The Patriot Post® · Grassroots Patriots Are Not Paranoid About Abuses

In order to buy the notion that grassroots Patriots are succumbing to paranoia when it comes to the matter of Tucker Carlson’s claims about the National Security Agency (NSA), you have to ignore a lot of things. What sort of things? Let’s list them:

1. The targeting of Prop 8 donors.
2. Operation Fast and Furious.
3. The IRS targeting of Tea Party groups.
4. Benghazi, and the lies Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice told.
5. Operation Chokepoint.
6. The “John Doe” investigations in Wisconsin.
7. Attempts by Democrat AGs to investigate opponents of their preferred environmental policies.
8. Spygate and the lies that triggered it.
9. The politically motivated abuse of Missouri Governor Erik Greitens by a George Soros-backed prosecutor.
10. Andrew Cuomo’s effort to leverage the selective enforcement of financial regulations to coerce financial service companies to not do business with the NRA — an attempt to cripple the gun-rights group.
11. Efforts by bureaucrats to undermine President Donald Trump on policy.
12. The double standards held by menu police.
13. The use of DARPA technology to affect domestic politics.
14. Letitia James trying to dissolve the NRA after a fishing expedition.
15. The massive bulk-mail ballot scheme and failure to follow election laws in certain states.
16. Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby’s FCC complaint against a local TV station owned by a conservative media conglomerate.
17. The leak of the tax data of some of America’s richest people to ProPublica.
18. The charges against the Trump Organization from the Manhattan DA that amount to nitpicking over perks after another politically motivated fishing expedition involving James.

That list is hardly exhaustive, but let’s call this what it is: A pattern of the abuse of power for political gain. Tack on a long track record of hateful rhetoric from the Left, a list of double standards a mile long, corporate redlining, and Silicon Valley censorship, and the fact of the matter is that dismissing the notion that the National Security Agency has turned its focus where it shouldn’t is believable. This is bad news for a host of reasons.

First of all, the NSA’s job is to be snooping around foreign communications. Finding out the latest plots from al-Qaida, hacking into the Ministry of State Security for the People’s Republic of China, getting blackmail material to put a twist on political leadership from France to Bangladesh — all of that is well within the NSA’s purview. Tucker Carlson isn’t, and the resources used to spy on him were not used for their intended purpose.

But worse, the alleged misuse — and let’s be blunt, the track record of Democrats means that extending the benefit of the doubt to the NSA under the Biden administration makes playing with matches in the middle of a puddle of gasoline seem prudent — fosters distrust against an agency that needs implicit trust in order to protect the country. Why is that implicit trust necessary? Well, take one of the more controversial parts of the Global War on Terror.

Your Patriot Post team defended the use of enhanced interrogation because, while it was not exactly nice, it was the only way to get someone like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to spill his guts about what he knew. And while not all situations call for waterboarding someone, there are other times when our intelligence community will have to do things that people don’t like to think about in order to protect this country. This is why people needed to be held accountable for Spygate, and not just to avoid domestic discord.

The only people celebrating this NSA dustup are in places like Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. Not only does it look like our intelligence community, at best, made a mistake that diverted resources from dealing with real enemies, but now our intelligence community will be less trusted by the party that takes those enemies seriously — and that will compromise efforts to keep America’s enemies in check. The compromising of those efforts will have dire consequences down the road, and grassroots Patriots should ensure an accounting for that.