Andrew MacDougall: A lunatic running Asylum America
With the appointment of Dan Bongino, Trump has appointed a conspiracy theorist to run the field operations of the FBI.
By: Andrew MacDougall
“The FBI has gone completely rogue. They’re a danger to freedom and liberty.”
“The FBI is no longer a law enforcement entity. It is an oppo research firm for Democrats with an armed political enforcement branch. FACT.”
“What’s happening at the FBI, and with the handling of January 6th, is an absolute disgrace.”
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Dan Bongino, a.k.a. the new Deputy Director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Bongino will now join FBI Director Kash Patel — a man with similarly spicy views over the failed insurrection of January 2021 — in leading America’s premier law enforcement and investigations agency. Fun times.
But if you’re looking for a social media post that really gets to the heart of what Bongino is about, the following is the best example:
“What do the ‘Great Reset,’ starvation, censorship, and the FBI have in common? Don’t miss my show today on Rumble, for the answer.”
Can you smell it? (Deep inhale.) Ah … the heady aroma of conspiracism. The promise of a big reveal. An appeal to an alternative media platform. The elements are all there. That’s right, Dan Bongino is an algorithm-humper. A grifter. A creature of the “new media.” A man who tells his audience what it wants to hear, not what it needs to know.
And to great effect. Bongino has approximately 6.6 million followers on X. Some 5.8 million on Facebook. And another 2.6 million on Instagram. All of which are posted to exhaustively in order to promote his vlog/podcast, the Dan Bongino Show (hosted on Rumble, where he has over three million subscribers). To date, Bongino’s 1,222 videos have garnered a stonking 319,323,606 views. His merch is almost as ubiquitous as the MAGA hats at Trump’s rallies.
If you’re a “normie” asking yourself how a one-time Secret Service close protection officer and three-time failed Congressional candidate-turned podcaster with fragrant views gets selected to oversee the entirety of the FBI’s field operations, including counter-terror operations, you now have your answer: the major platforms of the Attention Economy. There is no way Dan Bongino becomes deputy director of the FBI without the erosion of the mainstream media and concomitant rise of platforms where expertise and factual argumentation run a distant second to emotion and motivated reasoning.
And good Lord, is Bongino ever a motivated and emotional creature. Veins bulging. Voice breaking. His feeds are an endless series of claims to have unearthed any number of perfidious scams. And the star of his shows (beyond himself)? Donald J. Trump. Bongino’s sole qualification to run the FBI’s operations is having his tongue so far up Trump’s backside you can see it every time the president opens his mouth.
Indeed, Bongino’s digital oeuvre could be the president’s and vice-versa. Most of Bongino’s online work has also been cut-and-pasted into old-school print for people the president’s age. “Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump.” “Exonerated: The Failed Takedown of President Trump by the Swamp.” “Follow the Money: The Shocking Deep State Connections of the Anti-Trump Cabal.” The president famously doesn’t read, but he has been re-tweeting Bongino for years.
This is the point in the story where the more market-minded critics of the mainstream press say the press needs to evolve to compete with the likes of Bongino. But how do you compete with lighting your hair on fire and screaming down the hall? Do you want to compete with lunacy? I’m pretty sure a cancerous cell “outcompetes” its normal brethren, but nobody wants cancer, do they? We are now in an information economy in which cancers flourish. That Bongino’s reach went thermonuclear during the COVID-19 pandemic — when his posts were consistently in the Top 10 of Facebook’s most shared — tells the story.
And if you think that’s a bunch of sour grapes, take an afternoon to sink into Bongino’s universe and then read the job description of deputy director of the FBI. Look at the career of Paul Abbate, the newly-retired deputy director (who was acting as director until Patel was confirmed), and then compare it with Bongino’s. The man’s not fit to lace his predecessor’s boots.
Ah, but what if the FBI really is borked? What if it is in the grips of a “cabal”? What then? Don’t you need a rank outsider to come in and ride herd? As with most issues, there is often a grain of truth in the accusations levelled by the denizens of Algorithm Town. The trouble is, that grain now marinates in a mountain of bullshit that nurtures reasoned skepticism into full-blown conspiracy. Trump could have picked any number of sentient outsiders to do a reform job (if one was needed); he picked Bongino, a selection that couldn’t have happened in any other era.
In the past, Bongino would never have surfaced in the first place. He’d just be some ex-Secret Service stiff working security at an office building. Just like President Donald Trump was kept out of the 1988 and 2000 elections by the dual block of the mainstream media and Republican Party establishment, a Bongino-type would have failed to make it past any gatekeeper.
