This is great news. But America and the world can’t celebrate unreservedly — because Fauci himself is unlikely to face criminal jeopardy, owing to a sweeping preemptive pardon granted him by President Joe Biden. Yet that doesn’t rule out other forms of accountability for Fauci, such as civil torts. A deeper reckoning, moreover, may shed light on the creepy, long-running nexus between biological research and America’s national-security state.

Last week, Dr. David Morens — a senior adviser to Fauci during the Covid years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health — pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired with two other people to hide evidence and defy public-records laws. The evidence in question: emails between Morens (and other government-linked scientists) and the British zoologist Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that used US government grant money to fund so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a report from the House subcommittee on the pandemic.

Gain-of-function research involves combining different viruses to create dangerous hybrids, justified on the grounds of better understanding future infectious diseases. At least one US intelligence agency — the CIA — has already concluded that the novel coronavirus likely leaked from a Chinese lab doing just such work. And it is also reasonable to at least suspect that the US government’s funding of the EcoHealth Alliance was part of intelligence efforts to keep tabs on Chinese research. 

According to the Department of Justice, Morens and two unnamed co-conspirators agreed “in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.” This was done, as the conspirators themselves made clear, to evade the transparency requirements of the Federal Records Act and the possibility of future exposure under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.

More from this author

The paper that destroyed world trade

By Christian Parenti

Among other things, Morens and his conspirators were trying to hide details related to a NIAID grant that helped fund experimentation with bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in China. One of these bat coronaviruses may have been a precursor to the Covid-19 virus, which likely escaped from the WIV in 2019.

Many of the incriminating communications have been posted online by the oversight committee of the US House of Representatives. Numerous emails implicate Fauci himself in the effort to evade public-records and transparency laws. For example, an email from Morens to a group of fellow scientists, including Daszak, dated April 21, 2021, contains the following: “PS. I forgot to say there’s no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Another email, from May 13, 2021, to the same group of scientists discusses having a friendly journalist “interview Tony [Fauci] directly and connect him to our ‘secret’ back channel. He emailed Tony a few days ago.” This suggests rather routine illegal use of private communication systems to coordinate official pandemic messaging, an effort in which Fauci himself was involved.

Daszak — widely suspected but not confirmed to be one of the unnamed conspirators — appears in many of the emails in which avoiding transparency is mentioned. An email dated April 21, 2021, from Daszak to a group of five other government-employed or -connected scientists, reads in part: “Please feel free to share any docs that I’ve sent to you, with Tony [Fauci]. Hopefully you can do that in a way that avoids [the Freedom of Information Act], and if not possible, just show him stuff on screen share on Zoom.”

In another email, Morens, referring to Fauci, tells Daszak; “If he needs further info, it might be best to connect you two, in an off-the-record manner. Would that be OK? We are getting FOIA’d nonstop, so it’s most important that Tony [Fauci] not have anything on the record that could come back to bite.” Daszak responded: “Totally agree. Tell him I’m happy to speak with him at any time and will do so in a way that’s not FOIA-ble.” 

In an email from November 18, 2021, Morens says: “Please pass this on to Peter [Daszak], and I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail, and make sure that what gets sent to my gmail doesn’t have a cc [carbon copy] to another government employee who could be FOIA’d.” There are many more statements of the kind in the public record, thanks to House investigators. 

The scientists’ obsession with secrecy, their fear of public scrutiny, tells us much about the politics of this pandemic. These people are fundamentally authoritarian. They despise democracy. They epitomize the arrogance of scientism: the worldview that treats science not as a means to gather certain kinds of facts, humble in the face of what it doesn’t know and subject to future revision — but as a total worldview, offering definitive answers to all questions, including the nonscientific, and elevating the expert himself to the status of a demigod. 

Their research was reckless. They suspected trouble. And they tried to hide it.

Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance are important in themselves and also because of the larger dynamics they reveal in the history of Covid’s origins. According to Dr. Andrew G. Huff, a former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance-turned-whistleblower, the nonprofit was heavily involved with a USAID program called PREDICT, which ran from 2009 to 2019, and billed itself as an early warning system for zoonotic pathogens that might emerge from nature. 

