Kash Patel's Plots

Fiction and Persecution in the FBI and America

I am not a historian of the FBI, but I am pretty sure that no one has heretofore made their case to direct the organization by writing children's books.

In Kash Patel's contributions to the genre, he portrays himself as an all-knowing wizard, foiling sinister conspiracies against King Trump.

I don't find this laughable. I find it sinister.

Much can be said about Patel, who the Senate will now be considering in confirmation hearings. The circumstances of his nomination are quite unusual. He has no qualifications. Unlike previous FBI directors, he has never held a prior office that requires Senate confirmation. FBI directors are meant to serve ten-year terms, so that Christopher Wray, nominated by Trump in 2017, should still be in office. But knowing that Trump was planning to fire him, Wray resigned. Patel is a loyalist to Trump who has promised to pursue his enemies.

The United States is in the midst of a regime change, in which Patel, if confirmed, would be useful. In general outline, the idea is to make the government as a whole dysfunctional, while preserving the parts of it than can intimidate and oppress citizens. The FBI, as the chief national law enforcement agency, will have to be transformed.

The enforcement of the laws will no longer be desired, at least not in the traditional sense. In a country where all are equal under the law, those who govern us can also be held accountable. Patel has made clear, in numerous interviews and in his book for adults, that he sees Trump as above the law, others as suspects in a conspiracy, and himself as the savior.

The plots of the children's books bring this home. America is a monarchy and Trump is the king. The efforts of people to do anything aside from celebrating the monarch in his beauty and worthiness are deep state conspiracies.

In the books, the plot points are quite specific and the characters are not disguised. The Russians did not help Trump. Trump won the election of 2020. And in 2024, Biden and Harris used the Department of Justice (presented as a tame dragon motivated by food) to persecute Trump and to prevent him from returning to kingship. In all of this, Patel is is "the distinguished wizard and corruption combatant," an all-knowing mage who foils the plots of the evil-doers and shines in his loyalty to King Trump.

The children's books are revealing in three ways. The first is that Patel sees politics in terms of his own special abilities, his loyalty to Trump, and the evil of anyone who dares to interfere in their special relationship. The second is the definition of law enforcement as a tool of political power. The third is the celebration of fantasy, particular and general. It is a bad thing, of course, that Patel tells American children big lies in his books. But the deeper issue is the proximity of big lies to prosecutorial power.

The fantasy of the children's books is being forced into real life.

We already know that FBI agents are being screened for their willingness to affirm the fiction of Patel's children's books. They have to affirm that Trump won an election that he lost, and also affirm that the people who tried to overthrow the American constitutional order in January 2021 are heroes. We have also seen that everyone in the FBI connected to investigations of Russia has been targeted for firing. This is in accordance with Patel's idea, expressed in his children's books, that the connection of Trump with Russians was a hoax.

But of course this is not true. Russia supported Trump in numerous ways, and still does. And regardless of that, Russia is a real country, with its own policies towards the United States, and its own intelligence agencies. These carry our regular disinformation campaigns inside the United States, as well as sabotage and assassination. They target critical American officials in attacks meant to injure them and force them from office.

The portrayal of Russia as nothing more than a "hoax" is troubling for a number of reasons. Russia is active in supporting specific American politicians and harming others, for reasons of its own. It supports the kind of propaganda that Patel promulgates. The overlap is hard to miss: Patel himself was paid by Russians to take part in a film.

So dismissing Russian realities as a hoax removes from American official attention a country that does harm to American citizens. And it serves as a pretext for a first purge of the FBI, the purge that will likely precede many others, should Patel become its director. But the "hoax" fantasy also leads us away from what contemporary Russian practice and indeed Russian history might teach us.

Law enforcement, in the traditional sense, depends upon the embrace of facts. There are laws; there are actions; as a factual matter, what you do might or might not violate the law. There are investigations, procedures, hearings, trials, and ultimately a notion of the rights of the citizen or the person. But history reminds us that agencies associated with law enforcement can also operate another way, as the instruments of purges.

There are two preconditions for this. Their directors must see their jobs as to serve a leader rather than the law. And there must be animating fantasies, big lies, that enable prosecution. And then everyone can be guilty. Truth no longer protects anyone. Fantasy endangers everyone. If you do not believe in the non-existent conspiracy, you must be part of it. And if you do not believe in the untrue pronouncements of the ruler, you must be against him.

Russia today has a national law enforcement agency, the FSB, that behaves much as Trump and Patel would like the FBI to behave. Its arrests are very often based upon phantoms, notions of conspiracies, whims of a ruler.

And in the Soviet history of the 1930s we see how far this sort of thing can go. The justifications for the Great Terror, back then, all involved imaginary conspiracies. Their rhetoric was uncannily to Patel: the "deep state" sounds a lot like the non-existent "network of networks" that the NKVD was pursuing in the USSR back then.

I find Patel's children's books alarming, because they remind me of propaganda fiction from earlier times and other regimes. It is not just the innocent packaging of the dangerous fantasy, but the details: an enemy, Jewish as it happens, is urinated on by an animal, and young readers are meant to laugh. Patel boasted about this.

I imagine that anyone who would tell big lies to small children would also live by them, and within the alternative reality they imply. In his committee hearings, Patel dismissed his own words as smears against him, which shows that the wizard has mastered some of the black arts of totalitarianism.

As FBI director, Patel would not be able to immediately transform the agency into something like an FSB or an NKVD. But we should not delude ourselves that he has any other direction in mind. Senators who vote for him will have done their part in a regime change.

It does not take much to change the atmosphere of a country. The ongoing purge inside the FBI is not lethal, and the first purges it directs against "enemies" beyond will not be, either. But even an investigation can disrupt or even ruin a life. And, before too long, the big lies lead to real deaths.