Red-Brown Alliance? When it comes to abolishing the national security state, Hell, YES!

The FBI, since its inception, has had the primary mission of surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting any political movement that was deemed a threat to the American ruling class at the time. This is easily proven just by reading up on the FBI, or there’s the excellent film, J. Edgar, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the antihero, outstandingly directed by Clint Eastwood.

Even though the film is from J. Edgar Hoover’s perspective, which Eastwood probably agrees with, I think it’s an accurate portrayal of the cross-dressing monster. The film certainly portrays the agency’s, or its predecessor agency’s, initial mission to crush Communism and the labor movement in the years after World War I.

Anyone who knows anything about the civil rights movements of the 1950s thru 70s knows how the FBI responded to them—Communists! Enemies of the State! Surveil them! Infiltrate them! Set them up to do illegal things! Then crush them!

The thing the FBI always feared the most was a broad-based, populist movement intent on overthrowing the existing power structure, without which the agency as we know it would cease to exist. That’s why they opposed MLK. That’s why they opposed Malcolm X. That’s why they almost certainly arranged the assassination of Fred Hampton.

What did Fred Hampton do to maximize the FBI’s ire to such an extent? He started finding common ground with the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists. He discovered, as did some of them, that the the capitalist system, and the security agencies that defended it, were far greater enemies to each of them than they were to each other. It was in the interests of both to find common cause against oppressive state power.

Now, about a half century later, we have the spectacle of right-wing Republicans calling for the defunding and abolition of the FBI. Yes, they’re doing it because the FBI has finally targeted one of them, but that does not matter. What matters is whether they are correct on this particular issue, and from my Marxist, not to mention American, perspective they are correct.

What would any of those Black leaders I previously mentioned say? They’d say to people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, “We are glad to see that you understand the FBI is a threat to the liberty of us all. And we will stand with you on this issue. Hopefully, we can find more common ground as we work together to accomplish this one great purpose—the abolition of the American Gestapo.”

Look at what the FBI did here. They infiltrated the campaign of an opposition political leader. They openly admitted, before Congress, that their purpose was to prevent him from winning the election. They pushed a story about foreign support for this candidate that they invented out of whole cloth, and recently they searched his home for any evidence they could find or fabricate to prevent him from running for office again.

Richard Nixon was impeached and resigned before the Senate could convict him because of his cover-up of a third-rate burglary of Democratic Party headquarters. Joe Biden, or the powers behind the dementia on the throne, authorized the FBI to ransack the home of former President Trump in the hopes of finding something, anything, that will prevent him from running for office again because they know that he will probably beat any horrible candidate they might put forward in 2024.

Nixon was wrong but Biden is right? How so? Nixon let his staff use some crazy ex-CIA guys and equally crazy anti-Castro Cubans to get dirt on his domestic political opponents. Biden has unleashed the ultimate federal law enforcement arm to do the same to his domestic political opponents. If anything, Biden’s crimes against the American Bill of Rights are far more egregious than anything Nixon did in that regard.

The FBI has always been something of an American Gestapo. They have grossly abused their power, so much so that whistleblowers within the agency are so appalled they are speaking out, albeit anonymously for the most part. Some Republican politicians are now calling for their abolition in response to this most blatant abuse of power in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment for partisan political gain.

Democrats, and unfortunately many to their left, claim that anyone who supports those right-wingers on anything must be right-wingers themselves on all things. That is an absurd position that Fred Hampton or Malcolm X would instantly reject, and so do I.

Socialists should be supporting those Republican politicians in calling for the defunding of the FBI, and only on that issue, as a first step in abolishing the entire national security state that has absolutely no interest in seeing real democracy become a reality in the United States, not defending the same organization that has persecuted leftists for a century just because they are now persecuting the populist right as well.