Followup On The FBI Targeting Of Conservatives

Steven Bannon today did an interview with William M. Arkin of Newsweek. Arkin is the author of the blockbuster article that we highlighted yesterday: Resisting Our National Security State: Good News, Bad News. I’ve done a transcript of that interview because it does shed additional light on Arkin’s important views, which are the results of “two to three months” of investigating the whole issue of what the FBI’s “domestic terrorism” program is really up to, is really all about. In this interview Arkin is slightly more forthcoming than in the article itself.

First, to give you some idea of who Arkin is, he’s a journalist who has largely spent his career on the national security beat. I’d describe him as a sort of human rights or peace acitivist in his general orientation. That’s probably a simplification, but I think it gives the impression of his orientation. This excerpt from his Wikipedia page may help:

Arkin is co-author of Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (Little Brown), a New York Times and Washington Post best-selling non-fiction book based on a four-part 2010 series Arkin worked on with Dana Priest. Top Secret America won the 2012 Constitutional Commentary Award from the Constitution Project. The book and series are the results of a three-year investigation into the shadows of the enormous system of military, intelligence and corporate interests created in the decade after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The series was accompanied by The Washington Post's largest ever online presentation, earned the authors the George Polk Award for National Reporting, the Sigma Delta Chi Society of Professional Journalists award for Public Service, was a Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting finalist and Pulitzer Prize nominee, as well as recipient of a half dozen other major journalism awards.

Arkin has advised the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the CIA, various offices on the Air Staff and various senior service schools and war colleges, the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, naval intelligence, the United States Air Forces Central Command, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, the Joint Warfare Analysis Center, and various "Lessons Learned" projects (Operation Enduring Look, the Gulf War Air Power Survey (GWAPS), Center for Naval Analysis).^[2] He has also been a consultant on Iraq to the office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

On January 4, 2019, Arkin resigned from NBC News. In an article about his resignation CNN described him as a critic of "perpetual war" and the "creeping fascism of homeland security".^[5]

The interview itself isn’t as articulate as I’d like it to have been. For example, Arkin persists, as in the article itself, in referring to “MAGA”—as if it were an entity of some sort. I give Arkin credit for intelligence, so I assume he intends to describe a mood of dissatisfaction with the current state and direction of the American polity that tends to rally around Trump, rather than an actual entity. Even so, that usage remains unsettling, as it tends to mirror the rhetoric of the Ruling Class and to imply a sort of conspiratorial movement receiving central direction. In fairness, Arkin reveals himself to be a critic of what he labels as “the liberal media” that still controls much of the public square.

Arkin’s critique of the FBI centers around his view of its transformation, post 9/11, from a reactive crime fighting agency into a proactive intel agency that seeks to prevent terrorism before it happens. There is truth in that. Mueller very deliberately set about transforming the FBI into what he openly described as an “intelligence agency.” On the other hand, this critique misses a lot. The FBI has always been an intel agency—any standard history of the organization will show that this was true from its very first days. The difference is the overwhelming emphasis on the prevention of terrorist acts, and the direction of the FBI’s gaze toward The Deplorables—Americans of whom the Ruling Class is deeply suspicious, as well as contemptuous. The little people who insist on thinking for themselves, and are in need of deprogramming. This shift of focus happened years before 9/11 and is best understood in cultural rather than legal or structural terms.

A primary area of concern for Arkin is that the FBI, in its supposed quest to preempt Domestic Violent Extremists, is the effort to identify these bad actors through combing the interwebs for their rantings. In fairness to the FBI—and you can compare what I’m saying here to what Arkin says below—you know that the FBI would be roundly chastized if it missed some terrorist who was readily identifiable online. It happens every time there’s a mass shooting that, as seems usual, is committed by someone whose online presence should have given clear indications of his/her intent. One problem with those incidents is that so many of these mass shooter are, in fact, Leftists—whereas the FBI is focused on normal Americans as the source of terror. Which is to say—as Arkin does say, quoting “an FBI guy”—these normal Americans are a source of terror for “Washington.” That’s as close as Arkin gets to identifying the FBI’s problem as a cultural problem.

The reality is, that it would be relatively simple to set up some sort of oversight to keep the FBI on the straight and narrow. Instead, and Arkin only alludes to this obliquely, what the FBI has done to a very great extent is to target political speech that is totally non-violent but is disapproved by the Ruling Class. In other words, the FBI has willingly transformed itself into the political police of the Ruling Class, and the uneasiness exhibited by some of the “FBI guys” whom Arkin interviewed is a clear indication that they’re aware of this problem. They know that the FBI, as Arkin indicates toward the end, is now in the business of searching out WrongThink for its masters, the Ruling Class in Washington and their surrogates around the country.

The real danger for 2024 is not that the FBI will conduct mass “MAGA” arrests., The danger is that the FBI will attempt to suppress political speech by adopting the Leftist tactic of categorizing opinions that lack Washington’s seal of approval as “triggering”, as “violence” in and of themselves. Fortunately, the courts are starting to come to grips with the fact that the FBI has, for years now, been engaged in egregious law breaking in this regard—which, not coincidentally, came to pass on Bluto Barr’s watch at the DoJ, while political violence in the streets went unchecked. Funny how Bluto’s interview tour continues, sporadically, with nary a question about that.