Parallel to PREDICT, Fauci’s NIAID also wrote a grant for $8 million directly to EcoHealth Alliance so that it could help fund research into bat coronaviruses being conducted by Shi Zhengli, a senior scientist at the Wuhan institute. This research seems to have included gain-of-function enhancements on some of the bat viruses that may have made them more dangerous to people.

To be charitable, if collecting intelligence on China’s infectious disease research was the plan, the US government did manage to get inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was then one of China’s top virology labs. Less charitably, the government did so by using US taxpayer money to fund dangerous research in a sprawling and poorly run lab. While the Wuhan Institute of Virology did have Biosafety Level 4 laboratories in 2019, it also had numerous less secure facilities in the same building; some of the bat-virus research is alleged to have occurred in these lower-safety level labs.

In this light, the pandemic can be seen as the ultimate iatrogenic disaster. In an effort to combat pandemics, a secret arm of the government may well have funded research that inadvertently produced the very thing it was trying to prevent: a massive, deadly, economy-crashing pandemic.

It isn’t too far-fetched to imagine that the Trump administration, and especially health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., are now deeply ambivalent about the nature of the government’s likely efforts to keep track of other countries’ bioweapon research. On the one hand, if such spywork is funding dangerous research in order to get inside foreign laboratories, it can lead to unintended consequences … like a global pandemic. On the other, rival states and private actors do, in fact, conduct dangerous biological research that the US government might want to be apprised of. 

Suggested reading

The People vs. Anthony Fauci

By John D Davidson

A better way to mitigate the whole problem would be to refurbish the international treaty against biological weapons. That treaty, which outlaws offensive-oriented biological research and was highly effective in an earlier age, has a gaping loophole that allows high-tech biological research to continue as long as it is done in the name of medicine, public health, and biodefense. In other words, the great powers are still making the active ingredients in would-be weapons, but they are not making or testing delivery systems, nor do they deploy pathogens to the battlefield. However, as highly dangerous biological research advances, those old constraints become less important.

To understand how and why, it helps to revisit history. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, the US government, along with most of its large allies and peer competitors, maintained offensive-oriented biological-weapons programs. During the pandemic, liberal journalists went out of their way to scoff at any mention of “bioweapons,” as if such a thing had never existed. But it did, and it is all a matter of public record.

However, by the late 1960s, American military leaders had turned against these so-called germ bombs, seeing biological warfare as dangerously unpredictable and dangerously accessible. In fact, the US brass referred to biological warfare as “the poor man’s nuke.” A number of accidents, including the mass poisoning of a herd of sheep in the American West, had led to public outcry from not only hippies, but heartland squares as well.

When Richard Nixon arrived at the White House in January 1969, he was met by large and persistent peace vigils demanding an end to US biological-warfare programs. Ten months later, in November 1969, Nixon announced the “unprecedented” unilateral end of America’s biological-weapons program. Quickly thereafter, the United States launched international negotiations aimed at ending bioweapons programs everywhere. In 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention was agreed to. All signatory states were compelled to end their offensive research and to destroy their offensive biological weapon stockpiles by March 1975.

The treaty has mostly been a success. But there was that one loophole. States could continue doing research on dangerous pathogens as long as this was for the creation of “defensive medical countermeasures.” For a long time, this loophole meant little, in part because the barriers to such research were so high. However, by the early aughts, with the advent of the CRISPR gene-editing technology, dangerous tampering with pathogens became much easier and more common.

As more parties began tampering with pathogens, intelligence agencies around the world became increasingly eager to understand what their adversaries were doing. It is this drive that may have led to America’s probable efforts to access the premier virology lab of Washington’s main rival, China.

Diplomacy brought an end to offensive-bioweapons research among the major powers of the planet. But it left open the defense loophole. Real accountability, and a real reckoning with Covid, could, among other things, clear the path for diplomacy between the world’s great powers to amend the 1972 convention, so that the treaty effectively regulates the dangerous and increasingly accessible technologies of the 21st century.

The need to update the 1972 treaty has grown particularly acute in just the last year. Aided by artificial intelligence, synthetic biology is developing faster than ever, and in very dangerous ways. In July, researchers at the University of Minnesota created the first ever artificial life form, a one-celled organism, capable of limited division and replication, called the SpudCell. It is, as yet, unable to evolve or divide over many generations, which is why scientists don’t consider it fully alive. But that could change.

