In a hearing supposedly addressing global threats, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon demanded to know why the Intelligence Community wasn’t hiring more potheads. It went downhill from there. The head honcho, Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, declared the Intelligence Community was open to potheads, as long as, presumably, they weren’t smoking on the job.

And you wonder why the Intelligence Community can’t figure out where COVID-19 came from?

Thanks to billionaires George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg, Oregon has decriminalized LSD, cocaine and heroin. Perhaps Wyden wants the use of psychedelics to be permitted by intelligence analysts. Perhaps the intelligence product will then improve.

But don’t worry: there is a bipartisan consensus that a popular Chinese-sponsored app known as TikTok should be banned. TikTok gathers intelligence the same way Google does. And Google’s YouTube competes with TikTok.

Our top intelligence people claim TikTok serves the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. Well, YouTube terminated my account a year ago because I offered people free anti-communist videos. All of my 500 videos were taken down for being in violation of “community guidelines.”

So from my perspective, they serve the same masters. One is no better or worse than the other. The difference is that TikTok is popular with teenagers.

By outlawing TikTok, however, Google will benefit.

We hear a lot about parental rights and responsibilities these days. Parents should monitor their kids. Why should the federal government do what parents should be doing in the first place?

Why have “conservatives” joined with Big Government liberals in a campaign to ban this app?

This whole TikTok brouhaha is an effort by Google to eliminate competition.

In regard to China, Haines ruled out COVID-19 being a bioweapon, but said the intelligence agencies under her jurisdiction couldn’t decide on the lab leak theory versus infected animals being the source.

Why has the Intelligence Community ruled out COVID being a bioweapon? Nobody disputes the fact that China has a bioweapons program.

The lab leak theory, now the most popular view, seems designed to get U.S. officials off the hook, since they financed the experiments in the Wuhan lab. They can’t be held accountable if it was just a lab “accident.”

The lesson I took from this snippet of the hearing was that the Intelligence Community isn’t very intelligent. Perhaps there are too many potheads on the payroll already.

The pro-pot publication Marijuana Moment found the Haines testimony very significant. It reported, “A top U.S. intelligence official reaffirmed on Wednesday that it is not the federal government’s current policy to deny people security clearances based on past marijuana use alone, stating that it is counterproductive to recruitment efforts, especially amid the growing legalization movement.”

There are apparently so many potheads in America that we can’t do without them in sensitive positions. Barack Hussein Obama was a trailblazer in this respect, having won the presidency despite a record of heavy marijuana use in the “Choom Gang.”

In addition to Haines, the witnesses at the hearing were William J. Burns of the Central Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Scott D. Berrier of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Paul Nakasone of the National Security Agency, and Christopher Wray of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In disgust, after watching the exchange about potheads, I turned the channel on my Smart TV and found colorized episodes of “The Three Stooges” on Prime Video. The episode “Disorder in the Court” was hilarious.

I came to the conclusion that the five witnesses at the Senate hearing delivering commentary on the “2023 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community“ were themselves stooges.

When a top intelligence official talks about hiring potheads, you know we’re in deep trouble.

FBI director Wray referred to the release of COVID as an “incident,” rather than an accident. This made the talking heads almost breathless. What did he mean? It’s more gobbledygook from Wray.

Fortunately, the hearing took a serious tone when Senator Tom Cotton wondered why the “threat assessment” report on page 33 referred to “Transnational RMVEs,” or racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, posing “the most lethal threat to U.S. persons and interests….”

Cotton considered Haines to be a clown. “Are you serious?” Cotton asked. When he asked how many people in the U.S. were killed by RMVEs last year, she didn’t know. She agreed, however, with Cotton’s point that fentanyl was killing as many as 100,000 Americans a year. This seems to be a lethal threat. Later, Haines was unable to identity the “populist parties” her report identified as threats.

The assessment declared, “Western Hemisphere-based TCOs [transnational criminal organizations] involved in illicit drug production and trafficking bound for the United States endanger the health and safety of millions of U.S. citizens and drive crime and corruption. U.S. law enforcement is seizing increased quantities of fentanyl, and the majority of the more than 100,000 annual deaths from drug overdoses in the United States stem from fentanyl.”

It goes on to say, “Mexican TCOs obtain the majority of precursor chemicals needed to produce fentanyl from China through mostly Chinese and Mexican chemical brokers and are able to circumvent international controls through mislabeled shipments and buying unregulated dual-use chemicals.”

Now consider this: if China is deliberately supplying the chemicals the Mexican TCOs use to make fentanyl, why is Haines so afraid to conclude that COVID-19 was deliberately and intentionally released to cause death and destruction to people and economies, especially ours?

Incredibly, when Senator John Cornyn reiterated that China continues to supply the chemicals to the Mexican cartels which make the fentanyl for export to the U.S., Haines said the Intelligence Community needed a deeper “bench” of analysts to understand the problem.

These people are stooges and clowns. Perhaps a new crop of pothead employees will do the trick.

None of the five stooges was willing to admit Communist China is at war with the United States and that we need to be on high alert or a war footing.

Under pressure from Senator Wyden, who has made drug legalization into his signature issue, we can anticipate that the guidance on potheads and other drug abusers getting security clearances will be liberalized even more in the future.

Considering the flawed nature of the intelligence “product” put on the record for the Senate hearing, it’s difficult to conclude our defenses against foreign agents and spies getting government jobs can get much worse. So why not hire more dopers?

Don’t worry about the Chinese alliance with the Mexican cartels. Worry instead about the “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.” You know who they are. They are your neighbors and friends. They are Americans. They are you.

• Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org