The mandate for 2023 and 118th U.S. Congress
by Scott S. Powell
The
pre-Christmas vote by the U.S. House and Senate to pass the $1.7 trillion Omnibus Spending Bill at a
time when America’s balance sheet is in its worst condition ever is a sign post
that financial collapse
cannot be far away. Our nation is now technically bankrupt with liabilities significantly
exceeding assets. And it gets worse every year with national debt now growing
on a long-term annual basis at 8% or more, while assets (GDP) are growing on
average at only 2.5 to 3% annually. Politically, our federal government is
operating at ever new levels of dysfunction and corruption with diminishing accountability
to the Constitution in either the spirit or the letter of the law.
Consider: the widespread failure of elected officials
to uphold their oath of office; the political weaponization of the Justice
Department and the FBI; the unequal two-tiered practice of justice and law
enforcement; the flood of illegal immigrants and criminal enterprises into the
United States as a direct result of willful federal government policy; and the violation of the First Amendment by federal agencies
such as the FBI, DOJ, DHS, the CDC and DOD, who have engaged in covert
operations against American citizens that include media manipulation and
psy-ops.
With a new Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives
it is time for action and results.
There are two priorities for the new Congress. First, it needs
to write and pass bills that fix the biggest problems—like crime and the
southern border—that will improve the lives of all Americans. Second, Congress
needs to hold public hearings for discovery of causes of our nation’s dysfunction
and corruption. The House of Representatives is well suited for this because of
the breadth of its committee structure and because it holds the purse strings
that can withhold funding for government agencies who fail to be transparent
and cooperate. Simultaneous and separate hearings on different areas of failure
and corruption, can produce findings, deliver policy solutions and personnel
recommendations and prosecutions well before the 2024 election.
Since the First
Amendment protects the entire Constitution, a good place to start this process
is discovery and examination of how those rights have been violated. The “Twitter
files” being released by Elon Musk and other whistleblowers have revealed
how the Deep State has destroyed Americans’ First Amendment rights.
One
thing we now know is that significant numbers of ex-intelligence agents and
employees have become employees of Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
And this is more than the usual the revolving door of ex-government employees
finding work with government contractor firms. The FBI was working so closely with Twitter since
January of 2020 that it was viewed as an agency “subsidiary”—flagging and
blocking numerous accounts for purportedly “harmful misinformation”—before Elon
Musk’s takeover.
Perhaps the
easiest to understand operation to influence election outcomes was revealed by FBI
actions in October 2020, nine months after the agency obtained possession of
the Hunter Biden laptop. At that time just three weeks before the Presidential
election, the FBI actively suppressed the Biden laptop expose in New York Post,
creating a blackout of Biden family criminal activities on Twitter, Facebook,
and other social media. It has been observed by many including Democrats that
this may have sealed the election of Joe Biden as President.
It turns out
that the Department of Homeland Security has been one of the key coordinating centers
of censorship. The DHS was deeply involved in censorship leading up to the 2020
election in creating a public-private consortium known as the Election
Integrity Partnership (EIP) with the stated purpose to “monitor and correct
election mis-and disinformation,” such as the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden
laptop. This EIP censorship network
partnered with two other subagency-operations within DHS, the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Elections Infrastructure
Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC), and also the State Department’s
Global Engagement Center (GEC) during the 2020 election cycle. Collectively
they operated as technocratic thought police forwarding tickets of “mis- and
disinformation" to social media companies.
The EIP grew to about 120 analysts monitoring social media
for 20 hours a day. It developed communication portals through which it
forwarded supposed misinformation to be censored to Big Tech platforms and their social media
engineers, including Twitter, Facebook, Google, TikTok,
Reddit, and Discord as well as liberal groups such as Democratic
National Committee, the NAACP, Common Cause, and influential academic
organizations such as Harvard's Defending Digital Democracy Project, which
operated throughout the 2020 and 2022 election cycles to censor supposed “mis-
and disinformation.” The EIP did shift some of its censorship resources when it
came time to launch the Virality Project in February 2021 to promote Covid-19
vaccines.
The CDC also had a
secret portal to censor and ban dissenting social media posts, a practice that facilitated the shut-down
of the economy and cost the lives of many who were deprived of learning about
low-cost effective therapeutic treatments for Covid-19, while also promoting mandates
for mask-wearing, social distancing and the holy grail of vaccinations to be
delivered in the future.
Equal in importance to protecting Americans’ First Amendment
rights, is the need to hold hearings and take action on the political
weaponization of the Justice Department and the FBI and the unequal two-tiered
nature of justice and law enforcement, which has been self-evident for the last
fifteen to twenty years.
The full scope and
numbers of illegal immigrants and the accompanying criminal and terrorist
elements gaining entry through our southern border also need to be examined
through House committee hearings, and—if warranted—the impeachment of DHS
Secretary Mayorkas for dereliction of his oath of office and duty to protect
the nation’s southern border from mass invasion.
The other critical
factor for the renewal and survival of the United States is the restoration of
public trust in its national elections, which many feel have been rendered
irrelevant because of the massive fraud and irregularities in the 2020 and 2022
elections. Out of control mail-in voting, ballot harvesting and curing of
ballots to the tune of more than 35% of some 112 million ballots cast in November
2022 makes auditing impossible. And while the irregularities are there for all
to see, the political weaponization of the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA together
with their portals and penetration of the media have succeeded in blasting those
who object to these radical ballot changes, extended ballot counting after
election day and rigged electronic tabulation or to anyone who questions
election results. On cue the media calls these “election deniers,” “democracy
destroyers,” or even “insurrectionists.”
We will close by returning
to the paramount importance of the First Amendment. The freedom to speak, read,
hear, and view diverse perspectives protects all the other amendments and the
Constitution itself. Getting at the truth is as essential for effective government
and it only emerges from free discourse and debate—often more from the people with
practical experience from the front line than from experts from the ivory tower
or other insiders with entrenched careers or compromised by politics and financial
payoffs.
The CDC has been
wrong in all its recommendations on dealing with Covid-19, causing devastating economic
destruction and unnecessary deaths. The DHS has effectively helped criminal
enterprises and betrayed the American people by ineffective border enforcement
and then it has lied about the results. The Biden DOJ and the FBI have violated
American citizens’ Constitutional rights in countless and diverse matters
revolving around First Amendment rights, even resulting in the unprecedented imprisonment
of American citizens as political prisoners. The DOD brought about the loss of America’s
stature as a reliable ally by abruptly and inexplicably abandoning Afghanistan—leaving
behind thousands of loyal Afghan allies, some $85 billion in advanced military
equipment, and abandoning the largest air base in central Asia to the Chinese.
And if this wasn’t enough, the DOD leadership under Generals Austin and Milley
during the last two years has pursued policies that have systematically
weakened the American war-fighting capability at a time of rising overseas
threats.
The mandate for the
2023 new year and 118th U.S. Congress opening the first week of
January is straightforward: First, pass bills that solve big problems and help
the largest number of Americans. Second, investigate government malfeasance and
violations of American citizens’ Constitutional rights for the purpose of
cleaning up government by recommending and pursuing penalties, prosecutions,
and impeachments.
______________
Scott Powell is senior fellow
at Discovery Institute. His recent book, Rediscovering America, was #1 new release
in history for eight straight weeks at Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637581599). Reach him at scottp@discovery.org
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