Less complicated and far more dangerous was news in early August that scientists had created a series of viruses that had been designed by AI. Hopes for medical breakthroughs were raised, but so were safety concerns about new synthetic diseases running out of control.

As Dr. Huff, the EcoHealth Alliance whistleblower, told me over the phone: “Universities in all the G20 countries have the capacity to create totally synthetic viruses. We no longer have to go poking around in nature to find dangerous viruses and then do gain of function on them. It’s now possible to create dangerous viruses from scratch.”

We need sunlight and lots of it on the history of Covid’s origins. This is not just about punishing a group of creepy insiders — though they certainly deserve it — it’s also about reining in and restructuring biodefense research of all sorts.

It’s easy to feel squeamish about discussing these matters. The facts, though well-documented, sound conspiratorial and haven’t broken through to the mainstream press, and therefore might hurt your credibility at the next dinner party. But that attitude is adolescent and painfully upper middle class. Now is the time to face the facts, no matter where they lead. A real reckoning on Covid is the first step towards effectively demanding that our governments refurbish the Biological Weapons Convention and take other steps so as to prevent another biomedical disaster.

The alternative may well be masks, lockdowns, censorship, online schooling, shuttered churches, vaccine passports, and exhortations to snitch on neighbors who fail to comply — in short, mass hysteria and authoritarian overreach all over again. 

Deindustrialization has had devastating social consequences in the United States, as anyone who has spent time in the Rust Belt can attest. And the decline continues. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, manufacturing’s share of gross domestic product has declined by 26% just since 2013. At the sector’s postwar peak, manufacturing took up a third of GDP.

Some intellectuals in the Trump orbit have developed a rather elaborate critique of the situation. They might not have a functional plan, but they do have a theory. That theory has come closest to being spelled out in a November 2024 paper by Stephen Miran, the Harvard-trained economist who now serves as the chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. Titled “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System”, Miran’s 41-page paper is making the rounds and creating quite a buzz.

It’s a dry, technical slog. But — love or hate the trade war — Miran’s ideas are worth understanding.

He argues that America’s economic crises stem from the fact that the dollar serves as the world’s “reserve currency”. The dollar, more than any other currency, is held in large amounts by governments, central banks, and major financial institutions across the planet, because it serves as the most trusted medium for international trade and is seen to be “as good as gold”.

As the world’s reserve currency, the dollar is used to price commodities like oil or gold, to settle cross-border transactions, and to provide a safe haven during economic turbulence. Because everyone wants dollars, US government debt and Treasury bonds are in constant demand. This gives the US government and American businesses tremendous power and advantage. In a crisis, Americans can more or less print “gold” and spend their way out. Many struggling economies would like to have such “problems”.

But in Miran’s view, several serious interconnected problems flow from the dollar’s global dominance. The dollar is overvalued relative to other currencies because as a reserve currency, it is in constant demand. This undermines domestic manufacturing, by making American exports more expensive. Over the long run, the high expense of the dollar is bound to bring about deindustrialization.

More from this author

Progressives should cheer Trump’s FBI purge

By Christian Parenti

While Miran is correct about the overvalued dollar’s role, he neglects deindustrialization’s other causes, not least neoliberal deregulation that has allowed firms to do things with cheaper and cheaper labor, rather than develop labor-saving technologies, and the excessive financialization that characterizes this order. Nor does he address the fact that other countries that don’t issue the world reserve currency have also suffered deindustrialization.

In the event, Miran contends, deindustrialization leads to declining productivity and slower economic growth. We now know that when production takes place on one side of the Pacific while engineers and designers labor are on the opposite side, innovation and productivity flag — and, with them, growth. Thus, even as the US economy grows, it grows slower than, and diminishes relative to, those of its emerging rivals, most notably China. Along the way, both the private and public sectors become ever more indebted.

Deindustrialization, moreover, ultimately undermines the reserve currency issuer’s military prowess — that is, the very foundation upon which America’s reserve-currency status rests in the first place. A deindustrialized economy has a hard time producing and maintaining a modern military.

