Core American values by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

By ten o’clock last night my hopefulness had been badly shaken. By this morning, it had almost evaporated. 

Last night, Rachel Maddow reported on the purging that is going on at the Department of Justice and the FBI, where — a day after Kash Patel testified that there would be no retribution at the FBI — they are going after anyone who worked on the Jan. 6 cases. “Trump,” she said, “is moving toward ending independent law enforcement as a core American value.” This sent chills down my spine.

The Justice Department has moved to fire a swath of senior FBI leaders and began a massive probe into agents who helped investigate the 2021 Capitol riot — The Daily News

A group representing FBI agents issued a rare public warning of the potential for hundreds of firings at the nation’s top law enforcement agency. — USA Today

Besides keeping us safe from terrorist attacks, at the direction of the same FBI headquarters that Mr. Patel wants shut down, the FBI every day investigates espionage, organized crime, human trafficking, cybercrime, sabotage, civil rights violations, white-collar crime, violent crime, political corruption and assassinations, all coordinated by FBI headquarters. — Washington Times

Maddow also let us know that there are shenanigans going on at the Treasury Department, where, after Musk was instrumental in pushing out the highest-ranking career official in the department, his people locked civil servants out of their own systems.

The Trump administration pushed out a top Treasury Department official this week after he refused to give Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team access to the government’s vast payment system, part of a bid by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to choke off federal funding. — The New York Times

Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials. — Reuters

And then there was the second fatal plane crash in three days.

Wednesday’s fatal plane crash occurred while no one was leading the agency in charge of air safety… Mike Whitaker, the previous FAA administrator, stepped down on Inauguration Day… He’d repeatedly clashed with Elon Musk… over safety issues at his space company, SpaceX. — HuffPost 

The Trump administration is offering what amounts to buyouts for federal workers… as part of the president’s breakneck efforts to reshape the government in his second term. — The Hill

In the wake of the worst American air disaster in two decades, the understaffed and cash-strapped National Transportation Safety Board was scrambling to keep investigators from leaving after federal employees received an offer by the Trump administration to resign and be paid through September. — CNN

When I went to bed last night, I was sure I’d wake up to a flood of email and headlines about the goings on at the DOJ and Treasury. Nothing. That was when I started to feel hopeless.

It’s not that the news isn’t out there. You can find it, if you know what you’re looking for. I was looking for it, specifically about the FBI purge and its consequences, and still had trouble finding it on my news feed.

This is larger and faster and worse than what I could have imagined. They are destabilizing the criminal justice system, making all of us less safe. And how do we feel about flying now? A friend’s kids and grandkids flew this week, “I was a wreck until they all got home,” she told me this afternoon. They have deadheaded the CDC as the avian flu is spreading and want to put someone in charge of Health and Human Services who doesn’t know what Medicare Part A covers. The person up for Director of National Intelligence refuses to call Edward Snowden — now a citizen of Russia — a traitor. I could go on.

They want to break it all. Do they not understand that they too live in this country? “They’re trying to illegally fire a third of the federal government,” Adam Kinzinger said today. “Let’s bury them in lawsuits to prevent them from doing what they’re doing,.. That’s about all we can do right now. Except being loud, being noisy.”

It took Hitler 53 days to dismantle German democracy. It seems that Donald Trump and his overlords and minions are in a race to prove they can do it faster.