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more aggressive posture and a more open contempt for religious dissent.

Yet imagine, for a moment, the scandal if the Trump administration had coordinated with pro-life organizations to build cases against abortion advocates.

Imagine if the DOJ had been caught trading texts with pro-life security teams.

Imagine if federal prosecutors were accused of seeking harsher punishments for abortion-rights defendants while going easy on pro-life defendants.

It would have been a national emergency. Frontpage news. Congressional hearings. Wall-to-wall coverage.

But because the targets were pro-lifers, the story is treated like a niche controversy — something for conservative media to discuss, while the mainstream press quietly looks the other way.

That brings us to one of the most important questions of all: How were the people involved in this allowed to remain embedded inside the DOJ for so long?

Sanjay Patel was reportedly still working at DOJ until Monday. That is not a small detail. That is a flashing red warning sign.

Because it lends credibility to something the political class has mocked for years: the existence of a bureaucratic deep state — career officials who outlast elections, ignore the will of voters, and quietly advance an ideological agenda regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

This is what it looks like when a permanent governing class decides it is untouchable.

And it also illustrates why the fight to remove ideological holdovers inside federal agencies is not some paranoid fantasy. It’s a real, ongoing struggle — one that will define whether elections actually matter.

The bigger issue here isn’t just abortion politics.

It’s the steady normalization of using government power to punish religious Americans.

The Democratic Party has shown, again and again, that it is willing to use the apparatus of the state to crush dissent from people of faith. Not because those people are violent. Not because they are criminals. But because their beliefs are inconvenient.

That’s why millions of Americans have fled places like California, where progressive lawmakers increasingly flirt with the idea that religious organizations should be allowed to operate only if they comply with left-wing doctrine.

It’s not hard to imagine where this eventually goes: Any religious practice that doesn’t comply with the left-wing social agenda will be quasi-criminalized, all under the language of “antidiscrimination,” as if the First Amendment is just an outdated technicality standing in the way of progress.

If Democrats ever gained full control of the judiciary, especially if they succeeded in stacking the Supreme Court — which you can be sure former Vice President Kamala Harris would have attempted to do if she had won in 2024 — this is exactly the direction they would push the country.

This is why the Biden administration may go down as the worst in modern American history — even worse than Obama’s.

Not because Obama didn’t do the same things.

But because Obama understood enough to keep it quiet.

Biden said the quiet part out loud.

Ben Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and cofounder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author. To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS. COM