"Deep in December, it's nice to remember
Although you know the snow will followDeep in December, it's nice to remember."Tom Jones, "Try to Remember," from The Fantasticks, 1960
"That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.”George Orwell, the novel 1984, 1949
The past is being rewritten. It is easier just to go along with the new reality. But it isn't reality, and in the long run it isn't happy.
FBI Director Christopher Wray announced he would not serve out his term as FBI director. He would resign to coincide with Trump taking office.
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| Going gently, complying in advance |
President-elect Trump had said he planned to fire Christopher Wray and replace him with Kash Patel. In a speech to FBI employees Wray said that in his view resignation "is the best way to avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work." Wray is giving Trump what he wants. He is going along. He is normalizing Trump. It doesn't reinforce FBI values and principles. It sacrifices them.
FBI directors are given 10-year terms of office for the very reason that Congress wanted the FBI to be independent and outside the cycle of presidential terms of office. Wray is a Republican, appointed to government positions by Republicans, and appointed to his current position by Trump himself in his first term, when Trump -- against tradition -- fired the prior FBI director, James Comey. Wray is not a deep state Democratic operative. He is an FBI institutionalist.
Wray's resignation changes the reality and future memory of what is happening. Trump wants to fire an FBI director loyal to FBI's purpose and replace him with a partisan loyalist who promises to do partisan investigations. Had Wray been fired and replaced it would have frozen into the record the truth of a partisan takeover of the agency. Resigning in advance changes the story. It is just Trump filling a vacancy, a routine act. Anticipatory compliance is easiest. It avoids a fight. But it makes Wray complicit in the lie.
Trump wrote an alternative reality on Truth Social yesterday:
The resignation of Christopher Wray is a great day for America as it will end the Weaponization of what has become known as the United States Department of Injustice. I just don’t know what happened to him. We will now restore the Rule of Law for all Americans. Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause, worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me, and has done everything else to interfere with the success and future of America.
This isn't true. Try to remember: Christopher Wray's FBI obeyed the law. The search warrant of Mar-a-Lago was carried out with cause, after repeated efforts to retrieve documents, with openly acknowledged obstruction by Trump, and with a search that revealed exactly what the FBI alleged, which was hidden national security documents that Trump denied having.
I realize it is strange to pair a quotation from a tender play about young love, The Fantasticks, with Orwell's dark warning of a dystopian political future,1984. But both contained a warning about the human desire for reconciliation, for loving too well and easily, for failing to recognize that conflict is inevitable, and that truth is hard. We are hearing alternative facts. Trump can sell. He is motivated and relentless and he has loyal allies who are selling the same story. They had better. If they don't he will "primary" them.
He is rewriting himself as victim and hero. We are in for a lot of this. We need to have the courage to remember what we saw with our own eyes.
"And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested." – George Orwell, the novel 1984
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10 comments:
And Turkey did not commit genocide on the Armenian people, just ask their government, they will tell you.
Americans didn’t like the direction our country was headed, so they elected a sociopath to be president of the United States. This is an example of why the founding fathers didn’t trust majority rule, but the electoral college is obviously no silver bullet.
Some make lame excuses for this fiasco: it’s the economy, it’s “wokeness,” it’s the elites or whatever. No, it’s that Trump best represents Republican values. It’s not as if they didn’t have a choice, but through fraud, sexual abuse, the porn star, a coup attempt, the attack on our Capitol building, the stolen boxes of national secrets – the worse his behavior the better they like him. Without his supporters, Trump would just be another common criminal. It’s his cult that has given him so much power over us.
So, now we’ll be getting his agenda of retribution and mass deportation. His cabinet picks give us an indication of what’s in store, so buckle up. As Trump tweeted in his invitation to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists: “will be wild!”
It may be the Robin Hood syndrome. I saw firsthand the appreciation of the cartels in Mexico. Their home cities benefitted and were protected from a corrupt government. Let's see how a sociopathic personality treats his supporters. The time to do something is too late. Buckle up; we're in for a rough ride.
Wray is a coward. The nation's top cop resigns rather than follow the law and hold POTUS accountable.
He should have stayed in the job and took POTUS to court.
What's the point of having the 10-year law if a POTUS can break it?
Will POTUS Newsom be stuck with TFG's henchman due to this 10-year law?
While we are talking about history being memory-holed by our current Ministries of Truth, we need to include Wikipedia, which has been rewriting much of our past to fit woke narratives since it came under the leadership of left ideologue Katherine Maher, who left recently to become the head of NPR, where her prejudice fit right in.
He's already backing off his promise to reduce inflation - no big surprise.
Interesting choice of villains: not Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson, whose lies and crackpot conspiracy theories are legion, but Katherine Maher who hasn’t said anything that isn’t true.
“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”
Katherine Maher on X, 2020
Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" and "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be."
https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1780929268949614848?s=61&t=SBNGqyYXzB675VqHBqz7kw
Sounds like your opinion differs from hers, but Peter is commenting on the distortion of facts.
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