Miran is correct to flag America’s hollowed-out military, a crisis that is already coming into view. We have seen it in America’s absurdly diminished TNT supply chain. To fuel its war in Ukraine, the Biden administration had to create a crash program to build TNT factories to supply the war, because the old supply chain had been taken over by Wall Street mergers-and-acquisition wizards and profitably offshored to Russia and China. Oops.

Finally, all of this leads to a sovereign-debt crisis for the reserve-currency-issuing country.

In painting this rather bleak panorama, Miran is describing what’s known as the Triffin Dilemma, named for the work of the late Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin, who first identified the inherent dangers that come with issuing the world reserve currency. Triffin, who died in 1990, taught at Yale and worked for the International Monetary Fund. He influenced both Nixon’s decision to go off the gold standard and the IMF’s creation of a supra-national currency called Special Drawing Rights, or SDR. Miran’s use of Triffin is sophisticated and well-reasoned.

Suggested reading

Trump’s Gorbachev moment

By Malcom Kyeyune

However, Miran’s paper has a number of flaws, one of the biggest being that it discusses the real economy very little. The majority of the paper is a detailed discussion of the “incidence” of potential tariffs, meaning a highly technical discussion of who will actually pay the price of the tariff, the exporter or the American importer and consumer. Miran’s conclusion is that a tariff offensive, such as the one Trump has just unleashed, could be “disinflationary”, meaning that there will be inflation, but at a slower rate of inflation that prevailed before the tariffs. Which is fine, so far as it goes, but doesn’t reckon with the pain of tariffs at the individual and firm level.

Another weakness is that while Miran sees the dollar’s reserve-currency status as the root of America’s economic problems, he doesn’t want to dispose of that position. Rather, he just wants to moderate it. This is partly because, as he admits, there is no apparent alternative to the dollar, which, in turn, owes to the lack of any alternative to the size and depth of US financial markets.

Miran discusses briefly the possibility of a multilateral approach to lightening the burden of being the issuer of the world’s primary reserve currency. One could imagine international negotiations that, in the spirit of Triffin, would attempt to massively expand the role of the IMF’s alternative currency, the SDR. But ultimately Miran comes down on the side of unilateral action of the kind that his now-boss has taken.

A more fundamental flaw is that there is no discussion of industrial policy at all in Miran’s paper, which is really too bad. One could, for the sake of argument, grant all of his points. One could allow that tariffs will work, that they will be disinflationary rather than lead to stagflation, that they will summon a huge wave of inward-bound investment. One could grant all that and still argue that the whole endeavor will fail for lack of an industrial policy.

The idea of reviving US manufacturing by financial manipulation is deeply flawed. No country has industrialized without having an industrial policy, including the United States. Alexander Hamilton’s “Report on the Subject of Manufactures” was, in fact, the first modern blueprint for such a program. It was the playbook the early republic followed throughout the first Industrial Revolution.

True, tariffs can have some salutary effects. The impending threat of tariffs has already led to some high-profile promises. Apple promises to invest $500 billion in domestic manufacturing. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has likewise pledged to invest $100 billion in the United States to build state-of-the-art chip plants. But foreign investment alone isn’t sufficient to revive American manufacturing.

TSMC, for example, is now printing chip-circuitry that is almost as small as an atom of silicon. The clean rooms in which such work is done must be entirely dust free, totally sterile. The laundry service for the uniforms the technicians wear is itself a high-tech service that the United States is currently incapable of providing.

Think about that: Americans don’t have the capacity to do TSMC’s laundry, yet we expect the firm to successfully invest $100 billion to create advanced manufacturing facilities. We need a plan to either recruit specialized laundry firms from Taiwan, or somehow train and help fund American firms to do the same. Similarly, Apple had a laptop factory in Texas that had to close because the firm could not find a flexible and dynamic enough supplier to build its highly specialized screws. These sorts of problems replicate across the manufacturing landscape.

But the Trump administration shows no sign of coming up with an industrial strategy or promoting workforce development.

Take trade schools and workforce preparation. The inability to hire qualified and disciplined workers is the No. 1 complaint of manufacturing employers whenever they are surveyed. Is Team Trump throwing money at that problem? No. Quite the opposite. The Trump administration has recently closed numerous trade-school-type apprenticeship programs because they were DEI-connected, often run by Left-leaning nonprofits that worked closely with trade unions. When Trump eliminated all DEI grants, many of these workforce training programs lost funding, and the slack hasn’t been picked up by some other expansion of trade schools.

