Op-Ed: Beware the Achilles’ Heel of American Conservatives

I’m going to make a bold and contentious claim that just might shock you:

The Department of Justice is the ultimate “RINO,” and blind support for this government entity is the Achilles’ heel of American conservatives.

This statement isn’t coming from a far-left radical clothed in a black hood and smashing storefront windows, nor is it uttered by a fanatical supporter of Black Lives Matter spray-painting “ACAB” on a police station. Rather, it is coming from an ardent Trump supporter and security professional who worked in conjunction with and otherwise interacted with federal law enforcement agencies for about a decade.

Law-abiding Americans who love the United States also love our constitutional legal code. Conservatives pride themselves on core values like hard work, respect for property, and a general adherence to stability and the rule of law. As such, conservative Americans usually are highly supportive of our law enforcement and judicial entities — as they should be.

But just because an individual claims he is properly upholding the Constitution and a just legal code doesn’t mean he actually is, even if he is publicly committed to doing so.

The fight between “back the blue” and “defund the police” is usually about the legitimacy of the institutions themselves and rarely about the individuals representing those entities. Further, the BLM movement often focuses on single police officers, flinging dubious accusations of misconduct against them, rather than focusing on the big players on the federal level.

Similarly, many are confused as to why President Joe Biden and his more radical Democratic allies vehemently lambast local law enforcement while ignoring the federal Department of Justice. One possible answer is that municipal and state police departments answer directly to the communities that they serve. The federal DOJ, however, is under the control of the executive branch exclusively and ultimately one man and party — in this case, Biden and the Democrats.

Isn’t it funny how any person or agency that is armed and committed to protecting the safety and rights of American citizens on the individual or community level — such as local law enforcement — is under attack by the Democratic Party as “dangerous”?

The simple fact of the matter is that the DOJ began the process of weaponization decades ago — especially during the 1990s. Many Americans raised eyebrows at the questionable law enforcement practices exercised at both Ruby Ridge and Waco. But others are less aware — even though former President Donald J. Trump mentioned it repeatedly — that the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act initiated by then-Sen. Biden and signed into law by former President Bill Clinton was highly detrimental to society.

“We have predators on our streets,” Biden stormed in 1993. “They are beyond the pale. … We have no choice but to take them out of society, and the truth is we don’t very well know how to rehabilitate them at that point.”

Allegedly in an effort to curb rising crime, Biden proudly led the charge to dramatically increase sentencing and impose mandatory minimums to prison terms in the federal system after parole had already been abolished. Further, Biden stated that he had no idea how to rehabilitate criminals, so his only solution was to lock them up longer (or even indefinitely).

Ironically, many of these enhanced prison sentences related to drug and firearm crimes. Biden’s son Hunter is notoriously suspected to be guilty on both counts, but he has never been seriously investigated. Similarly, as former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard pointed out in the Democratic primary debates in 2019, now-Vice President Kamala Harris’ record as California attorney general is potentially contemptible and arguably hypocritical.

And yet ardent supporters of the BLM movement rallied behind Biden and Harris in 2020 against Trump, even though it was the latter who spearheaded the First Step Act and other serious reforms of the DOJ.

The DOJ has become a big business, having an annual budget of over $35 billion — a nearly 20 percent spike in less than two years from the end of the Trump administration.

In order to maintain that budget, federal prisons must be kept at a certain level of capacity. Correspondingly, nearly 2 million persons are incarcerated in the U.S., and another 4.5 million are under supervision in the form of parole or probation. To put that into perspective, for every 40 adults in the U.S., one person is in some form of law enforcement custody or supervision.

The indisputable statistical reality is that the land of the free actually leads the world in incarcerations in both total number and per capita rates — exceeding China and North Korea combined.

Of further concern is the disparity in federal policies. For instance, Biden has all but opened the American border to illegal immigrants as well as drug smugglers — including traffickers of fentanyl. However, due to federal mandatory minimums, the average prison sentence related to fentanyl is five years, and over 86 percent of those convicted are American citizens.

In other words, Biden and his colleagues are intentionally looking the other way as hordes of illegal immigrants bring fentanyl into the U.S. by the truckload with no consequence, and then arresting and imprisoning American citizens who become addicted or otherwise affiliated with fentanyl distribution for five or more years.

But now conservative Americans are suddenly becoming wary of the federal judicial system.

The hoax of the Mueller report and supposed Russian collusion, the false accusations against Gen. Michael Flynn, the malicious prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse, the indefinite imprisonment in solitary confinement of persons who took selfies in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the endless witch hunts against Trump’s allies and Trump himself, and the recent indefensible FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, complete with a ransacking of the former first lady’s closet, have stunned many Americans.

What a coincidence that the federal law enforcement agencies that Trump strove to reform have tirelessly persecuted him with every legal weapon imaginable.

In response, the usual rhetoric I hear from conservatives is that each of these incidents was a one-time fluke, or perhaps an unheard-of new development within the DOJ. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and the statistics and numbers prove it.

The reality is that the corruption, malice and dangerous one-sided weaponization of the DOJ have been in play for decades. Conservatives simply didn’t notice or care because the DOJ targeted alleged criminals.

But now that same DOJ is in the hands of Joe Biden.

In 1993 and 1994, Biden declared that drug users and dealers were violent and dangerous, and serious action needed to be taken against them. The result was mass incarceration. And those convicted and imprisoned permanently lost many of their civil liberties as felons, including the rights to vote and own firearms.

Now in 2022, Biden is using the same rhetoric and terminology for what he calls the greatest threat to America and a grave danger to democracy — Trump, his political allies and the MAGA adherents who vote for them.

And what a coincidence, those “dangerous” Trump supporters who could be facing accusations of “illegal ownership of firearms” and “insurrection” in the not-so-distant future would also lose their rights to vote and possess firearms if arrested and convicted.

The beast is the same; the target is new.

And that is why I say that the federal Department of Justice is the ultimate “RINO.” Many of the individuals within the DOJ and judicial system falsely claim to be committed to upholding the Constitution as well as law and order — ideals that conservative Americans hold dear. But in reality, the DOJ — in contrast to local law enforcement — is a heavily armed force under the control of a single political party.

As seen in Mark Zuckerberg’s admission that the FBI interfered in the 2020 election by protecting Biden and his family, the primary agenda of the DOJ is to keep that party in power and ensure that those committed to reforming and purging the department of bad players and malicious corruption — like Trump and his supporters — are hounded as “dangerous criminals” and locked away for as long as possible.

And while DOJ officials work to dismantle American freedom and liberty, they smugly wrap themselves in the banner of the Constitution and American law, profaning the sacrosanct legal code that they blasphemously proclaim to represent and protect.

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