How much do you trust the Establishment in Congress? No, really. Think that question through. Do you trust them more or less than:

• A shabby guy trying to sell you a used car for cash by the side of the road?
• An officious stranger on the phone insisting she needs your bank information to protect you from identity theft?
• A Nigerian prince who contacted you online because he wants to send you $150 million?
• A sociopath you haven’t spoken to for 20 years who just needs to crash at your house for a couple of days?
• A pastor wearing a rainbow flag T-shirt who wants to tutor your children?
• Vladimir Putin?
• Official representatives of the Chinese Communist Party?

I’d like to suggest that your level of trust should be precisely the same for your own member of Congress.

Don’t You Trust Congress?

The problem we have is that liberals in Congress are far to the left of even most liberal voters. They overwhelmingly favor the Biden administration’s wide-open borders, which let human trafficking cartels flood our country with unvettable foreigners from the Middle East and Asia, whose ties to spy agencies and terrorist groups are literally unfathomable. But we won’t find that out officially until some of these “diverse” new “Americans” have blown up LAX or hacked the electrical grid from Boston to Atlanta.

The same legislators favor massive foreign aid to the world’s four corners, but won’t spend money to secure our own elections. They backed the phony impeachment of President Donald Trump over charges of “Russian collusion” they knew were partisan and false. They backed up Joe Biden’s story, echoed by bipartisan Deep State hacks, that the scandalous information on Hunter’s laptop wasn’t real, but simply a figment of “Russian disinformation.”

They want to seize our guns, abort our babies up through birth (sometimes after), dose our kids with puberty blockers, force untested vaccines on us, and censor our online speech. Every wholesome initiative conservatives propose faces an almost lockstep, party-line wall of stone.

They Want to Protect “the Children”

But now, by some weird turn of events, the leftists in Congress are worried about TikTok and its impact on our kids — the same kids they won’t protect from grotesque porn or groomer books in school or drag queen story hour or “trans” boys in girls locker rooms.

Those same legislators are also really concerned about apps controlled by China — the same China whose state-controlled businesses funneled millions of dollars to the Biden family, which Democrats say doesn’t mean anything. It’s not okay for Chinese billionaires to own an app on your phone, but they can have blackmail info and secret influence over the White House. 

The Republicans in Congress, who can’t get Democrat support for a single sane or patriotic policy, now suddenly find themselves embraced in a massive group hug of bipartisan cooperation when it comes to the bill that would wrest TikTok from Chinese control. It’s just weird that the lawmakers who vote for demonic madness 99.99999 percent of the time happened to see the light just this one time. Maybe it’s a miracle!

Some people say we should just smile, nod, and take the win. This time Lucy really will let Charlie Brown kick the football, this one time at last. We just ought to trust the leftists, to take their outstretched hand of friendship. Perhaps this is the start of a whole new era of the Democrats thinking clearly and voting sanely. That must be what’s happening, right?

The Greatest Act of Censorship in American History

Tucker Carlson and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) have another view of the situation. In the interview below they talk about Congress rushing through the new TikTok bill, which a majority of Republicans in the House backed — along with that weird surge of suddenly patriotic, security-conscious Democrats who have no other ulterior motive whatsoever. Carlson calls it “the greatest act of censorship in American history.”

The people who’ve handed our country to China are banning TikTok to protect you from China? Probably not. So what’s really going on? Rand Paul joins us to explain. pic.twitter.com/XRe7fvqoOw

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 14, 2024

Former Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), who just announced his bid for U.S. Senate, points out that this bill grants unelected bureaucrats (the Deep State) the power to censor any media company they deem to be controlled by a “foreign adversary.” You know, the way the FBI and CIA deemed Trump to be controlled by Russia based on evidence they knew all along was fake.

They always hide the playbook in plain sight. All you have to do is read the bill. pic.twitter.com/GWMIrJcLJJ

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) March 14, 2024

Just in Time to Silence Debate Before the Election

This bill could take effect just in time to shut down media operations such as Rumble, Elon Musk’s X, and other platforms Deep State agencies “determined” were “controlled” by our “adversaries” and engaged in “election interference,” using the same standard of evidence that deemed Trump a Russian asset and Hunter’s laptop “disinformation.”

Maybe you don’t remember the last time there was a massive, bipartisan consensus to pass a bill that would protect Americans from some terrifying foreign threat, at the low, low price of trashing a few obscure legal protections nobody really cared about unless he was a criminal or a “terrorist.” It was the Patriot Act, overwhelmingly passed in the panic that followed 9/11, over the crank objections of a few “liberty- obsessed crackpots like Rep. Ron Paul and … yours truly.

I said at the time we shouldn’t give George W. Bush any power we didn’t want someone like Hillary Clinton to have in four years’ time; that it was dangerous to rip up the 1970s-era reforms that had reigned in CIA operations against Americans; that we were creating a domestic infrastructure for dictatorship. I even wrote an article in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, recording my warning for history. (See entry “War on Terror.”)

It passed, of course, and the FBI launched a wave of stings that bribed, tricked, and fooled innocent American Muslims into “terrorist” schemes invented and funded and armed entirely by … the FBI itself. That didn’t harm most of us. What did harm us was Barack Obama taking power, appointing the Marxist John Brennan as head of the CIA, and weaponizing the Deep State against his political opponents — from the Tea Party to pro-life moms.

As The Stream has long reported, at that point the intelligence community became a fourth branch of government, not answerable to the other three — not even, as the Deep State coup against Donald Trump taught us, the duly elected president. General Mike Flynn tried to hold it accountable. And we all saw what happened to him.

The CIA as Our New Censors

We also saw during the COVID panic the extent to which our authorities were willing to censor and silence our speech — with Youtube enforcing the Chinese-dominated WHO’s party line on vaccines and treatment, shutting down epidemiologists who asked informed, awkward questions. We saw Mark Zuckerberg testify before Congress that the CIA asked him to quash The New York Post’s truthful reporting about the Hunter Biden laptop — a stunning act of election interference worthy of a “color revolution” coup the CIA might have staged in Haiti or Honduras.

But now we’re supposed to believe that handing those same agencies and the federal regulators who collude with them the power to censor all online expression is an act of patriotic good government, driven by the Democrats’ concern “about the children.”

Readers who disagree should let me know, including of course their PIN codes, their banking information, and their mothers’ maiden names in the Contact Us field of this site. Do it for the children.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.