Dramatic Reversal: Democrats Now Trust FBI and CIA

Here are the numbers, a Gallop poll from 2022:

Glenn Greenwald comments on the dramatic change in the attitudes of Democrats:

So, here you see the FBI: 79% of Democrats think the FBI is doing an excellent or good job. For decades, distrust of the FBI and a view that it is a fundamentally corrupted organization pervaded and shaped federal politics. That is gone. Democrats worship the FBI. We report on those hearings all the time in the House where Democratic members of the House, of Congress, stand up and applaud the U.S. security state for censoring the Internet on the grounds that these agencies are benevolent, have nothing but the most patriotic and noble intentions and want to protect us from disinformation. So here you see the FBI with 79% trust among Democrats; among Independents, about half, 47%, and among Republicans, 29%.

So, essentially, the FBI is seen to a purely partisan end or political framework, ideological framework. They have immense powers, they operate in secrecy, they spy on Americans, they investigate crimes and the only people who really trust them are Democrats. Independents are split. Republicans overwhelmingly view them as corrupt.

It's even worse for the Department of Justice. Only 58% of Democrats trust the Department of Justice; 28% of Independents think the DOJ is doing a good job; only 24% of Republicans. So, imagine how much this is going to exacerbate that distrust. These remarkable and extraordinary prosecutions were brought during an election against the leading political opponent of the current government.

And then you have the CIA. When I tell you that opposition to the CIA has long been a central plank of left-liberal politics, I cannot overstate that case. To be on the left meant that it viewed the CIA as a malevolent institution forever, for decades, until 2016, and you see the reversal happen immediately. The reason for it is so disturbing. It's because the CIA – and the FBI – is where Russiagate came from, and liberals started recognizing validly that the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security and the NSA and the Justice Department were on their side. They were political allies of the Democrats. And so now you have this remarkable reality that 69% of Democrats – 69% – think the CIA is doing a good or excellent job: 69% of Democrats. To be a Democrat is basically to mean that you place a lot of faith and trust in the CIA and even among this 30%, that won't say it; you barely can find opposition to the CIA in mainstream laughable discourse Turn on podcasts or YouTube programs of self-proclaimed leftists. I don't mean real leftists like the kind we have on our show, like the Black Revolutionary Network, but I mean, like the ones in the Democratic Party, the ones who follow Bernie Sanders and AOC. You will not hear a peep of meaningful denunciation of the CIA if they mention them at all. It's very much in passing with no passion, with no concern, because they don't consider the CIA menacing, because they know the CIA is their political ally. The CIA is not supposed to be anyone's political ally. They're not supposed to have anything to do with American politics and yet everyone knows they do. And they have to explain these percentages.

Here you see 50% of independents. So again, independents are split like they are with the FBI; 38% of Republicans have positive views of the CIA, largely from probably decades of Republican politics, the establishment weighing the hawkish wing of the Republican Party that has long viewed the CIA as an important ally. But that has cratered. And here you see the massive partisan split and how these agencies are viewed and the fact that a huge chunk of the country believes that these institutions are politically corrupted and fundamentally and irretrievably broken. It's a massive crisis of institutional authority in the United States. And it's aimed at the agencies that are now the ones responsible for trying to prove that the indictment of President Trump is illegitimate, invalid.

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Inconvenient Murderers

From the New York Post:

Our era is obsessed with “hate-crimes.” So much so that it sees them in places where they don’t even happen. Yet last Saturday in Brooklyn was a hate crime. And the media are actually covering it up. All because Sibley’s assailants were not hood-wearing members of the KKK or “MAGA” hat-wearing Republicans.

Instead they come from another group that our media identifies as a victim class. The fact that the men were Muslim is why the media has been actively dishonest in its reporting. Despite the story going around the world.

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The Hubris that Resides in the Heart of the Censor

Glenn Greenwald, discussing journalism and censorship with Ben Shapiro:

At the heart of the censor resides hubris, more than anything else. If you look at the intellectual history of humanity, it's nothing but trial and error. What people believe in one generation is Absolute Truth. It gets to be regarded by the next generation as a grievous error. That's the way that we advance. That's what makes life exciting: The fact that we err, we're fallible, we're constantly in search of the truth, we're using our reasoning skills and our cognitive abilities to try and figure out what is true and what is false.

