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Tulsi Gabbard testifying before the U.S. Senate. Credit: C-SPAN

As over a billion people in the world celebrate the Lunar New Year period with feasting, family gatherings, and best wishes and hopes for the new year, the potential for the United States to make a fresh start took a step forward with the Senate hearings for Trump cabinet nominees Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel.

Kash Patel, nominated to head the FBI, has stated his plans to investigate and end the use of the Bureau for political purposes, redirecting its efforts to fighting crime. “I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops—go be cops,” he said on a podcast. During the hearing, Patel deflected questions and seemed not to ruffle any feathers of the Republicans, who, if they vote as a party, will advance his nomination to the full Senate.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, had a contentious hearing, with numerous demands that she denounce NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a traitor. The fact that she said that he broke the law, that she thought the right approach would have been to approach the intelligence communities and the inspector general, was not enough for them. Like a struggle session, they insisted that she utter the word “traitor.” She did not give in. Her own personal experience serving in the military in Iraq, in a war started based on lies, was an inspiration to her to act to reform the intelligence process.

The LaRouche Organization’s report on “The Liars’ Bureau” is indispensable reading, in order to understand the reason for the barrage of attacks, from media and government layers, against the confirmation of these two individuals. Although Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel are testifying, it is the Senate that is being tested. Will the intelligence community—that brought the world the Iraq War, the killing of Qaddafi, the “moderate rebels” in Syria, warrantless spying on millions of Americans, and the “Russiagate” baloney deployed against Trump (including the lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation)—succeed in cowing the Senate into denying the nominees their places in the cabinet?

Meanwhile, Trump is taking predictable actions that contradict the fulsome praise he lavished upon the principle of free speech—namely, he is acting on what has become known as the “Palestine exception.” He issued an executive order to “combat anti-Semitism” that adopts a definition and examples of the term that allow its application to sentiments that are anti-Israel, rather than anti-Jewish. And he followed it up with a fact sheet that details his plans to deport students engaged in what he called “pro-Jihadist” protests. “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests,” the fact sheet reads, “we put you on notice … we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses….”

Will all those who denounced social media censorship of the Biden laptop stand up for the right to engage in political speech critical of Israel?

In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, treated as a pariah since its founding, has entered the fold of legislating policy, when its members provided the necessary votes to pass a bill on migration sponsored by the CDU party. Previously, other parties declined the benefit of AfD votes for their policies, and largely insisted on not dealing with it at all. The AfD has doubled its polling percentages in the last three years, and is currently predicted to achieve second place in the Feb. 23 parliamentary elections. Its opposition to conflict with Russia and green energy mandates, as part of its platform that also includes some unsavory elements, have brought it increased support.

But, ultimately, it is through a program of world development, under a paradigm that rejects the unipolar hegemonism the Anglo-American elite have sought, that migration issues can be reliably solved, as part of a broader move toward scientific and technological development based on increasing energy use and the increasing quality of that energy, and a cultural renaissance based upon the unique characteristic of human life: the ability to generate hypotheses that transcend the senses, hypotheses of universal principles, which allow us to transform our relationship to nature, and to each other.