WAX: Defund the FBI, Re-Fund the State/Local Police

If there was ever a time to quit treating politics like a game, it’s when the FBI comes after parents who dare to fight for the last hope for this country, their children. What happens next decides the fate of the American experiment in self-government. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigations is no joke, despite its recent and not-so-recent directors. This institution is immensely powerful, and patriots would be sensible to fear it. But good sense and virtue also demand a proper people’s rebellion against it.   

Earlier this month, US Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies to coordinate with local law enforcement on strategies for responding to “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools.”

Now, there’s not enough room in this column to expose every B.S. claim made in Garland’s letter, but it shouldn’t be necessary anyway if you just contrast his words with the hours and hours of school board meetings that have gone viral on social media in recent weeks and months.

Parents shouldn’t be discouraged from speaking out passionately, even indignantly at school board meetings. However, they may wish to consider that this letter from Garland signals the same sort of operations that followed his last Chicken Little declaration in May 2020 about white supremacism and far-right radical extremism.

Don’t forget that the “kidnapping plot” of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer quickly followed that May 2020 pronouncement. According to Buzzfeed News, some of the 12 FBI informants involved “had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception.” 

“The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them,” the left-leaning news outlet reported.

Would the FBI infiltrate school board meetings or groups of parents planning to attend those meetings? Of course, they would, and likely already are doing so. After all, the head of the Detroit office for the FBI was promoted after the Whitmer incident to the Washington, D.C. office to oversee the investigation of the January 6 protest and riot in the U.S. Capitol. 

Revolver News has covered the federal government’s undercover involvement in the January 6 event, but even that incident seems quaint compared to what’s going on now with the targeting of parents at local school board meetings. 

The National School Boards Association lit the match that started this federal inferno coming down on parents. It was their letter to President Joe Biden on September 29 that claimed “domestic terrorism” and “hate crimes” were imminent threats at these local meetings.

One case cited on page four of the letter was that of Scott Smith in Loudon County, who was charged with obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct after public comment was shut down at the June 22 school board meeting.

Smith didn’t attack or threaten anyone. Quite the contrary. His ninth-grade daughter was allegedly raped and sodomized in the school bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt claiming to be gender-fluid. The school is accused of covering it up, the Daily Wire reported.

“Our nation’s public schools,” Garland calls them. Give me a break. His letter and the NSBA’s both clearly pander to one side of the debates over mask mandates, anti-white Critical Race Theory indoctrination, and hypersexual literature on kids’ library shelves. This notion of national public schools is absurd, but it’s useful for grabbing up more and more power.

The FBI must be stopped, defunded, and abolished.

Thankfully, the American people have at their disposal a rich tradition and legal doctrine that the FBI ultimately can’t overcome. It’s called saying, “No,” and this defiance is most effective when it takes the form of nullification or simply non-compliance, known and upheld by the Supreme Court as anti-commandeering.

None of this requires shuffling Republicans in or out of federal office, be it the House, Senate, or even the presidency. There’s no need to bring a lawsuit to federal court.

The agency’s origins go back over 100 years, roughly half the whole history of the federal government itself. Yet no national police or investigative force was ever inscribed in the U.S. Constitution. 

What is in the Constitution is the Bill of Rights, which includes the Tenth Amendment. That amendment, the cornerstone of the entire framework of our republic, makes clear that the federal government has quantifiable, delegated powers, while the states and their respective peoples have all the powers not delegated nor prohibited to them. 

State and local police aren’t perfect, but they’re inherently less prone to the longstanding corruption of the FBI. The best, perhaps only way to rein in the feds is a locally-based movement to reclaim the policing powers that D.C has usurped.

There are 16 states with Republican super-majorities in both state legislative chambers. What’s stopping them, or any red county for that matter, from introducing bills or ordinances to forbid their respective law enforcement entities from cooperating with the federal government on this matter? 

Notably, Florida state representative and candidate for U.S. Congress Anthony Sabatini has introduced a like-minded bill against the U.S. Capitol Police.

The FBI’s budget is nearly $10 billion. Split 50 ways, that’s $195 million per state. Isn’t senseless violence up nationwide? Imagine what could be done with that money if it left D.C. and wasn’t put to use stoking the flames of a culture war or threatening a civil war?

Americans can take their country back and even come together on a platform of decentralization. The centralizers in D.C. predictably demonize nullification and anti-commandeering, but the fact is they depend on local and state support for their programs.

The American people must focus ever more deliberately at the local level and interpret this latest action from the FBI for what it truly is, an admission that they fear losing their unconstitutional powers to local resistance.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AmericanActionNews.com

Gavin Wax

Gavin Wax is the 75th President of the New York Young Republican Club, Chairman of the New York Republican Liberty Caucus, an Ambassador for Turning Point USA, and an Associate Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research. You can follow him on Twitter at @GavinWax.