The New Yorker Argues Hoover's FBI Was 'Nonpartisan', Trips

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We only have a few days left in 2024, and in the competition for dumbest post of 2024 The New Yorker submits this piece for consideration and it just might be the winner:

J. Edgar Hoover made the F.B.I. into a powerful but nonpartisan colossus. Kash Patel’s chief goal, by contrast, is to weaponize the Bureau to protect Donald Trump and wreak vengeance on his Administration’s enemies. https://t.co/cUkJ28esXh

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) December 24, 2024

They’re serious.

Which makes it even funnier.

Here’s their argument:

Hoover, for all his many faults and abuses of power, was nevertheless an institution builder; he believed in the F.B.I.’s nonpartisan independence. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he grew up imbued with the idea that career-long government service was one of life’s noblest aspirations. As a D.C. resident, Hoover could not vote, and though he was a staunch conservative, he never joined a political party. Patel’s chief goal, by contrast, is to weaponize the F.B.I. as a partisan force to protect Trump and wreak vengeance on his Administration’s enemies. If such naked politicization happens to undermine public faith in the F.B.I., so much the better. In Patel’s book ‘Government Gangsters,’ published last year, he describes the Bureau’s top officials—along with other ‘Deep State’ executives—as a group of ‘spiteful mandarins’ hell-bent on destroying the country in service of their ‘uniformly left wing’ desires. He warns, ‘Democrats and the Deep State are on the same team.’

The idea that people who work at the F.B.I. are closet leftists conspiring to bring down the Republic has to be one of the more bizarre takes in a political moment with no shortage of them. But such is the state of our politics, in which self-proclaimed protectors of “law and order” attack the national-security establishment, while reluctant liberals defend its professionalism and autonomy. Hoover would agree with Patel that what happens at the F.B.I. matters. However, the similarities mostly end there. Hoover used to describe the Bureau as the ‘one bulwark’ against a hidden left-wing conspiracy that penetrated all corners of American life. In Patel’s world, the F.B.I. is the conspiracy.