We know he was willing to sacrifice his life for presidents.
We now know he is willing to sacrifice his fortune.
We’ll talk about his sacred honor in a bit, but first we need to pause and really appreciate what this man has done, now that he’s accepted an appointment as Deputy Director of the F.B.I.
When Dan (I hope he’ll forgive me the informality) came up from the NYPD to the Secret Service, it wasn’t yet woke. Standards still mattered. Only the elite of the elite made it to the Secret Service to begin with and of those, only the elite of a whole next-level of elite got to protect presidents. Dan was one of those men.
He walked away to serve. Gave up a nice salary and job security (such as it is when your job is to take a bullet for your protectee.) He ran for political office… and lost. Twice. No small matter this, as he had a wife and two daughters to support. It was a huge sacrifice, but service called.
Service has called him again, and once again, he is the elite of the elite. His podcast has a larger audience than most of the networks, and one can easily presume the money is pretty good, as he’s just finished building a new broadcast studio for it. The paint isn’t even dry.
He’s walked away to serve. He’s walked away to serve an institution that will test his sacred honor. The F.B.I. which Director Kash Patel and his new Deputy Director Dan Bongino will lead is a broken institution. This “rank and file” nonsense is just that: nonsense. The rot is deep and wide. No doubt there are good agents, but if future performance is based on recent past performance, they will be the exception and not the rule and that’s a very, very heavy lift. We’re all familiar with the stories of the pre-dawn raids on elderly J6ers, and agents walking parking lots at school meetings to write down the license plate numbers of the attendees there to protest porn in their children’s school. We’ve seen the kneeling and the frog-marching of peaceful protestors in leg-irons. The last five to ten years have absolutely cratered conservative America’s esteem in this once elite police institution. While the progressive left has had their totalitarian tickle, the rest of us have been gutted. It’s been an education.
And we will not forget. As for forgiveness, it will come with accountability.
The Hoover Building needs to be fumigated, purged, and would that we could, entirely gutted of all but the few left who remember basic civics.
We know Deputy Director Dan Bongino knows his civics. He’s spoken movingly about the power to deprive someone of their liberty, so I know we are in his good hands. May Kash Patel and he remember always that our lives, fortunes, are bound up in the preservation of their sacred honor.
Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr, unaltered.