The Daily Signal - Rep. Dan Bishop: Weaponization of Federal Government Is Growing

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

The list of alleged instances of a weaponized federal government is getting longer, Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., says. “The problem of the federal government being weaponized against the American people's fundamental constitutional rights is pervasive and it seems, although I think we've done some things good to uncover and deter it, it is a constant problem and growing,” Bishop says.  As recent examples, the North Carolina Republican points to instances of the White House's asking social media companies to censor content related to COVID-19 vaccines and to the FBI's misusing database information against Americans.  The crisis at America’s southern border, Bishop says, is another way government has been weaponized against the American people during the Biden administration.  Bishop joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to detail these instances of government weaponization and what Congress can do to stop the abuse.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, April 11th. I'm Virginia Allen. Concerns are growing over the weaponization of the government. We've seen countless instances, even just over the last year, of government power, unfortunately, it appears, being used against the American people. Representative Dan Bishop of North Carolina is incredibly concerned about this trend, and he's joining me on the Daily Signal podcast today to explain what can be done about this. He also explains how the situation on the southern border is furthering this challenging situation. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. So what is going on with Ukraine? What is this deal with the border? How do you feel about school choice? These are the

questions that come up to conservatives sitting at parties, at dinner, at family reunions. What do you say when these questions come up? I'm Mark Geine, the whole. of the podcast for you, Heritage Explains, brought to you by all of your friends here at the Heritage Foundation. Through the creative use of stories, the knowledge of our super passionate experts, we bring you the most important policy issues of the day and break them down in a way that is understandable. So check out Heritage Explains wherever you get your podcasts. It is my pleasure to be joined in studio by Congressman Dan Bishop of North Carolina. Thank you so much, Congressman, for being with us today.

I'm delighted to have the chance to talk with you. Thanks for having me. Well, you bring so much experience to the table you serve on the Judiciary Committee in the House, on the House Homeland Security Committee, as well as the Subcommittee on Oversight, Management, and Accountability. We're going to touch on all of those today. It's a busy time. Congress has just returned to Washington, D.C. There's a lot on the table.

One of the issues, though, that is before all of us as Americans that's on our minds, is what is happening within the government regarding weaponization. And I know that's an issue that is very, very important to you and something that you have voiced concerns about. Over the past year specifically, what are areas where you have seen the federal government use its power as a weapon against the American people? Boy, there are a lot of examples.

I went to the Supreme Court oral argument in the case Murthy v. Missouri, which is the name of the case below it was Missouri versus Biden. and concerning all of that activity by the FBI, by SISA, by CDC, by the White House, entangling themselves very excessively with social media company executive management to curate and manipulate what Americans were allowed to say online. And even while that case remains pending before the Supreme Court, the FBI has announced recently that it is renewing its program for interacting with social media companies. I continue to believe that the United States government does not have any legitimate interest in working to eliminate from the public discourse speech that would be protected by the First Amendment.

And that activity is horrific, in my view. And there's one. You know, another thing that comes to mind this week, the United States House will vote on reform to the FISA Section 702, this data, of foreign collected information that sweeps up tremendous amounts of information about Americans and their communications with overseas, many of which are quite legitimate. Obviously, in the world's a very busy, you know, connected place. And we've seen documented abuses back in 2019. There's like over a million in 2021 when they did another analysis.

It was 278,000 times the FBI misused that database against Americans. and yet we've had a hard time as Republicans getting a reform bill to the floor. And even now, the Speaker has surprised many Republicans by announcing that he's going to oppose the amendment that will add a warrant requirement before the FBI can get at that data. There are a couple, I could go all day. The problem of the federal government being weaponized against the American people's fundamental constitutional rights is a, it's pervasive. It seems, although I think we've done some things good to uncover and deter it, it is a constant problem and growing, I believe. Is it a new problem? No, it's not.

You know, when I was instrumental in negotiating for the establishment of the weaponization subcommittee, the select subcommittee on the weaponization, the federal government at Jim Jordan chairs, and back when we were having the negotiations over the Speaker election before 2023, and I did it because it, It was evident to me that we were seeing a recurrence of what Congress has attempted to get at before. The main vehicle for that was the Church Committee, headed by a liberal, Frank Church, a Democrat of, I believe it was Idaho, back in the 70s, to uncover abuses by the Intel community. And there were revelations that came out of that. It was actually trip precipitated in that case by media reports. And so, you know, that led to the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. three years after that committee.

We've also seen in the 80s Congress undertook to take a serious review in the Senate of the practices by the FBI in terms of the use of confidential human sources to infiltrate organizations out in American society and possible entrapment sort of, you know, whether they needed to codify entrapment defense because of the way the FBI was conducting itself. There have been many others. It is not a new problem, but it is also one that I would say has not been solved over the longer term. And in fact, I'd say has become much, much worse and larger as we've gone through the USA Patriot Act post 9-11. You know, the fears that arise from that in terrorism, terror risk has led to a lot of ways in which governments become more authoritarian.

