When a peculiar little Swedish girl burst upon the global political scene a few years ago, it was not to argue, not to educate, but to berate.
Greta Thunberg, poster child of the young Left and its devotion to the modern religion known as the climate cult, will forever be remembered for a single sentence:
“How Dare You?!”
She knew nothing of history, of science, of culture – nothing at all. She admitted it proudly, telling the world “I ought to be in school!” as indeed she most certainly did.
But there she was anyway, at the UN and on our television screens, becoming an iconic icon of the pop culture just for saying “How Dare You?!” because the rest of the world was doing something other than what her fever dreams had told her was right.
In this particular case, of course, it was about energy: she was berating us for continuing to use energy that works, rather than traveling by rowboat and switching off our air conditioners like she and her luddite legions demand. We don’t agree with her, so rather than try to make a logical case for their side, they just berate us until we relent.
This has become the Left’s standard approach.
A century ago, they would pretend to be scholars, dressing like college professors and writing thick books to convince the gullible of their marxist theories. But no longer.
No rhetorician, however skilled, could construct a logical argument in support of letting boys compete in girls’ sports, or mandating that toddlers be injected with untested vaccines, or viewing carbon dioxide – literally the source of photosynthesis – as a poison.
So they just yell at us.
The example of the moment is the indictment of James Comey last week. The former FBI Director was charged with obstruction and making false statements, just before the statute of limitations was to run out.
And the Left shouted “How Dare You?!”
As FBI director during the second term of Barack Obama’s presidency, Comey was in a position to either pursue or thwart an array of crimes committed by or on behalf of the Obama regime. The most famous of these was the prosecution of Hillary Clinton for her shameless “disregard” for the government’s email rules when she was Secretary of State in Obama’s first term.
Exactly why a huge percentage of those unsecured emails absolutely had to be classified, contrary to the Obama regime’s spin, is too complex to cover here, but see this article for a basic explanation. And separately, exactly how much care the government takes to protect classified messages, with different systems and different levels of access, is also well worth studying for context. See this article from Mike Ford for an explanation of those mandatory processes.
Now, we can debate the details of this case, and they will certainly be debated both in court and in the public square, but what also merits note is the reaction of the punditry to this particular indictment:
“How Dare You?!”
The United States, unfortunately, is a high-crime country, primarily because we are so tolerant, even after criminals are convicted, we usually turn them loose again, soon if not immediately. So they keep on committing crimes, and keep on getting arrested. There is therefore nothing odd about an indictment, as such. It’s hardly “cruel and unusual.”
But the establishment is angry at this one, and they can’t really explain why.
He was the director of the FBI, we’re told. We shouldn’t be prosecuting a chief of federal law enforcement for his choices on how he ran an investigation, or who he chose to prosecute, or what charges to bring.
We’re told that we should trust such bureaucrats, let them do their job, and leave it all in their capable hands.
That’s what they say this time.
But are they consistent?
Isn’t it the Left that objects when policemen arrest suspects “just because they fit a description?” Doesn’t the Left judge law enforcement harshly, based on generalities like the percentage of a demographic that tends to get arrested?
Didn’t the Left start riots in support of a St. Louis criminal who attacked a shopkeeper and a police officer (the Michael Brown case)? Didn’t the Left start riots in support of a Minneapolis criminal who died of a drug overdose while in custody (George Floyd)? Wasn’t the Left happy to question the choices of these clearly well-intentioned policemen, happy to charge them with murder, happy to blame them for just doing their jobs?
In both cases, it took years for much of the public to finally realize the innocence of these two policemen; one is still in jail, likely for life, for these outrageous charges.
And these are just the examples that first come to mind. The number of times when the American Left has happily attacked law enforcement, and insisted on the arrest of policemen or prosecutors due to disagreements with the choices they made in doing their jobs, is infinite.
The entire Black Lives Matter movement, in fact, and the entire multi-billion dollar nationwide destruction during the city-burnings of 2020, are examples of times that the political Left have judged the choices of law enforcement after the fact, and punished them for it.
So there is certainly precedent for the Left opposing American law enforcement in their handling of specific cases, and supporting the jailing (or worse) of such professionals.
Perhaps their insistence that we just “trust the bureaucracy” is really just another thinly-veiled partisan tactic. They can pull it out of their toolkit when they don’t like their opposition’s prosecution, but disregard it as irrelevant when it’s their own side doing the prosecution.
This is, after all, in some ways a response to the lawfare that the Left practiced against President Trump, his administration, his businesses and his campaign teams over these past few years, really, ever since he entered politics in 2015.
The Leftist bureaucracy called for midnight raids, searches, and prosecutions of Trump partisans for arguable recordkeeping violations, false statements, misstatements in banking documentation. When the Right has identified people on the Left who have committed much more serious examples of the same violations, the Left calls it revenge, overreach, autocracy, tyranny. Why isn’t it those things when the Left does it?
More importantly, one might argue, the Trump administration’s prosecutions are infinitely more important, specifically because the Left is the one that needs to be taught a lesson, not the right. The Left specifically uses these tools, not only in the USA but in Brazil, South Korea, Germany, France and elsewhere too, as cudgels to drive conservatives out of politics. The Trump administration sees it as a part of their duty to fight such weapons, to fight the abuse of government power as a means of eliminating candidates or parties from the battlefield of elections.
Only if the people who practiced lawfare over the past eight years are arrested, tried, convicted, and punished hard, will future politicians – of either party – be able to consider themselves safe to run for office and do the jobs they were elected to do, without fearing the lawfare that has been used against Republicans since 2016.
As always, we must learn from the lessons of history too:
Lavrentiy Beria was head of the USSR’s NKVD, roughly their version of the FBI, during Josef Stalin’s reign of terror. He abused his power for decades, and was eventually executed for it in 1953. Should his work not have been questioned?
Fecor Shehu was the communist minister of internal affairs in Albania from 1978 to 1982. Known for his brutal interrogation practices and other abuses, such as the routine rape of female athletes, he was ultimately investigated himself, found guilty, and executed in 1983. But he was a professional in a bureaucratic law enforcement role; should his work not have been questioned?
Son Sen held various law enforcement positions in Cambodia over his long career with the Khmer Rouge. He was head of the Santebal, the Cambodian secret police, during the 1970s, for example, and directed the massacres of some 100,000 people in 1978 alone. He didn’t do it alone – his family helped – but it was official, in the service of their special brand of communism. Even the communists ultimately decided he had gone too far, and Son Sen was executed, along with his entire family, in 1997.
The list goes on.
The number of corrupt politicians in the world is beyond count, and arguably, the worst place of all for government corruption to occur is in law enforcement, the one sphere of government that the citizenry most needs to be able to trust.
There are many politicians in America who need to be prosecuted in the coming years. People who took advantage of Covid-19 to deny innocent citizens their constitutional rights. People who took advantage of a corrupt “climate finding” to ban useful products, ban efficient energy sources, and dole out countless billions in tax dollars to their corrupt green energy friends. People who violated the most fundamental elements of the Bill of Rights to order publishers and platforms to censor speech, to overregulate businesses, to close down churches, to harass legal gun owners.
James Comey is not the only one. By the end of this, his name will hopefully be counted among hundreds, even thousands.
But you have to start somewhere. And with statutes of limitations winding down on some of his alleged crimes, this particular abuser of his role in federal law enforcement is a perfectly logical place to start.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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