The Left will ignore the Durham Report for the same reason they ignored the Twitter Files

Say you witnessed a murder. You immediately tell the police. But they don’t care. Horrified, you then notice the sheriff is infamous serial killer Ted Bundy. You are no less disturbed, but you get it. This week, we learned that Special Counsel John Durham’s four-year investigation into the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe into Trumpworld to find possible collusion between Russia was based on… nothing. The report concluded that the FBI used “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence.” That’s not good. It’s certainly not professional. BASEDPolitics’ Hannah Cox also noted, “The FBI used a ‘different standard’ when weighing concerns about potential election interference in approaching the Trump campaign vs. that of Hillary Clinton’s.” The FBI picked favorites. It played them too. Hannah continued, “Durham reports that the agency also received intelligence from a trusted source claiming the Clinton campaign planned to vilify Trump by tying him to Russian President Vladimir Putin for the explicit purpose of distracting the public from her own private email server scandal. However, unlike the FBI’s decision to launch a full investigation into Trump’s activities, the FBI never so much as opened an inquiry into this report. In fact, in response to a purported plan to target the Clinton campaign by foreign operatives, the FBI provided defensive briefings for Clinton and her staff.” There’s more, but to be clear: A weaponized FBI worked in favor of Team Clinton against Team Trump. This is bad. It’s un-American. It’s undemocratic. It’s far worse than Watergate. It’s more of a threat to democracy than anything that happened on January 6, 2021 on Capitol Hill. The establishment class didn’t care. “Nothing burger.” Nothing to see here. Here’s a New York Times headline. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1658608315490877440 See? It’s just conservatives getting worked up. There weren’t even conclusions. The Left really got mad at CNN’s Jake Tapper for being one of the very few in the establishment press to admit what the Durham report had concluded. Tapper told his audience on Monday, “Regardless, the report is here, it has dropped. And it might have not produced everything of what some Republicans hope for, it is regardless devastating to the FBI, and to a degree it does exonerate Donald Trump.” This is true. A casual glance at the key parts of the Durham Report would tell any fair-minded observer the same. The Left wasn’t having it. https://twitter.com/0ccupyDemocrat/status/1658208140419280897 https://twitter.com/KeithOlbermann/status/1658227637586673664 Across the media spectrum, it is true that independent and right-leaning news sites ran with the Durham Report as their lead, shocking story and establishment media either ignored it or acted like no conclusions were determined. The fury at Tapper was for breaking rank. In past, more normal times, it would be expected for Americans to believe having a politically-motivated and partisan FBI that does the bidding of a major political party is dangerous for democracy. But this view rests on the assumption that having a politically-motivated and partisan FBI that does the bidding of a major political party is indeed dangerous. The Left doesn’t appear to think this at all. If such power is used for their purposes, they seem to even think it’s a positive good. I’m not talking about hard-core leftwing activists. I’m talking about high-profile Democrats who see nothing wrong with setting up a ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ to police citizens’ speech. I’m talking about Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly who wanted to censor social media to prevent bank runs. I’m talking about Democratic Rep. Stacey Plaskett who wanted to throw reporters in jail. I’m talking about members of Congress like Democrats Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Chuck Schumer, who want the government to regulate Fox News. https://twitter.com/brad_polumbo/status/1651327280755490817 These Democrats and countless others now reject liberalism in its most basic practice. They would never express this position so directly, but their actions time and again speak louder than their rhetoric. Just look at how they reacted to the Twitter Files. When the Twitter Files revealed that the federal government had been working in tandem to censor and suppress speech and news, the overwhelming reaction of leftwing politicians, pundits and celebrities was that this was a right-wing fiction. For them, it was nothing, too. The press is often the worst culprit. As independent journalist Leighton Woodhouse observed in December, “It’s not just that the corporate media has abandoned the kind of adversarial journalism exemplified by the reporting on the Twitter Files; it has taken on the role of defending the state against those who continue to practice it.” When the Twitter Files broke, I wrote, “Despite the Left’s endless warnings about various ‘threats to democracy’ coming from the Right, the jarring logical conclusion that Twitter worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. government to censor free speech is just not something most American liberals are going to care about at this point.” “Despite overwhelming evidence. Despite liberalism,” I added. The Left now considers old school liberals who still defend free speech to be right-wing, and free speech itself has become a right-wing value. https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1633861899199684619 Every once in a while someone on the Left will straight up acknowledge that rejecting liberalism has been a key Left tool. After Twitter intentionally suppressed a legitimate but potentially damning story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the emails it contained, a story that was later verified by the New York Times and that Twitter finally admitted censoring, left-wing podcaster Sam Harris said in an interview, “Now, that doesn't answer the people who say it's still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post's Twitter account, that's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump - absolutely it was, absolutely.”  “But I think it was warranted," he added. Ends > means. Authoritarianism > liberalism. You are right to go to the police after seeing a murder, but if the police don’t see anything wrong with it, what can you do? You don’t like that Ted Bundy serially killed people, but you don’t expect any less.  You don’t like that the Left now rejects liberalism, embraces weaponizing government and eagerly undermines our most basic American liberties, but at this point, we can’t expect any less. The values that cause so many to be disturbed by the Durham Report’s conclusions are simply no longer shared by the establishment class. How do you appeal to others’ better natures if they no longer have them? If they no longer even know what’s better? Common sense definitionally requires a commonality that too many Americans just don’t have anymore. John Durham could have found that the FBI kidnapped Trump and held him at gunpoint, and I don’t know if most leftists would see the harm in that. Political divides have replaced sanity. It’s as befuddling as it is alarming. But it’s where we’re at.

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