Let's Nobody Throw A 'We Love The FBI' Party Just Yet, OK?

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | February 8, 2018 |

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | February 8, 2018 |

One of the things that our fearless leader was mentioning just yesterday is the need to distance ourselves from some of the day-to-day craziness coming out of the White House. So while Devin Nunes himself is little more than a historical footnote, we might want to take a second to consider the ramifications of his actions on our larger social institutions. Specifically, Democrats and Republicans finally agree that the F.B.I. is fucked up.

Of course, the common narrative is that Liberals are just jizzing ourselves over the F.B.I. these days. We’re buying F.B.I. branded reusable tote bags, we’re hosting F.B.I. press conference watch parties in our upscale apartments while serving hummus and gluten-free pita chips, we’re sending little Briston to their Montessori, autumn-themed, costume parties dressed as Little Bobby Mueller. We love this shit now, right?

Only we still super don’t, because the F.B.I. is still doing things like arresting people they target for being Black Extremist Identities (I don’t know what that term means exactly, but I feel like it’s right in line with an organization whose first major job was to enforce the “White Slave Traffic Act”). This is still the federal agency that sees “subversives” like Martin Luther King Jr. and socialists as threats five times as often as it recognizes threats from the goddamn KKK. This is still the agency who as recently as ten years ago impersonated an AP member in order to infect the computer of a fifteen-year-old because fuck it. Now, is it fair to expect an organization that was founded over a hundred years ago to have never screwed up? Clearly not. But having a series of pretty big fuck ups because of an ingrained belief in maintaining the status quo even at the cost of principles and integrity? Again, not something most Liberals are going to get behind.

So why bring all of this up? Just to prove how deep into a Wikipedia entry I can go? Or because I needed to win a bet by using the words “Robert Mueller” and “jizzing” in the same post? Regretfully no. It’s because there’s actually something bigger at stake here. The “Liberals love the F.B.I. now” narrative feeds into the idea that this is just about politics. Our guy lost, their guy won, so we’re both making whatever underhanded, dirty moves we need to make in order to win. Or it might be because the omnipresent Liberal threat has corrupted all forms of knowledge building up to and including “science.” It treats the very idea that we should expect our law enforcement to behave as impartial arbiters of fact-based and fairly applied laws as a political view, and that’s super jacked up.

What’s really happening is that Liberals are impressed that a federally funded agency created (theoretically) to investigate crimes and protect U.S. citizens hasn’t yet screwed up the investigation into the largest meddling into our elections by an outside entity in our nation’s history. The bigger issue to address isn’t if Trump will get booted from office because of the F.B.I. It’s how we let things get this bad.