Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson told Newsmax Wednesday that the United States is becoming "totalitarian" in the wake of a third criminal indictment of former President Donald Trump.
"Where are we going? Where is this leading? What is going to happen to your children and your grandchildren?" Carson said during his appearance Wednesday on "The Chris Salcedo Show." "What kind of environment are they going to grow up in if we have a situation in which we weaponize the Justice Department against our political enemies?
"What happens when we get to a point where we say, You can't express certain things, and if you do, you're subject to prosecution? That's what happens in totalitarian societies. This is what we are becoming."
Carson explained that the Founding Fathers thought long and hard about limiting the way the U.S. government would grow, so that it would not infiltrate and dominate people by using the power of civilian oversight.
"In that Constitution, they gave oversight to Congress of the executive branch, and they created a situation where each branch could keep an eye on the others," he said. "However, Congress' enforcement arm is the Justice Department. If the Justice Department is in the pocket of the executive branch, there is no mechanism in order to alleviate the problem of a corrupt executive branch. This is what we're seeing right now."
Carson said that the only way to solve the problem is for citizens to turn out and vote for a change.
"The likelihood of them doing that is decreased when you have a media that has forgotten its responsibility," he said. "The reason that the media, the press, is the only business protected by the Constitution is that they were supposed to disseminate unbiased information to the people, so that people would actually know what's going on."
Carson noted that an informed electorate can then effectively "correct" the direction of the country, and that those decisions should only be through campaigns and not legal actions by the party in power to prevent opposition.
"It seems to me as if the Department of Justice is working hand in hand with the executive branch to distract people's attention, and they keep them from seeing what's really going on [with the Hunter Biden investigations]," he said. "When something big comes out that's counter to the interests of the executive branch, the Department of Justice is right there, Johnny on the spot, to throw something else into the arena to distract people."
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