In short, Trump insiders like Navarro and Miran can’t bring themselves to even admit the state intervention in the economy that their own theory requires. They are still in thrall to neoliberalism’s markets-über–alles mythology, even as they attempt to overthrow the neoliberal order.

Suggested reading

Trump’s tariffs are the end of globalisation

By Wolfgang Munchau

Step One in creating an industrial policy is having a more grounded and concrete discussion of American manufacturing as it actually exists. So here’s a sketch of what we have. The vast majority of US manufacturing firms are small and medium-sized enterprises that are privately owned, as in not traded on the stock market. According to the US Census, there were 238,851 manufacturing firms in the United States in 2021. More recently, the National Association of Manufacturers estimates that there were about 300,000 US manufacturing companies.

These firms are usually individually or family-owned, or they are closely held by small groups of investors, or a few partnerships. The vast majority of these small manufacturing firms produce fabricated metal products, furniture, and apparel. They tend to operate in local markets and focus on products where customization is key.

Some of these smaller firms are involved in precision manufacturing with links to the military industrial complex and will be essential in any high-tech revival. These are the types of companies that can make screws to Apple’s specifications. But without public support and planning, they won’t have the flexibility to scale quickly and pivot quickly as their customers’ designs change in response to shifting market preferences.

This landscape of actually existing American manufacturing is almost totally neglected by the discipline of economics and our policy elite. If there is to be a revival of American manufacturing, we need to get to know manufacturing. There also needs to be an intellectual and cultural revival in our thinking about manufacturing. Recently, a Chinese propaganda video, animated using AI, showed bored, overweight Americans toiling at sewing machines by way of suggesting that America isn’t for manufacturing any longer. Many social-media personalities, even self-proclaimed progressives, enthusiastically shared it — a grim indicator of how far America’s elites are from being able to even imagine the nation as a future manufacturing powerhouse.

For all the convulsions it has caused, Trump’s tariff rampage can’t be described as a death blow to neoliberal globalization. As Miran’s paper indicates, the theory behind it, while half-correct, is still marked by all the flaws of the neoliberal imagination: an imagination that can think only in terms of prices and financial flows, and never in terms of concrete places, industrial processes, and real products.

As the son of a Leftist radical targeted by the FBI over his opposition to the Vietnam War, I know which side to cheer for.

Since retaking office, Trump has dismissed dozens of officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice. According to The Hill, the administration is “eyeing firing perhaps thousands more in an unprecedented purge.” The earliest targets include officials involved in prosecuting Trump himself, as well as those who caught some 1,500 defendants in a post-Jan. 6 dragnet.

Then there is Kash Patel, the president’s choice to lead the FBI. If confirmed, Patel would join the ranks of other Trumpians leading agencies of which they are deeply skeptical. Among other measures, Patel has mused about shuttering the J. Edgar Hoover Building — the FBI’s headquarters, named for its notoriously lawless and racist first director — and converting it to a “museum of the deep state.”

The building’s 7,000 staffers would fan across the land, under Patel’s plan, solving workaday crimes. As opposed to the kind of highly politicized activity that has turned half of the country against the bureau, not least the use of its vast investigatory powers to corner Trump, seeking to undo his first election.

That project began when the bureau used allegations of “Russian collusion” proffered in the so-called Steele Dossier to launch a wide-ranging investigation into the Trump campaign. Commissioned by the Clinton campaign of 2016, and partially paid for by the Democratic National Committee, the dossier’s claims about Russian collusion were entirely unsubstantiated, as special counsel Robert Mueller revealed in an extensive probe that concluded in 2018.

Nonetheless, the FBI leaked parts of the Steele Dossier, then used the ensuing DC rumors as “evidence” with which to apply for and receive four wide-ranging Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants. This allowed the bureau to spy on the communications of the Trump campaign; one of the FBI attorneys who helped apply for the FISA warrants was later convicted of having altered an email to make it look more incriminating.

