It’s increasingly difficult to imagine anything the Trump administration can do that conservatives and Republicans will not make excuses for. There is apparently no federal power and no act by the US’s standing army of federal cops that Trump supporters won’t endorse.
The latest example is Republicans new assault on the Second Amendment and against private citizens carrying firearms. GOP mouthpieces are informing us that Americans are not allowed to be armed with a gun at a protest.
It’s hard to be shocked by much anymore, but this Administration-wide talking point -- that carrying a firearm inherently proves the carrier must’ve had sinister, criminal intent -- is genuinely shocking. If this was a Dem admin, “2A” people would be going absolutely ballistic pic.twitter.com/WIbM3vLLqM
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 25, 2026
Here’s another regime apologist—Border Patrol head Greg Bovino—claiming that a loaded magazine is evidence of criminal intent:
We are allowed to have loaded magazines in America.
Whether the shooting was justified or not, simply being in possession of a gun with ammo is not proof of intentions to massacre anyone.
Sorry, I’m not giving up that premise to the federal government. https://t.co/u6SGzNRdxP— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) January 24, 2026
Moreover, FBI director Kash Patel claims ”You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple. You don’t have a right to break the law.”
This is all in response to last weekend’s events in which ICE agents disarmed a local man who was legally carrying a hand gun. Once the man was disarmed, ICE agents then shot him in the back, killing him.
Since then, rank and file Republicans and conservatives have been all over social media proclaiming that people should not be allowed to carry guns in the presence of police, and that only “terrorists” carry guns at protests.
Confronted with their sudden infatuation with gun control, conservatives will claim that the Second Amendment does not entitle one to oppose federal agents while armed, and that it is always wrong to obstruct federal agents who are enforcing the law.
Opposing federal agents is exactly what the Second Amendment is for, and before their hero-worship of Donald Trump short circuited their brains, many conservatives fully defended their natural right to carry guns at protests and government meetings. Indeed, it’s not even difficult to find images of conservatives carrying guns at various protests, as can be seen here.
A thread of MAGA protesting with guns and not getting murdered for it...
Arizona, November 2020 https://t.co/ZzD017kmWH pic.twitter.com/fPjCJ6XPhq— Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) January 25, 2026
Perhaps most notable of these was the 2014 Cliven Bundy standoff where armed Americans gathered to prevent the federal seizure of cattle that was on federal land illegally. Some protestors aimed their guns at federal agents. Others brandished their weapons as a means of preventing access to the cattle.
What the protestors did was moral and legal, and certainly in the spirit of the Second Amendment, which was designed specifically to counterbalance federal power—with violence if necessary.
Yet conservatives in recent weeks have doubled down on their love for federal agents and federal law, and now pretend that basic American freedoms like open carry and the right to bear arms is somehow anti-American or terroristic.
1995: When Conservatives Called Federal Agents “Jack-Booted Thugs”
This will shock modern conservatives, but there once was a time when federal agents were viewed with suspicion by conservatives. That was back when a Democrat was president, however, so the usual conservative amnesia about federalism and the Bill of Rights had not yet set in as it usually does during Republican administrations. Under President Bill Clinton during the 1990s, conservatives routinely saw federal agents as the enemies of the constitution and of true law and order. The conservatives of that time were right.
One particularly notable example of the attitude in the 1990s was this: in a May 1995 letter to members, the National Rifle Association described federal agents as “jack-booted thugs” and contended that in the recent past, “it was unthinkable for federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens.”
The letter met public and heated resistance from the Republican party leadership, which (as usual) rushed to the side of federal law enforcement, and engaged in the usual pro-regime song and dance denouncing criticism of federal police.
Former president George H. W. Bush resigned from the NRA as a result, and US Senate Republican majority leader Bob Dole said the NRA needed “a repair job.” As usual, the Republicans—indulging in their usual worshipful treatment of federal police power—were wrong.
This is especially obvious when we consider the context in which the NRA was critical of federal agents.
By 1995, opponents of federal power had fresh in their minds abuses of power displayed by federal agents at both Waco and Ruby Ridge. According to the regime, the victims in these cases were in possession of firearms that federal agencies didn’t like. This gave FBI and ATF agents new opportunities to dress up in new quasi-military costumes, grab assault rifles and assault the private homes and property of private citizens.
This was part of a larger trend in federal law enforcement. It was becoming far more common to see federal “police”—who were really behaving more like a permanent federal standing army—wearing military gear and masks. Thus, the NRA letter in 1995 described federal agents as “armed terrorists dressed in Ninja black ... jack-booted thugs armed to the teeth who break down doors, open fire with automatic weapons and kill law-abiding citizens.”
The narrative then was the same as it was now: if the federal government is not given greater and greater power to crack down on Americans, then domestic terrorism will spread and crime will spiral out of control. Rank and file Republicans—then as now—were therefore aghast that anyone could criticism the valor of federal law enforcement personnel.
Yet, criticism from the GOP leadership didn’t even get the NRA to recant, and a week after it sent the initial letter, NRA president Wayne LaPierre further explained: ”What steamed Mr. Bush was NRA President Tom Washington’s calling the 1993 Waco, Texas, raid an example of ‘black-suited, masked, massively armed mobs of screaming, swearing agents invading homes of innocents.’”
Some conservatives saw what was coming. In its fall/winter 1994 issue of The New American magazine, the John Birch Society devoted multiple articles to the theme of how the US was moving “toward a police state.” The image featured an ATF agent decked out in camouflage, holding an assault rifle, and generally dressed like he was preparing to ship out to a war zone in Central America. “KEEP THEM LOCAL” one headline declared while the cover noted that “collectivist politicians” were using “a national epidemic of crime and violence” as an excuse to “strengthen federal law enforcement powers.”
This latter statement accurately describes the current MAGA and GOP position. Conservatives use the presence of illegal aliens to justify any and all federal action against anyone anywhere, and the Bill of Rights means nothing if you are an “agitator” who provides even the most minimal resistance to federal cops.
In 2026, conservatives cheer the masking of police in a way that would have been viewed as shockingly sinister, illegal, and downright creepy by Americans of earlier generations. In 2026, federal police must not be impeded in any way, and local police—once considered by many conservatives to be the the final say in whether or not federal agents should have access to the local population—should just get out of the way and let the army of federal agents do whatever they want wherever they want.
The current conservative rationale is no different from what it was under Janet Reno and the murderous federal officials of the Clinton era.
