Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #DefundTheFBI
Most recents (4)
Official and Confidential
The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
by Anthony Summers
openlibrary.org/works/OL242360…
The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
by Anthony Summers
openlibrary.org/works/OL242360…
Cointelpro
The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom
by Nelson Blackstock
openlibrary.org/works/OL121099…
The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom
by Nelson Blackstock
openlibrary.org/works/OL121099…
Why was the professional activist left so irritated by MTJ’s call to #DefundTheFBI? When every DSA-endorsed candidate votes to fund the feds & for $40 billion to Ukraine while a crude right-winger slams the security state & NATO, it deepens the US left’s painful identity crisis.
As ideological boundaries blur and the contradictions of the US professional activist left rise to the surface, its influencers spend increasing energy gatekeeping and punishing heretics (Dore, Tulsi, etc). They are clinging to a precarious identity and fragmenting community.
The security state now views Trump/MAGA as a threat to “national security” - not necessarily the activist left, as the FBI did during its 60s heyday. The activist left convened around Bernie, who rolled over for the establishment, and BLM, which was co-opted by the NGO class.
To understand @RickyShiffer's attack on the FBI and the dissonance of #DefundTheFBI in the Trumpist "law and order" right, it's instructive to look at two case studies within Cincinnati police: Proud Boy sympatizer Ryan Olthaus and "rogue element" former Asst. Chief Dave Bailey. 
Ryan Olthaus brought attention to himself when he threw the white power hand sign at a Black citizen during a 2020 city council meeting where many called for defunding the police. His problematic social media glorified Proud Boy violence. Full history:
The city manager called Dave Bailey a "corrupt", "rogue element" which "ultimately may require the intervention of outside law enforcement to ferret out." Forced to retire, Bailey began calling for civil war and overthrow of the US government, using language similar to Shiffer's.
Defunding the FBI, *as some Republicans are now proposing*, would leave murderers and kidnappers free to conduct a reign of terror on innocent American lives.
I know the entire Beltway media will now be obsessed with getting every major Republican elected on record as to whether or not they want to defund the FBI.
