By John Kass

Aug. 23, 2022

 

“When the Grey Hair is dead, Magua will eat his heart. Before he dies, Magua will put his children under the knife, so the Grey Hair will know his seed is wiped out forever.”

Wes Studi as the Huron warrior Magua, in the 1992 film “The Last of the Mohicans.”

 

What is best for the American nation? Not the nation of dry history books and three-cornered hats and lawyers arguing over marble statues and dropping Latin in their learned journals.

I mean what is best for the nation we live in, this real place, not a fantasy, but this nation we raise our families in, the country our children sleep in, and wake up to each morning?

Because for all of them, and all the rest of us, there is a question that can no longer be avoided:

About the government tomahawks in the hands of the left–those self-described “civil libertarians” who’ve always relied upon government and force and muscle to get their way, whether in a big city like Chicago, or now, increasingly playing the Chicago Way game writ large, from Washington.

And what happens if the right takes control, and demands to swing those tomahawks as part of political payback? What happens to our country?

On The Chicago Way podcast, Jeff Carlin and I ask it of Tom Bevan, co-founder and publisher of Real Clear Politics. You can listen to the podcast just by clicking the on the play button in the photograph at the top of this column.

Do we dismantle the FBI now, after President Joe Biden and the Democrats’ disastrous and ill-advised raid on the home of former President Donald Trump, with the Democrats using the FBI and the Department of Justice as their personal political tomahawks against the Republicans?

Or, if the FBI is not dismantled and carted away soon, isn’t America now setting itself up for a series of Banana Republic nightmares–in which to the election victor go the spoils of power, like the federal war hammer, to be brought down upon the heads of the enemy?

But are those the heads and faces of your enemies? Or are they the faces of your fellow countrymen and women? According to various polls, we increasingly see those we disagree with as the enemy. This has been happening for years, accelerating with the 2016 elections. Media encourages this for profit, spinning a fever pitch of screaming to sell their products.

The heated rhetoric—pushed since Trump and his voters outraged the Washington political establishment by winning the 2016 election and denying Hillary Clinton the presidency—shows no signs of dissipating.

Christopher Bedford, writing in the conservative magazine, “The Federalist,” argues that Democrats have weaponized and undermined the American state, and they won’t be sorry until they’ve felt the same pain being visited on Republicans.

That’s what happens when the tomahawks come out.

I’ve been warning about this weaponized Deep State for years, from the Russia Collusion Hoax to the Pulitzer Prizes the media has given itself for perpetuating their phony story that Trump was a double agent. This fear of a loss of power has taken on many forms, from the wild and erratic impeachment efforts to the suppression of legitimate news about the questionable, and quite likely illegal business dealings of the president’s son, Hunter Biden.

Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, prominent members of the so-called American “Intelligence Community” insisted the Hunter Biden stories were Russia disinformation, when the stories were not disinformation. These so-called intelligence experts revealed themselves to be little more than prostitutes. But the establishment’s allies in news media shielded them, and Big Tech protected them and killed off legitimate public debate. And media could always be counted on to change the subject to something like the president’s favorite ice cream.

The bi-partisan Washington establishment. what I call the Combine in Illinois, is terrified that it will lose its power in the November mid-term elections and now strikes with ever-increasing ferocity.

And who is stuck in the middle? The people. And who gets hurt when the tomahawks come out? The people. And the American nation.

“It’s bad,” said Bevan on The Chicago Way podcast, who has published a wide range of views on the FBI’s Raid at the former President Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, some essays condemning Biden, others supporting the president and the status quo.

 “It’s definitely bad. And I think—and this is one of the things that the Democrats consistently fail to appreciate,” Bevan said. “How are they going to feel when Republicans take power, and somebody does this not just [to a] former president but a future likely opponent. It is an unprecedented move. It could have been avoidable.”

Yes, it was avoidable. If the raid were all about “urgency” of nuclear secrets, why did Biden and his Justice Department wait months and months to act? Because this was all about the exercise of power, and Biden and his Democrats could not wait to use government muscle as if they were big-city politicos at some corrupt City Hall.

As Prof. Charles Lipson has argued, the foolish raid of Trump by Biden and the DOJ  has “finished off public trust in federal law enforcement.” Political reality demands a thorough house-cleaning. If that doesn’t happen soon with great transparency, disaster will follow.

The elite, the American managers of culture, politics and the American Administrative State have been willfully blind, protected by the media that has indulged and serves them.

And now it’s obvious that they’ve all led America to the edge of hell.

Fretting about civil liberties just because the politicians you happen to like and support are suffering heat, while ignoring the threatened loss of civil liberties of those who you don’t support politically is selfish, and dangerous. It is a surefire way to lose the republic.

We stay in our own news silos and treat those with whom we disagree as our enemies. And this is reinforced by corporate media that profits by such idiotic talk. These days, we don’t merely disagree with your opponents, we cast them as evil, beyond redemption, as deplorables, as barely human.

And whether you’re of the left or the right, what can you do to those whom you’ve dehumanized? Why, you can do almost anything to them. That’s the point of dehumanizing them.

With this, there has been increasing talk about civil strife, as if civil war were some academic exercise. It isn’t. The stains don’t wash away. Those who survived civil war in Central America, Africa or Europe could tell you it’s not a parlor game.

My own father and our family survived a brutal civil war that began in Greece in 1946. Throughout my childhood we hardly ever spoke of what happened there. It was all too ugly, too painful.

It starts as political talk, said my father. But when the blood gets in your eyes, it’s not about politics anymore.

Do you want any of that here?

Yet without confidence in our now-weaponized institutions, without a thorough, sober house-cleaning of the FBI and Department of Justice, we move closer towards it.

If we continue to step on the Constitution and applaud government force to settle disputes over our “enemies” and  call it “fair” if the outcome suits our political desires, what we’re really doing is the modern equivalent of grabbing for the tomahawks.

When blood gets into American eyes, it’ll be too late.

Some shudder as to what comes next.

But sadly, some don’t shudder at all.

(Copyright 2022 John Kass)

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