And at the same time, has done some other really dumb things that leave us more and more exposed to risks of terror like having an open. border. Well, I do want to talk about the border here in a second in regards to the weaponization aspect. As you just articulated, the problem seems to be growing. It's getting larger. And we know from history, it can be challenging when you surrender more and more power to the federal government. It can be challenging to pull that back. What are the solutions, especially, as you've worked on Homeland Security, on the subcommittee for oversight, what are the solutions that you all have come up with in Congress to say, hey, we need to make sure that the American people are protected, that rights are being protected.

Well, funny, because as soon as you identify a one solution, you can see how the problem can metastasize around it. So one that I have proposed and that I think it may be the only real legislative effort or legislative idea that has emerged from the weaponization subcommittee is a bill that Harriet Hagerman and I co-sponsored called the Censorship Accountability Act. And what it would do is for the first time, there's a statute called Title 42, Section 1983, under which people have since the Civil War era been able to sue state officials, people acting under color of state law, state or local law, who deprive someone of his or her constitutional rights under the federal constitution.

And what that has never extended to explicitly is federal officials. And in particular, we think the most egregious acts, are when federal officials take action to deprive someone of their First Amendment rights, the rights of free speech, the right of free exercise of religion, right to peaceably assemble the rights of the press. And so we have a bill that would expand that and let victims of the deprivation of their First Amendment rights sue the federal government official who's engaged in that. That needs to become law and it needs the president's signature or to pass over the president's

signature. But that's one good example. but here's what that misses. What we've uncovered in the Select Subcommittee is not only the FBI and federal agencies do what I previously described with social media companies and many other such problems, but you've seen that government has sort of seed money to put seed money out to create and support sort of pseudo-academic private NGOs like the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington's Internet Project, where there are. censors, you know, people who favor censorship and they go out and try to spot posts or threads that they believe are improper and shouldn't be out there in public. And then they recommend to the platforms to take them down.

But all of it is sort of sponsored by the government. So you got this kind of what's been called the censorship industrial complex or the censorship laundering complex. And then if you actually go past that, something we're seeing brand new in the last week or so. actually, it's brand new in one particular, but it's a phenomenon that's a little bigger that's been around for a bit. Other countries, Western so-called democracies from Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and most recently in Brazil, that are undertaking legal and extra legal efforts to put pressure on a company like X, formerly Twitter, because what they say is, again, misinformation. but they're using the power of a foreign government that couldn't get away with it

under our First Amendment here in the United States to attempt to, because these social media networks by their nature need to be large and global. And they're trying to, so Brazil, some court official, high court official in Brazil is attempting to, you know, as I think even started criminal process against Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter in the last few days, as an attempt to intimidate. and to coerce X to impose censorship internally. And Mike Benz, who is one of your guests here at Heritage today, makes a clear case for how what Brazil is doing

is something that has been an indirect result of efforts by the American intelligence community and state department over a period of years. So you see, it's an enormous complex, global in its nature, and it's all designed in advancing authoritarianism and have always been in my lifetime Western demise. We face a crisis of freedom. Is that the endgame, this furtherment of totalitarianism?

I believe it is tightly connected to the notion of globalism, the idea that, you know, world order that elites in the United States and in countries all over the world have deemed to be, you know, the elites favor this kind of a control of the population. They believe populist-oriented politics are to be suppressed. And it's just, it's anathema to everything I understood and learned about Western democracies, Western thought, Enlightenment thought, if you want to go back and start to think of it in a slight and somewhat historic terms, it is a darkening of, you know, you can go back and think about Winston Churchill describing an iron curtain descending over Europe,

across Europe, speaking of the authoritarian communist nations and where their reach had extended in the Berlin Wall and the like. What I think we're seeing is the descending of a new anti-freedom darkness that is pervade. And we have the mechanisms here in the United States that best can fight it, but we've got a long way to go. And we've only scratched the surface on the, I'm afraid to say, in the select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government. You mentioned the border a few minutes ago.

How does the situation on the border play into this conversation? We know that under President Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, somewhere between 8 and 10 million individuals have not just crossed the border illegally, but then have been actually allowed to stay in the United States. Yeah, I saw Tucker Carlson say in an interview persuasively the other day that the total population of persons who are not lawfully in the United States is like 22 million. And as you indicated, the scale of the process of Biden's bringing in new people. I think the way it fits into this conversation is there is an allowance and even a facilitation of a chaotic loss of integrity of our border.