There are a lot of things I believe, very, very, very passionately, I honestly have never ever gotten to the point where I felt like what I believe in is so clearly and indisputably and permanently true that I believe it ought to be illegal for anyone to express an opinion different than the one that I had. I couldn't imagine ever finding the hubris necessary to believe that about myself that I now reside above the human history of trial and error. But that's really what these people believe. And I think that is the reason censorship is so appealing: once you convince yourself that you were on the side of objective good, whoever disagrees with you or sees the world differently than you is the enemy of all--evil--and you can only see the world in that kind of binary way. It almost becomes not just tolerable, but necessary to say those people shouldn't be able to speak because they're fonts of falsity, lies and deceit, whereas I am the owner of the truth. I feel extremely uncomfortable believing that about myself, even though there are a lot of things I really strongly believe in and believe are true. I just never have gotten to that point. And can't imagine getting to that point.

Once you adopt a view, your political opponents are no longer people who are misguided and wrong, or even ill-intentioned . . . they're essentially on the level of Hitler and Nazism. That's the single worst evil we could possibly think of. If you really believe that the United States faces a choice between remaining a liberal democracy on the one hand, or succumbing to a Hitlerian, white nationalist dictatorship, if that's something that you actually believe, on some level it becomes rational to say: "I think the evil we're facing is so overarching that anything and everything we do, censoring, lying, sabotaging, cheating and deceiving becomes, again, not just morally justifiable, but morally necessary.

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Conservatives Defending Traditional Liberal Values

How did it come to be that conservatives have become the most vocal defenders of traditional liberal values? At Public, Michael Shellenberger describes the challenge facing those of us who embrace traditional liberal values:

For most of the post-war period, liberalism in the United States was defined around freedom of speech, the needs of the working class, and the fight against racism and sexism. It was liberals who defended the right to burn the American flag, and of neo-Nazis to march through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors. It was liberals who fought against corporate power and for the rights of working people. And it was liberals who fought to end racial segregation and to protect girls and women, including in sports.

All of that has changed. Today, it is conservatives who are fighting the racial re-segregation of classrooms and workforces by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) administrators in thrall to Critical Race Theory (CRT). It is conservatives who are defending the right to freedom of expression online from progressives demanding greater censorship by Big Tech and the government. And it is conservatives who are defending the rights of girls and women to female-only spaces and sports from natal males...

A similar dynamic occurred with the natural environment. After World War II, both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, supported industrialization, economic development in poor nations, and nuclear power. Starting in the 1960s, the radical Left turned against industrialization, and started romanticizing peasant life in poor nations, while opposing nuclear energy in rich nations. The result was that Republicans were left holding positions that were once mainstream liberal ones...

As a result, conservatives find themselves in the paradoxical position of defending traditional liberal values like free speech and racial equality from progressives.... A big part of the reason as to why it has been left to conservatives to defend liberalism is because the radical Left, or what is sometimes called the Woke Left, had already defeated traditional liberals, first in major societal institutions and then in Congress, many years and some cases decades ago. [Christopher] Rufo attributes much of the radical Left’s success to its ability to manipulate language and emotions.

Traditional liberals didn’t understand who they were dealing with. The liberal university presidents, the newspaper editors, and the heads of various professional associations were committed to civil dialogue and democracy; the radical Left insurgents were not. The radical Left didn’t hesitate to use illiberal means, including making false accusations of racism, sexism, and homophobia, against their opponents...

Readers of Public know that I believe that the radical Left’s power stems from being able to offer a complete Woke religion to fill the vacuum left by declining belief in traditional religions ... Into the spiritual void emerged a new religion: victim ideology, or Wokeism.

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Martin Gurri: The Path from Liberal Democracy to Liberal Authoritarianism

Martin Gurri details the path to present times where many of those on the Left who abhorred government-imposed censorship ten year ago now embrace it. His article is long, detailed an excellent. Title is: "The New Censorship: How the establishment Left embraced government control of digital speech." Here is an excerpt:

The Democratic Party is the natural home of the establishment Left. To this arrangement, the Left brings apparent advantages like the reflexive applause of the New York Times, but also, less evidently, a heavy load of ideological baggage. Its doctrines tend to be unpopular even among Democrats. Most blacks oppose defunding the police, for example. Most Hispanics disapprove of open borders. Most Democrats don’t believe that grievance should trump merit. If put to a vote, these propositions would lose. The Left must therefore transform them into moral commandments, beyond the reach of politics. In the digital age, this can be accomplished only by policing and controlling the Web—and censorship of that magnitude is possible only if Biden or some other Democrat holds the presidency after 2024.

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