Criminalizing Opposition In A Banana Republic

Criminalizing Opposition in a Pseudo-Republic

Mark Steyn

For almost a decade and a half now, the American "republic" has been decaying to the defining condition of a one-party state - that is, the total merger of the ruling party and the state. Last night, the dirty stinking rotten corrupt US Department of Justice signed off on a raid on Mar-a-Lago, so we've now moved into hardcore banana-republic territory: the regime's cops are busting into the home of the opposition leader. We're told this is because Trump took some "classified" documents with him when he left Washington. Yeah, that's always a pretext for an armed raid: You could ask Hillary Clinton or Sandy Berger.

The FBI has been getting more brazen about its political thuggery this last year, increasingly relaxed about putting its thumb on the democratic scale. As my old pal from Hillsdale days, Joy Pullman, notes in a column written pre-Mar-a-Lago:

In Michigan, the FBI openly meddled in the upcoming election by affecting the selection of candidates, arresting and charging the formerly leading Republican candidate for governor for misdemeanors. The FBI raided Ryan Kelley's home while polls showed him leading the primaries. In the primary election last week, he came in fourth.

Mission accomplished - and all while too many stars of the rube right were still insisting that there are just a few bad apples at the top, I know the rank-and-file, they're salt of the earth, straight-shooting G-men, they gave me this cute lapel pin, etc, etc. There are no straight-shooting G-men: Who do you think are manning the raids, you chumps? Where are the whistle-blowers? Or even the guys who say, "No thanks, I didn't sign up for this"? It's a wholly corrupted institution and has been for the best part of a decade. The default position for what's left of the opposition party ought to be that the FBI is beyond reform, and will be replaced by a new agency with vastly circumscribed powers.

The Mark Steyn Show three days after the "election" I suggested:

It's my view that after the Biden regime takes power, as in many coup situations, they will want to have the previous leader arrested. I'm being perfectly serious here. It is the intention of the Democrat Party to put Trump in jail. So, when he launches the 'Trump News Network', it's gonna need to be based out of Costa Rica or the Turks and Caicos or somewhere.

Does that sound a little extreme? Well, here was The Washington Post's recovering "conservative" columnist Jennifer Rubin round about the same time:

It's not only that @realDonaldTrump has to lose, his enablers have to lose. We have to collectively burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them. Because if there are survivors....they will do it again.

"Survivors"? There's that ol' Churchillian magnanimity in victory. As I said five days after the "election":

My advice is to take Ms Rubin and her chums at their word...

Even if they never succeed in gaoling him, they will surely use the "peaceful transition" to put in place a couple of decades' worth of litigation-without-end. Come to that, can he even trust the Secret Service agents they'll assign to him?

He will never be a 'normal' former president - because they are determined to exclude him from those ranks. 

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