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A better response to any misgivings about the FBI is to have R politicians probe the organization and gradually escalate if it's found to be breaking the law to assist Dems. On the other hand, saying "the enemy's misdeeds justify our own lies" is pure toxoplasma.
Did the FBI break any laws here? I don’t think so. But they (and ex CIA people) heavily tilted informational warfare in favor of the Dems and against truth.
Are there serious ethical and spirit of Democracy things at play - yes. Illegal probably not. FBI doesn’t seem to have been neutral as they are suppose to be but that isn’t illegal.
I don't know if they broke laws specifically, but if they did then that's an easy target to nail them for. If they didn't, then it's just another battle of "why are almost all institutions left-leaning?"
The latter is why a bunch of us advocate for raising the temperature and just playing the same games. Lie. Because there’s no other choice besides acceleration. Or a bit of a Russian tactic of offensive for peace.
That logical endpoint of that sort of escalation is a violent right-wing insurgency like the Troubles in Ireland, but with every major institution aligned against them the conservatives will almost certainly lose.
I mean, the IRA did get significant concessions.
The IRA wasn't universally loathed by every institution within Ireland though.
I think if we look into the specifics you'd have a hard time making the case that conservatives have less power in American institutions than nationalists had in Northern Ireland at the outbreak of the Troubles.
Even in the Republic it's not as simple as it seems, the Irish government was sympathetic to nationalists but not to the IRA. Ireland still has a secret juryless court which was set up specifically to jail paramilitaries.
The fact that the IRA had sympathetic supporters in Ireland was big. The Irish government might have officially disagreed with their violent methods, but not with the idea of Irish unification.
Compare that to a hypothetical scenario today where Conservatives are trying to go up against a left-leaning FBI that's clearly willing to bend laws, and a left-leaning media that'd love to manufacture consent to legitimize doing so.
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