A Useful Idiot, Part 4

 

     Imagine this picture in every FBI field office and resident agency.

     Partly for research for another Scott Carson novel, partly for enjoyment, I just started reading DAMNATION ISLAND by Stacy Horn, which details the horrors of Blackwell's Island in the 19th century. The lunatic asylum in particular and Blackwell's Island as a whole was put on notice by the legendary journalist Nellie Bly in 1887.

     Bly, newly-arrived in New York City, went right to work for Joseph Pulitzer's World and one of  her first assignments was to get into Blackwell's Island (Now Roosevelt Island) in an undercover capacity. So she faked insanity, promptly got herself committed to Blackwell's Island's lunatic asylum and accumulated information about the place for 10 days. She was examined by no fewer than eight different psychiatrists and each one came up with a different diagnosis.

    

     That experience would become a bombshell of six articles that Bly would later turn into a book, Ten Days in a Madhouse. It resulted in the state legislature in Albany allocating nearly a million dollars to upgrade and modernize every lunatic asylum in New York State, starting with Blackwell's Island. Bly's undercover work still stands, in my opinion, as the single most heroic effort in the history of American journalism.

     But Bly's experience 137 years ago served to show just how easily one person could get committed to a lunatic asylum even when, based on today's thresholds, there was no reason for it.

     Nowadays, it's obvious America's once again devolved and that, far from being justly institutionalized, some of the most rabidly insane people in the country are being given positions of power in the incoming government, starting with Trump himself.

     Along with RFK Jr, one of the most clearly insane nominees to Trump's kakistocracy of a government is Kash Patel, Trump's pick to lead the FBI.

     Patel started out as an obscure staffer working for Devin Nunes, now the CEO of Truth Social. Subsequently, he served as Chief of Staff to acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller, and senior advisor to the acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell. Believe it or not, he used to be a federal prosecutor (Then again, so was Giuliani).

     But Patel has no background in law enforcement nor has he run an agency as vast as the FBI. It's obvious that Trump wants to shoehorn him into the Hoover Building to "own the libs" but primarily to use him as a pimpstick to go after his perceived enemies, starting with those in the FBI. Trump may be incipiently demented but he's still with it enough to recognize a dangerous Fifth Columnist when he sees one.

     As with so many in Trump's orbit, Patel is a foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorist, the most dangerous kind- A true believer who also happens to be criminally insane. When he wasn't writing children's books about how poor Donald Trump was wronged (The first book has the fantastic opening line, "Once upon a time, in the Land of the Free, there lived a wizard called Kash the Distinguished Discoverer."), he's been railing about the "deep state", even drawing up a list of 60 people in his book, Government Gangsters, that he accused of being deep staters (Among them were Bill Barr and Robert Hur).

     He also spouts conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. In true MAGA form, he also sold supplements to counteract the beneficial effects of COVID vaccines. He also sells wine, MAGA clothes, playing cards and other crap, including his books.

     But what probably permanently put him on the map of MAGAdonia was when he went on Steve Bannon's podcast a little over a year ago and said this:

     "The one thing we will do that they will never do is we will follow the facts and the law and go to courts of law and correct these justices and lawyers who have been prosecuting these cases based on politics and actually issuing them as lawfare. We will find go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media. Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to come after you. Whether it is criminally or civilly we'll figure that out. But, yeah, we're putting you all on notice. This is why they hate us. This is why we're tyrannical. This is why we're dictators."

     This seems to comport very neatly with the news that Patel, if God forbid he's confirmed as FBI Director, will start rooting through files looking for the names of confidential informants.

     This shows that Patel is one of those lunatics that Trump covets, the very tip of the tip of the spear that's bound and determined to turn our government into nothing more or less than an engine of vengeance. And if the Third Reich taught us anything, it's that you cannot reasonably expect a government to remain standing for long if it's based on nothing but grievance and revenge.