An article on Revolver today laments the sad state of the U.S. military. Calling its soldiers “too fat” and its generals, “woke, parasitic, and incompetent,” the news outlet longs for the bygone days when Americans had, “the military they once did, and the one they deserve.”

This on the heels of the unprecedented FBI raid on former President Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. Conservatives have had a five-year-long reality check on the true nature of that organization, which conspired with the intelligence community to manufacture the Russian collusion narrative that dominated much of Trump’s presidency.

Even then, conservatives couldn’t face the reality that the FBI has always been a political organization, placing top priority on its own survival and expansion of power, as longtime observer of the federal bureaucracy, Dr. Frank Sorrentino, said on a recent episode of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom.

Likewise, they can’t see the military for what it is and has always been: just another government bureaucracy primarily concerned with its own survival, expansion, and ever-increasing funding. Instead, conservatives cling to myths about the military’s glorious past and the need for a great leader to come in and restore its previous virtues.

This unwillingness to acknowledge reality no matter how hard it punches them in the nose is tied to the most basic pillars of conservative thought. Unlike the libertarians who founded the United States, conservatives do not believe governments are instituted among men to secure natural, inalienable rights. That would require a view of human nature wherein man was capable of good and evil; government being the institution to restrain the evil side.

Conservatives don’t share that view. They believe man by nature is completely depraved, his savage instincts tenuously held in check by government power and longstanding societal customs. They truly believe law enforcement is out on the front lines of a war every single day, risking their lives to keep civilization from devolving into chaos.

This dovetails with the conservative view of Christianity, which sees man as fallen and only redeemable by the grace of God. Forget Jesus’ own words that, while sinners, we are also “the light of the world” and the salt of the earth.” Conservatives only hear the sinner part. Many seem to regard the Apocalypse as the most important book in the New Testament, its warlike imagery about the “end times” suiting their worldview much better than Jesus’ admonishment to Peter to “put your sword back in its sheath.”

And so, the unmasking of one federal institution after another, starting with the so-called “intelligence community,” proceeding to federal law enforcement, and now even the military, represents an existential crisis for conservatives. They should finally acknowledge these institutions were never what they thought they were. But they can’t. To do so would undermine their entire view of the world.

Instead, they yearn for the days when the “rank and file” FBI agents rooted out dangerous threats that might otherwise have destroyed the republic and the military heroically won “the good war” and saved the world from tyranny. They decry the sad comparison between political hacks like Christopher Wray and James Comey vs. hardnosed, incorruptible Elliott Ness (actually a Treasury agent) or between the fat, woke, and dimwitted Mark Milley vs. the steely-eyed General Patton.

While liberalism, based on a mad quest for absolute equality, provides no path to freedom, neither does conservativism, which is at its root based upon a suspicion of liberty itself. If we’re interested in a free society, conservatism’s myths must be busted once and for all.

The myth of the noble, apolitical FBI is an easy one. Right from the beginning, the agency was a political organism through and through. It’s longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover, infamously kept files on everyone from Congressmen to presidents to ensure his position and power could never be questioned. Neither was he particularly interested in pursuing organized crime during most of his tenure, preferring to target a series of “Public Enemy Number One” solitary criminals.

Apologists for the agency who acknowledge its corruption during the Hoover years point to a “golden age” after his tenure where the FBI supposedly became the apolitical force for good conservatives imagined it to be. But this is just more hokum.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?