Dan Bongino and Heather Mac Donald are absolutely certain that right-wing attacks on the FBI do not detract from conservatives’ law and order cred – yet neither one uttered a word against the recent threats to the FBI by Trump supporters.
The discussion began with host Dan Bongino saying, with a straight face, “No serious conservative out there is calling to defund any serious law enforcement activity. Our concern with the FBI is political targeting over law enforcing.”
He blamed the media for “trying to pollute the argument.”
OK, I don’t know that Bongino ever said specifically the FBI should be defunded but I do know he suggested that everyone at the FBI should be fired. On August 9, Bongino raged about the FBI, “Everyone has to go! You do not live in a constitutional republic anymore, and there is no fixing this, there is only rebuilding it.”
But a host of Republican candidates and officeholders have directly called for defunding the FBI. That includes Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who is treated as a serious conservative by Fox’s top host, Tucker Carlson. Regular Fox guest Victor Davis Hanson said on The Ingraham Angle recently, “I think they should break up the FBI, disperse its bureaus throughout the federal government. It’s got too much power, it's a threat, and it's a danger to democracy.”
Guest Heather Mac Donald did not challenge Bongino's assertion. Not surprisingly, she immediately pivoted to demonizing Black Lives Matter instead. Her argument seemed to be that because conservatives are not as awful as she thinks BLM supporters are, and because the right thinks law enforcement should go hard against BLM, the right can’t be anti-law enforcement.
MAC DONALD: I’ll believe that the right is engaged in the same widespread smearing of law enforcement as the left routinely engages in when I see graffiti, “AAAB” on cop precincts, on FBI sites that would stand for “all agents are bastards,” which would be the counterpart to the “all cops are bastards” graffiti that we saw during the race riots following George Floyd.
I’ll believe that the conservatives are responsible for delegitimating law enforcement when 73 FBI agents are fatally gunned down, as we saw last year when 73 police officers were fatally gunned down, when FBI agents have feces and bags of urine thrown at them.
Remind me again who recently attacked the FBI in Cincinnati? Oh, that’s right, it was an armed, white Trumper who was allegedly part of the January 6th insurrection. And who menacingly protested outside the FBI office in Phoenix? That’s right, they were armed, white Trumpers. Who was just arrested for making serious threats against the FBI? That’s right a Trump supporter. And who does the FBI think is targeting them these days? That’s right, Trump supporters.
Funny how with all of Mac Donald’s sanctimonious defense-by-fingerpointing-at the left, she never once condemned any of that behavior. Nor did Bongino. Apparently, hating the left is all the righteousness needed for these “patriots.”
MAC DONALD: What conservatives are saying is that we need a concerted effort to look at whether the highest reaches of the federal law enforcement agencies have been politicized. Because if that happens, any hope for the rule of law and for living in a non-totalitarian state is over.
But I am not gonna cop to the charge that we are engaged in the same type of corrosive discourse that says that every single police officer, by definition, simply by virtue of being a police officer, is a lethally biased racist, which is what the left tells us all the time. That is not what the right is saying about the FBI.
BONGINO: Yeah, it was absurd. … But it was conservatives calling for President Trump to use federal assets, both the federal guard and federal law enforcement when the left engaged in the George Floyd riots. That was us doing that. It wasn’t them.
MAC DONALD: Right. Absolutely. We still have credibility as the law and order party. You know, the left has engaged in the same – if you want to say flip-flop because now they’re saying, “Oh, law enforcement is great.” This reminds me of that iconic moment when Don Lemon was crying. Don Lemon was crying on camera at video of a Capitol Police officer being squished in a door during the January 6th riots. Never before has Don Lemon cared about police officers. And never since.
BONGINO: So true, so true.
MAC DONALD: So, you know that was an amazing turnaround. There’s nothing that the conservatives are doing now that is comparable to that.
BONGINO: Such a good point. It’s such a good point. They are the ones who flip-flopped not us.
I’m fine with any reviews of FBI conduct and it’s never OK to assault police officers or anyone else. But Black Lives Matter supporters were upset about cops who murdered George Floyd. Nobody at Mar-a-Lago was ever endangered by the FBI agents who followed the rules and got a legal search warrant. Not even Mac Donald or Bongino argued otherwise.
If these two hate mongers don’t know that their side has been calling for defunding the FBI and using inciteful language criticizing the bureau, they really have no business discussing the subject on any network that calls itself cable news. But more likely, they don’t care about the truth and neither does the Murdoch network that lets them get away with blabbing this baloney.
You can watch this pathetic argument below, from the August 20, 2022 Unfiltered with Dan Bongino.
