James Comey has his own history of eroding civil liberties and maintaining the police state apparatus against every black person in the country. When mass protest arose against police killings Comey was among those who peddled the lie of a “Ferguson effect.” He made the spurious case that the police were suddenly afraid to kill black people. If only that were true. The Obama administration was in the business of pretending to undo mass incarceration and Comey exposed their fraud by claiming that it didn’t even exist.
The FBI will always be in the business of crushing dissent. The agency coordinates its work with police departments across the country with Joint Terrorism Task Force operations that target black people, Muslims of all races and anyone else who may fit a profile rife with racism and xenophobia.
This is the FBI that many people now lionize in the wake of the Comey firing. Trump’s dispute with Comey has created a dangerous cognitive dissonance on the part of people suffering from selective amnesia. If black people can’t be depended upon to remember the FBI’s history of evil doing we are in very serious trouble.
Former National Intelligence director James Clapper laments that FBI agents are now suffering from “low morale” after their boss was told to clean out his desk. We can only hope that their condition is so serious that they no longer want to target individuals and groups for surveillance, arrest and imprisonment. We would be fortunate indeed to have an ineffectual FBI.
The term “deep state” has become popular of late but it is something of a misnomer. The deep state is nothing new or extraordinary. It was and is ever present in the lives of black people. That dynamic is unchanged, regardless of who sits in the corner office of the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington DC.
The fact that Hoover’s infamous name has not been removed is significant. It is further proof that the fate of a particular FBI director should be of no concern to black people. There are many legitimate reasons to oppose Donald Trump. However the emphasis on him rather than on the system has created a sad spectacle of foolishness and further proof of the sorry state of black political understanding.