Now, here we go with the transcript. See what you make of it.

THE WAR ROOM WITH STEPHEN K. BANNON EPISODE 3081 PART 3

Bannon leads into the interview by citing Jack Posobiec, who describes the Newsweek article as "the most important story out there." Then he directly addresses Arkin (I've had to edit Bannon's somewhat convoluted question):

Bannon: Bill, has any of your reporting come up in Congress? We have a Congressional committee whose focus is the weaponization of the United States Government. And the FBI and DoJ have been the principal targets of Judiciary, Oversight, and this Weaponization committee. So you have three committees, tons of people, has anything about what's really going on that you've exposed in this explosive story come up in any Congressional hearing that you've seen?

William Arkin: Not really that I'm aware of, Steve. The truth of the matter is that the FBI and, most importantly, Washington has identified Trump and MAGA as the greatest threat of domestic terrorism in the United States. It’s just fact. That’s what’s happened.

In other words, to Arkin it’s as plain as the nose on your face—the FBI, Washington’s new political police, are targeting conservatives (not the Left) under the guise of “domestic terrorism.” Arkin sidesteps that “under the guise” bit, probably because he doesn’t want to be identified as actually sympathetic to Trump or “MAGA”. But this is the fact of the matter—Washington is scared of people demanding change.

I asked an FBI guy once who was going on saying to me, the problem of fentanyl in America, the problem of gun violence in America. And I said to him, 'Well if I look at statements by the White House and by Secretary Mayorkas at the Department of Homeland Security or Christopher Wray at the FBI, if I look at their statements they’re saying constantly fentanyl is the biggest threat to America. Or they’re saying constantly that gun violence is the biggest threat to America. Why are they focusing so much on domestic terrorism?' And the answer that the FBI guy gave me was, 'Well, fentanyl is a threat to America, gun violence is a threat to America. Domestic Terrorism is a threat to Washington.'

And that in a nutshell sort of explained to me the landscape of domestic terrorism investigations, and the work of the FBI today. It’s a threat to Washington. And whether the FBI should be involved in regulating, or trying to regulate, or even investigating free speech in America, and political action and political activity in America, is a real question.

Awkward, but you get the idea. It’s not the work of the FBI that’s a threat to Washington—the “landscape of the FBI’s domestic terrorism investigations” is to address people whom “Washington” views as a threat to themselves.

But, on the good side, I will say this, that a lot of people in the FBI and the Intelligence Community said to me that they thought that the title "Domestic Terrorist" and the idea of "Domestic Violent Extremists"--which is a term that really basically came out of the war on Islam--that that term was no longer adequate and should be abandoned, because it makes it sound as if the federal government's role is somehow regulating the political landscape. And that's not the federal government's role. So, the good news is there's a lot of people within the government and within the Counterterrorism world who say, 'No, we don't have this right. We're basically trying to take the 9/11 model and apply it to MAGA and the Trump supporters--and that's not right.'

Right. J6. There’s also a lot of people within the government who are totally on board with this program. And the people aren’t on board, well, they go along to get along. It’s how bureaucracies work.

So, to me, there is some small silver lining in addressing this question, but really the biggest point that I wanted to bring across in the article was that this is just something that nobody wants to talk about, which is that the federal government sees violence in the 2024 election and sees extremism—as they define it—in the 2024 election, and is going to focus on it as a priority over the coming year. And nobody is really questioning, including in Congress, whether or not this is what the FBI should be doing, or whether or not this is indeed what the American people need.

Bannon: Last thing before I letcha go. ... We had the FBI situation about the memo they lied about, looking at the Latin Mass Catholic churches, which is the hobbits of the hobbits, as breeders of domestic terrorism. And Chris Wray lied about it when challenged. Has anybody at all--even outside Congress--has anybody beside yourself tried to drill down into the FBI about this, about how active this program actually is?

William Arkin: Not as far as I'm aware, Steve. This is sort of the first article that's written on this question, and it both presents the data which shows what the FBI's concentration is, in terms of its investigations and its assessments, but at the same time it raises the broader question of whose responsibility it is for even thinking about this, and whether the FBI is the legitimate agency. So, to me, this is the opening for a lot more investigation and a lot more--I imagine, in the coming days, as this article continues to be read by more and more Americans--the liberal news media will try to come up with the official line that counters what it is that I'm saying. But, again, this was a two month, three month, investigation in which I talked to people on all sides of the issue and talked to a lot of people inside the government. I'm pretty confident that this is the state of play: that MAGA has been targeted.

The FBI will say, 'Well, they're only targeted if we see that there's some evidence of violence,' but this is the new FBI, this is the post 9/11 FBI, where they see themselves as having to stop terrorism, stop violent extremism, before it happens. That's a different FBI than the FBI of the past, which is one that investigates lawbreaking which has already occurred and brings it to the courts. This is now the FBI that says, 'We're gonna look at people, look at individuals, who might be prone to violence, or might be organizing or might be carrying guns, and we're gonna define them as Domestic Violent Extremists and handle them in our Counterterrorism program because we wanna stop violence before it occurs.’ It's an interesting paradigm, but it's not necessarily one that comports well with the First Amendment.