Is the backlash growing teeth?
We got a perfect example of the biter-gets-bit scenario late this week featuring the larger-than-life crusader against fascism Elissa Slotkin. We’re told that Slotkin served as an analyst for the CIA, which means that this case is a twofer, informing us what’s wrong with the Senate today and what’s been wrong with the CIA for the past twenty years.
Slotkin, as readers will know, made the news earlier this week with the release of a clip showing her at some sort of University of Chicago conclave threatening legal persecution for young people who took jobs in the Trump administration: “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun. I might get an opportunity… I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want.’ I want that deterrence message sent.”
A few days later, in the face of a massive backlash, she doubled down on the threat and attempted to flip it into an accusation of Trump. “Fear is the point. Intimidation is the point. And if the president can do this to me, he can do it to anyone.”
It happens that U of Chicago undergrad Michael Bicksel was present for Slotkin’s remarks. He took them as a personal threat. “I don’t think there’s any other way to take it.” In response, he filed a complaint with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics.
“Senator Slotkin proposed a course of legislative action to weaponize the legal system in order to terrorize college students into forgoing public service,” Bicksel told the committee.
He noted that the discussion went on to suggestions that “Young people who want to serve the Trump administration be made pariahs, socially, politically, and even legally.”
Bicksel stated that he wanted a full ethics investigation into Slotkin, the kind that would certainly follow any such remarks by a GOP politician. “I could see Chuck Schumer racing down to the Senate floor to demand a censure, expulsion, or at the very least an ethics investigation. That’s what I’m asking for right now.”
Michael Bicksel is associated with the nobly named Chicago Thinker, a U of Chicago conservative student paper founded to hold campus leftists to their own standards. He is extremely personable and well-spoken, and should do well in politics if that’s the route he chooses.
While little may come of his complaint, it should serve as a warning to Slotkin – among many others – that, senator or no, she can’t simply mouth off and walk. Not in the political environment of 2026. When you kick open a door, you have to accept whatever comes through. The next door she kicks may not have an ethics panel behind it, but something more like the DoJ or Homeland Security.
J. R. Dunn, American Thinker