Around the same time, Hillary Clinton was also under investigation for having permanently deleted some 31,000 emails that had been subpoenaed by the DOJ in 2014. The FBI investigated Clinton’s illegal destruction of evidence, but in the run up to the 2016 election, it soft-pedaled the matter and declined to recommend prosecution.

Rather than abandon politics-by-probe, the FBI ramped up its anti-Trump efforts four years later, during his second presidential campaign. That’s when the bureau took a leading role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in what appears to have been an attempt to control the outcome of the 2020 election. Having come into possession of the laptop 10 months before the New York Post published its first story about it, the FBI verified had its authenticity. Yet it warned social-media platforms to be wary of a Russian disinformation operation involving Hunter. Sure enough, when the Post’s first story appeared, Twitter (now X) and Facebook swiftly throttled it.

The Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol gave rise to another embarrassing episode, combining neglect and imperiousness. There is no excusing the rioters’ actions, and some of those pardoned by Trump upon returning to office undoubtedly committed violent crimes. But the question remains: Why was the US Capitol so poorly defended that day? And why did the Capitol Police Board — consisting of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the architect of the Capitol — deny requests from the Capitol Police to deploy National Guard in anticipation of brewing turmoil?

The answer hinges, in part, on the failure of the FBI to share important intelligence with the Capitol Police. According to Steven A. Sund, then the commander of the Capitol Police, the FBI as early as December 2020 had intelligence indicating that various individuals were actively planning to march into the Capitol and that many of them planned to be armed and ready to use violence. Yet the bureau didn’t alert Sund about this fact, which would likely have led to the authorization of a National Guard deployment.

Then, too, the FBI has to this date failed to comply with congressional requests for basic information, such as how many FBI agents and informants were in the crowd on Jan. 6. As it happens, FBI Agent Steven D’Antuono, who was in charge of the bureau’s Washington, DC, field office that day, had also managed the bureau’s infiltration and entrapment of a ragtag band of right-wing militiamen who, at the urging of undercover FBI handlers, concocted a scheme to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The full extent of FBI manipulation of the suspects only came to light because two of the defendants refused to take plea bargains, went to trial, and were acquitted after proving FBI entrapment.

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago is another reason Trump is coming after the bureau. Accused of illegally hoarding state secrets after leaving office in 2021, Trump was cooperating with officials from the National Archives and Records Administration to return classified documents. The cooperation started early as May 2021 and would continue to the first half of 2022. Nevertheless, the FBI launched a dramatic early-morning raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. A year later, Trump was charged with 37 federal felonies connected to the retention of national security secrets.

At the same time, then-President Joe Biden was also found to have retained and improperly stored classified documents from his time as vice president. Biden’s documents were sitting unguarded in his garage. But there was no FBI raid, nor any discussion of criminal charges. Recall, too, that Hillary Clinton was likewise spared charges over her mishandling of State Department emails.

More from this author

Will the Biden family escape justice?

By Miranda Devine

Despite it all, Trump is now back at the summit of American power. Gone is the naïve showman from reality television. Trump 2.0 is battle-hardened and arrives with a wrecking crew and an aggressive plan to dismantle or weaken the key institutions of America’s unaccountable security state.

This is good and necessary. The FBI has a long and sordid history of framing people; disrupting, misdirecting, and destroying progressive social movements; and blackmailing politicians of any persuasion. As a result, there are many who dislike Trump yet cheer for him — because they dislike the FBI even more.

I understand this impulse. My father, the Marxist scholar Michael Parenti, was a fierce and public opponent of the Vietnam War, and he came under FBI surveillance. He even got a copy of his file. They harassed him, visited our home, bothered my mother. And so, when I read of stunned bureau officials seeking to calm the “fear and angst within the FBI ranks” and vowing to “dig in”, I felt that some little bit of cosmic justice was being done for Dad, who like many radicals of his generation spent years at the sharp end of FBI bullying.

The FBI is reeling from these early blows. But unless Trump and his colleagues are determined and systematic in their efforts, the security apparatus will regroup, shake off the dust, and strike back. We are in the opening rounds of what will be a long and brutal confrontation over the right to enjoy authentic political contestation, rather than a politics stage-managed by men in black.

Progressives who wish to preserve room for real politics, and who know their FBI history, should stand with the Trumpians in this tug-of-war.