Only the gatekeepers are now gone.
First, the press. A mainstream news ecosystem that was centered on cost and curation and powered by expertise (backed by civil liability) has been replaced by a “free” Attention Economy where “content” that provokes the quickest and biggest reaction wins the consequence-free prize of algorithmic amplification and the engagement (and monetization) it brings.
And the money is mostly on the Bongino side of the equation. It’s true that nobody ever really read the majority of the quality daily journalism produced by mainstream outlets; the sports, funny pages, horoscopes, and ads that used to come alongside that quality is what paid for it. Even so, under that model the people in power at least knew they were being scrutinised.
Now you make money by what people are willing to click on — and that’s, by and large, not original journalism (even if, ahem, people are willing to pay for smart commentary). Now content creators make (big) money by mobbing up and preaching to the converted.
And this is the point of Bongino. He is there to activate his mob in support of his political master. This is also the point of Elon Musk, the serial entrepreneur and amateur ketamine and ambien enthusiast turned “efficiency” czar, who now has his fingers on the scales of information via his platform X in a way that news barons of old could only have dreamed of. They are the enforcers in Trump’s universe. They set an agenda by setting off unsourced fireworks in every direction and then watch as the universe is forced to react to their inaccurate insanities as their mobs pile in.
It’s a complete inversion of the old informational order. And it’s breaking us apart.
In the olden days, Bongino and Musk would have been the men at the end of the bar raging against the machine. They’d be the weird uncles at the family party the other family members did their best to avoid. Now they’re the stars of the show. They are tribunes for the end of the bar and weird uncle crowd, a crowd that can glom together without risking the embarrassment of floating their unorthodox views in crowds of random people. Bognino, Musk and Patel can all rage against the “deep state” and decry the treatment of groups like the January 6th rioters — and be handsomely rewarded for it.
Forget the FBI. It’s these men who are the real threat to liberty.
Andrew MacDougall is a director at Trafalgar Strategy and former head of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
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You seem to be under the delusion that only now - under people like Bongino - are we encountering an atmosphere where "the erosion of the mainstream media and concomitant rise of platforms where expertise and factual argumentation run a distant second to emotion and motivated reasoning" has magically and suddenly 'poofed' into existence under His Awful Terribleness and those dastardly billionaire minions represented by Musk who knows next to nothing about how real bureaucracy is supposed to work to produce government efficiencies (sit down, George, while we pretend only these billionaires are Very Bad People).
Au contraire.
This was the pre-existing media atmosphere (giving rise to the public hunger for independent substack media, IIRC... ahem), and I can't recall any scathing mainstream journalism standing up to the earlier rejection of objective journalism... you know, the kind that supposedly was busy incorporating factual argumentation where only Russian disinformation rags were blaming widespread use of emotion and motivated reasoning on left leaning popular politicians.
But I do seem to recall not just widespread condoning of exactly what you now criticize and apply to Trump/Musk but the widespread rise and use by MMS of offence archeology as if a 'fact checking' industry coming into its own. This mental obtuseness long predates TDS and MDR (yup, here's Musk smeared yet again) becoming the latest left leaning Kool-Aide trying hard to become a Real Thing. You know, pretending with such righteousness that the whole reap-sow result we have today can be repackaged as belonging only to Trump and thus justify framing him as his Awful Terribleness. This requires a doubling down by the deluded to attribute all this to a moral deficit that Trump/Musk exemplify but that is also shared by every voter that swept him into majority power. It belongs to these deplorables this revolutionary notion of political leadership that will draining the swamp that is government today, to alter that business as usual. And Bongino - like many cabinet and senior administrator selections - actually fits what these majority voters hoped would happen: NOT business as usual. Well, clutch my pearls; how could this have happened?
Mainstream Canadian media as a quality provider of intelligent content ceased long before the internet's social media rise. MSM's profound failure to understand everyday people and what was important to them caused their fall. This MSM stupidly coupled with the same style of irresponsible and fatuous commentary that you ascribe to Bongino. Only from a different yet equally nonsensical political perspective. And this was politically reinforced here in Canada by government paying their salaries. Don't bite the hand that feeds you drives MSM existence and information presentation today. They are no longer independent. Thus they have buried themselves and now are realizing that their competition is simply better at reaching people. We need to defund MSM from the public trough and force them to compete and thrive or die. What MSM is doing now does not work. This is why people like me and the other readers here fund the Line. I don't miss ANYTHING about Mainstream Canadian media.