The New York Times calls Kash Patel “a hard-line critic of the bureau who has called for shutting down the agency’s Washington headquarters, firing its leadership and bringing the nation’s law enforcement agencies ‘to heel.’”

MSNBC opinion writer Hayes Brown is equally alarmed, but more colorfully so: “Kash Patel as FBI director would be like if you crossed Alex Jones with J. Edgar Hoover, in terms of just how much he would want to ignore precedent and the constraints that have been put onto the FBI over the years.”

Or take disgraced former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who opined, “The fact that Kash Patel is profoundly unqualified for this job is not even like a matter for debate.”

And to these harsh assessments, I ask: What’s not to like?

Patel is Donald Trump’s nominee to replace the FBI’s current director, Chris Wray, and the news is being met with equal parts fear and loathing on the Left and Flounderesque enthusiasm on the Right.

That’s because Patel is not only highly competent, as his public service career to date suggests; he’s also a disruptor and a reformer. And if any agency under the American sun is in desperate need of reform, it’s the Trump-hating, two-tiered-justice-distributing FBI. Indeed, former agents have called for the dismantling of the bureau.

This, after all, is the same FBI that in recent years concocted and carried out the Russia collusion hoax; that lied on a FISA warrant application so it could spy on Donald Trump and his entire campaign team; that entrapped a bunch of “pro-Trump” rabble in a phony kidnapping plot against Michigan’s Democrat governor less than a month before the 2020 election; that sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for nearly a year before the 2020 election; that colluded with Facebook and pre-Musk Twitter to censor the New York Post’s laptop bombshell two weeks before the election; that helped push the Gang of 51’s “Russian disinformation” letter even though it had already authenticated the laptop; that targeted parents who attended school board meetings because they were concerned about CRT and other hard-left ideologies being taught in their children’s schools; that targeted “radical-traditionalist Catholics” in their churches; that repeatedly targeted peaceful pro-life activists; that unlawfully seized the cellphone of a Trump-allied congressman and retired brigadier general; that gave two Republican senators a phony “defensive briefing” about Russian disinformation when they were investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine and other countries; that placed numerous agents provocateur at the January 6 protest-turned-riot and continues to stonewall Congress about it; that conducted an armed raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and rifled through the first lady’s underwear drawer because of a documents dispute with the National Archives; that intentionally screened out conservatives and Trump supporters in its hiring practices; and that cracked down on pro-Trump agents and patriotic whistleblowers within the bureau.

And most recently, we learned from Georgia Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk, who chairs the Committee on House Administration’s Oversight Subcommittee, that cellular carriers “have told Congress they possess intact phone usage data from the vicinity where two pipe bombs were planted” just prior to the January 6 Capitol riot, and this revelation is “directly disputing FBI testimony that agents couldn’t identify a suspect because the phone data was corrupted.”

Nearly four years hence, the FBI’s failure to identify the person who planted those pipe bombs at both the Democrat and Republican Party headquarters in one of the most heavily surveilled areas in the entire world — even though the bureau released video footage of the suspect sitting on a bench in front of the DNC headquarters while using his cellphone — is, shall we say, deeply mysterious.

And this is precisely why the Left fears Patel: Because he’s the enemy of the deep state and because he’ll be committed to transparency.

Just think of all we don’t yet know about Crossfire Hurricane, for example, and about the doings of deep-stater Kevin Clinesmith, the otherwise unremarkable FBI cutout who doctored evidence involving Trump campaign advisor Carter Page to help the Obama-Biden administration secure a FISA warrant to spy on the entire Trump campaign and subsequently the Trump administration. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their high-level henchmen have all escaped justice, but that doesn’t mean we ought not know what they did and how they did it.

Patel has experience not only as a federal prosecutor but as a federal public defender. Thus, as Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton notes, Patel has experience “not only in putting criminals behind bars but also can understand what happens when government overreaches.”

Fox News’s Trey Gowdy, himself a former federal prosecutor and anything but a rubber stamp for Donald Trump, knows a good and well-qualified nominee when he sees one — especially given what the “I” in “FBI” stands for. “You would not know the foundation or the funding of the Steele dossier,” said Gowdy. “You would not know about FISA abuse. You would not know about Fusion GPS had it not been for the hard work of a guy named Kash Patel. He is, quite candidly, the most unfairly maligned person that I worked with the entire eight years I was in Washington.”

And why might that be? Might it be that Patel knows where all the FBI’s pro-Democrat, anti-Trump bodies are buried? All reform-minded liberty-loving Americans should be exceedingly pleased that Trump has nominated Patel to take over for pencil-pushing corruption-enabling Wray at the FBI. If only Wray had the decency to resign instead of forcing Trump to fire him.

During a sit-down on the September 2nd edition of the Sean Ryan Show, Patel gave us a sense of the sort of change he’d bring to the bureau: “I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on Day One and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state. And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.”

No wonder they’re terrified of him. As Fox News’s Jesse Watters said, “When the butcher comes to town, the pigs start squealing.”

The place needs to be disinfected, and its purveyors of two-tiered justice need to be held accountable — especially those on the 7th floor.

And Kash Patel is just the guy to do it.