by Jacob G. Hornberger

April 28, 2026

In my blog post of yesterday, I wrote about right-wing obtuseness when it comes to the decades-old failed and destructive federal war on drugs, citing a Wall Street Journal op-ed by a conservative named Joshua S. Treviño. Today, I wish to use a remark made by Treviño in that article to make another point about right-wingers — one that shows how off the mark they are with respect to the federal government and American society.

Referring to two CIA agents who recently died in Mexico when the car in which they were traveling crashed and exploded, Treviño writes, “Two Americans are dead in the honorable service of their country.” He was referring to the fact that the two CIA agents were engaged in a drug-war enforcement operation in Mexico.

Like other conservatives, Treviño makes a common error in conflating the U.S. government and our country. The federal government is not the country. They are two separate and distinct entities, a phenomenon reflected by the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects the country from the federal government.

Thus, Treviño and his fellow right-wingers have it wrong. Those two CIA agents were engaged in the service of their government, not their country.

Moreover, it’s highly debatable whether their “service” was in fact “honorable,” given that they were enforcing one of the most failed, deadly, destructive, and expensive federal programs in U.S. history, one that has brought massive death and destruction to Mexico, not to mention tremendous destruction of privacy and civil liberties here in the United States.

After all, surely Treviño can recognize that simply because a person works for the federal government doesn’t necessarily mean that whatever he does in the course of his employment is honorable.

Were the CIA agents who engaged in MKULTRA acting honorably? Were the CIA officials who intentionally destroyed the MKULTRA records so that the American people would never see the full extent of the evil of this program acting honorably?

Were the CIA officials who conspired with the the Mafia, one of the biggest criminal organizations in history, to murder Cuban leader Fidel Castro operating honorably, especially given the fact that Cuba had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so?

Were the CIA officials who conspired to invade Cuba acting honorably? Indeed, were the CIA officials who lied to President Kennedy in the run-up to their failed Bay of Pigs invasion with the aim of manipulating him into providing air support for the CIA’s invasion acting honorably?

Were the CIA personnel who deceitfully produced an altered copy of the famous Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination as part of the national-security establishment’s cover-up of its assassination of President Kennedy acting honorably? (See my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.)

The point I am making is very simple: Just because people work for their government doesn’t mean that what they are doing is in the best interests of the country, and it also doesn’t necessarily mean that they are acting honorably.

Consider, for example, the Gestapo. Would Treviño say that the members of the Gestapo were serving their country and behaving honorably? Hopefully, he wouldn’t. But one thing is for sure: German right-wingers sure believed so. Like American conservatives today, German conservatives in the 1930s and 1940s conflated the German government with the German nation. In the minds of German right-wingers, the Nazi State and Germany were one and the same entity, just as many American right-wingers today are convinced that the U.S. government and the United States are one and the same entity.

Thus, when the White Rose students rose up in protest against the German government in the midst of World War II, German right-wingers considered them to be bad people who were siding with the enemy and attacking their own country. (See my essay “The White Rose: A Lesson in Dissent.” Also see the great movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, especially the scene in which a German judge tells Sophie and her brother Hans what bad Germans they were for not supporting their government in time of war. See here and here.)

Oh, by the way, I can’t help but wonder whether Treviño would say that the CIA officials who hired former Nazi officials during the national-security establishment’s Cold War racket were honorably serving America. See the New York Times article “In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis.”

Our 18th-century American ancestors had it right in demanding the enactment of the Bill of Rights. They understood perfectly that the federal government and America are two separate and distinct entities and that, in fact, one’s own government, not some foreign nation or officially designated boogeymen, poses the biggest threat to the freedom and well-being of the country. For that matter, they also had it right to not bring into existence an agency like the CIA or, for that matter, a war on drugs.