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This is funny or sad ,depending on how you look at it
US Justice Dept Mulling Criminal Charges Against Binance Founder CZ: Report https://decrypt.co/116961/us-justice-dept-mulling-criminal-charges-against-binance-founder-cz-report
Imagine you're CZ. You just exposed one of the biggest fraudsters ever. And now the DOJ wants to investage...you. Meanwhile, the actual fraudster is still free, giving interviews. Yeah, the DOJ has been looking into binance for years, but it shows the unfairness of it all I guess.
The FBI has operated as a political hit-squad for the Democratic Party since the days of J Edgar Hoover. Bankman-Fried/FTX was the Democratic Party's second largest individual donor. TINACBNIEAC.
They spent the 50s hunting Commies, the 60s blackmailing civil rights leaders, and the 70s getting grilled for COINTELPRO. Burn down one compound and I suppose that’s water under the bridge.
You mean they spent the 50's helping the Democratic party establishment keep it's radicals in check, the 60s blackmailing civil rights leaders on behalf of segregationist Democrats, and the 70s fighting a rear-guard action for the "deep-state", after the splitting of the Democratic party between segregationists and anti-segregationists handed the Republicans a pair of decisive victories in 68 and 72.
I'd like to ask this question to both you and @netstack , then: what about the 80's and 90's? Besides some shootouts and Waco, anyways.
Do you remember the FBI agents from Die Hard? Do you remember how they were portrayed as a pair of vaguely clueless trigger happy cowboys who didn't really care about saving the hostages? That was(is?) the mainstream/normie impression of the FBI through the 80s and early 90s.
I remember growing up on Tom Clancy novels in the 90s, where the FBI and its agents were portrayed as unfailingly competent, loyal, and incorruptible. I'd say Tom Clancy was pretty normie, no? I'd be lying if I didn't admit that my media diet shaped my political perceptions.
Then again, Tom Clancy himself was very much establishment GOP, but it seems to me that there was a time that our currently evident cleavages weren't quite so glaring.
Granted it's been over a decade since I've read any of the books other than Patriot Games and Hunt for Red October but my recollection is that Clancy's DoJ-alligned characters (Clark, Chavez, Oreza, et al) had a bit of the Dirty Harry vibe going on, wherein they tended to save the day in spite of the chain of command rather than thanks to it.
Clark in particular had a fair amount of that. Without Remorse, his origin story, has him completely outside the law, but it also has Jack Ryan's dad as the detective attempting to catch him, and a lot of the point of the novel is about how what he's doing really isn't okay. Particularly on the military side of things, there's a great deal of grousing about what we might term REMFs; Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears both hinge on jackass politicians fucking things up for the honest servicemen under them, and there's more of that in the other books as well. Still, especially at the level of the Feds and the Military, there's a whole lot of emphasis on following procedure and getting authorization, not engaging in cowboy shenanigans. The big exception is Clear and Present Danger, which now that I think of it has a whole bunch of faintly horrifying breaches of protocol, multiple incidents of threating criminals with murder if they don't spill, and a bunch of cops arranging to scuttle the case against a pair of murderers, provided they kill two other murderers, who are going to walk because the Coasties who caught them held a faked execution to coerce confessions. Every part of that sequence is portrayed as morally acceptable, if perhaps not terribly advisable, which in itself should probably give the reader pause... but absolutely did not when I was reading it as a youngster. None of that ever involves the Bureau, though.
The FBI is represented mainly by Special Agent Dan Murray, Jack Ryan's best friend, who's basically a carbon copy of Jack Ryan, only not the main character. Clear And Present Danger initiates its main plot when the incorruptible, courageous, and universally-lauded Director of the FBI is assassinated by Columbian drug cartels, and things follow that general take for the preceding and following books. FBI agents are significant characters in pretty much every book, and they are never portrayed with anything but a halo. I think I recall J. Edgar Hoover being mentioned as being the distant past, and the Bureau Doesn't Work That Way Any More, but beyond that the books get to engaging with real-world discontents with the FBI is in one of the later books, when some white supremacists try to build a huge truck bomb to blow up the white house.
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