And yet that is allowed to happen. And in fact, some, you know, suborned and incentivized by Joe Biden and the Biden administration, often in direct violation of law, and it carries an obvious security risk. If anybody, you've got millions, in fact, two million or more gotaways, people who have come across the border without ever encountering any kind of check by a border agent or any government official, and they're here in the country. When they talk about, and then I'll have representatives of the Counterterrorism Center, Ms. Christine Abb was able to sit in a hearing and tell me in two successive years

that that doesn't represent any kind of a risk. Well, anybody with common sense can see that's absurdity. It kind of reminds you of the 9-11 Commission language in their report. The system was blinking red. Even while that gross abuse of law and sovereignty is allowed to transpire with the risks that it entails, you've got at the same time the government taking more and more liberties and more and more restriction of the rights of Americans in the way they speak on social media and the things that they can read. and it goes on and on, you know, more infiltration is surprising stories coming out of the FBI

about infiltration of the Roman Catholic Church of hostility to parents assembling at school boards to speak their mind, all of which is, you know, suggested as necessary in the interest of protecting society against risks. There's a great inconsistency in that. It makes far more sense to do the reverse, which is open up American society, tell foreign nations that are going to try to impose burdens on, for example, American-based social media company that we're not going to tolerate that and we'll retaliate in diplomacy as appropriate. But on the other hand, we are going to maintain a rigorous American border and we're going to

police, we're going to enforce our laws internally, you know, at the state level and at the federal level, we're going to enforce law in a way that is fair, consistent, non-political and that imposes accountability for people who flout law. Yeah. I think that's one of the interesting things is we can see a lot of the immediate effects, right, of the sheer numbers who have crossed the border. But the question that's often on my mind, and I think many Americans mind, is what are the effects, five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road of having so many individuals cross the border illegally and then remain in the country? and that feels a little bit like a frightening, well, we'll have to just wait and find out.

I think that's right. It changes the identity of the country overall, and not because of the presence of people of different ethnicities or different national origin. It is the chaos that breaks down so many societal patterns. And so you get folks living in hotels for extended periods of time at the expense of the federal government. How are they going to transition into something else?

Or do you, by virtue of providing sort of wraparound social services, where people have come here illegally. Nobody knows where they should go. And that gets to be taken care of by the vehicle of government. Social services networks are strained in the process, so perhaps are not really adequate. But you can wipe out the work ethic out of any group of people. If welfare is so pervasive and government is so pervasive

that they lose the independence to function and work as they've been taught. And then you look at stats or numbers. There are the percentage of the American people currently in the United States that is foreign-born, has gone from like 5%. It was traditionally across time up to in excess of 15%. It's a record in history. And, of course, we're continuing to see that move upward. If you look at job numbers, you know, you see the media will always breathlessly report that we've had, we've exceeded expectations in terms of job growth.

But when you look at the details, it is overwhelmingly to foreign-born purpose. persons in the United States, which means Americans are not gaining ground in employment. And it is also coincidentally all part-time, full-time jobs are being lost. All of this is a byproduct of the abandonment of the rule of law in how we've administered the border. And again, this from the very same government that in many ways acts increasingly authoritarian with respect to its own civilian population. So we've got to be relentless and continuing to ferret all that out and continue to articulate more sensible approaches.

I'd like to try to end on a brief note of optimism. When you look at the state of the nation, what is giving you hope? Well, Virginia, I'm spending time now. I am running for the Office of Attorney General in North Carolina, and so I'm all over that big state. North Carolina is 10.5 million people. It's geographically a large place to try to get around. But I've had the same impression intensified in the course of this campaign that I've had while I've served in Congress. Although I think we see in so many ways institutional failure or decline in the United States.

And it is not something that's happening coincidentally. It is the result of aggressive ideological action, even in some ways a cultural Marxism that is spreading. And they found their way through many of our institutions of late, even the, United States military and some of our most venerable institutions. But the American people are themselves quite strong and resourceful and resilient. And they also know far more than politicians believe they know. And I'm confident that there is a path to restoring. I think Congress, unfortunately, has been stuck in a status quo sort of posture.

I think we're seeing transition over time in the Republican Party in Congress. I think that needs to accelerate and be completed. We need to have sort of the people who don't have the nerve to face the challenges that we face, need to get out of the way, and people need to come in who will. But I'm confident that the American people can find a way. In North Carolina, we're going to stand up, I think, this year, and we're going to elect executive offices, the Council of State offices, governor and attorney general, lieutenant governor, and others who have that kind of bold message and that willingness to stand up, say, look, the way you restore a culture of order is beginning with the rule of law. And you speak about it and you declare that we're going to stop the chaos.

And does it happen all at once? No. But that begins the process to healing first North Carolina and then North Carolina joined states like Texas and Florida. The bellwethers that have said we're not putting up with the woke. It's destructive to the flourishing of men and women and families. and we're going to do something different. We're going to follow those principles that made the United States the most successful country in the history of the world.

And I know the people know because I talk to them constantly, sometimes in political situations, sometimes not, but they know what is happening. They know what we need to do. And I think that we have the courage to do it. Congressman Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Congressman, thank you for your time. We appreciate it. My pleasure. With that, that's going to do it for today's episode.

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The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners. like you. Executive producers are Rob Bluey and Kate Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Mary Margaret O'Lehann, and Tyler O'Neill. Sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more or support our work, please visit DailySignal.com.