'Diamond Hands' Amelia Powers Gardner, Putting Conservative Values on the Blockchain

In the state of Utah’s second largest county, County Commissioner Amelia Powers Gardner is running for re-election. One of her issues is tech.

Turning the tables on Big Tech by using little tech, “the blockchain.” And it’s working.

Blockchain was invented, in part, to take power over your data back from Big Digital and place it in your own hands.

Gardner’s campaign is an extraordinary marriage of science and religion, cutting edge technology married to traditional values, a rock-ribbed conservative (fighting for the primacy of the individual and the family over the state) using new tech to give our old values new power.

I’ve encountered Amelia Powers Gardner when she was a featured speaker at many blockchain conferences. She’s a national thought leader for putting government records like birth and marriage certificates onto a new kind of encrypted digital platform.

Don’t let your eyes glaze over. It matters.

One of the great things about the blockchain is that it gives you new level of authority over the information the government keeps on us.

Why listen to me? I’m a techie and an archconservative: former Reagan White House official, worked with the George W. Bush White House Faith-based office and with Mike Pence as chairman of the National Space Council in the Trump White House.

I’m one of the O.G. Kemp-era supply-siders who cured the Nixon/Ford/Carter stagflation and restored the American economy to full vibrancy. A Washington Post columnist once described me, for my prominent advocacy of the gold standard, half in jest and whole in earnest, as “the Second Most Conservative Man in the World.” So?

So, technology is neutral. Fire, the original technology, can cook your food. Misused, it can burn down your house.

As Powers told me, “Before blockchain, if you lost your birth certificate you had to ask the government for a replacement. If it were on the blockchain you would not have to ask. This is the exact opposite of the Great Reset. The government can’t take it away or keep it from you.”

In the right hands technology can be a force for liberty as with America’s space race, restoring our national prestige and helping us win the Cold War.

Amelia Powers Gardner’s are not merely the “right” hands. She’s “diamond” hands, the best: mothering a family of six kids while serving the people of Utah County who elected her, passionately pro-life (7 Marches for Life), pro-gun (competitive shooter), limited government full spectrum conservative.

Per Amelia Powers Gardner: “Some people who really should know better mistakenly believe that any tech is Big Tech, at risk for being abused to create ESG scores that can be used to subjugate us like the Chinese Communist Party does. To the contrary! The blockchain lets freedom ring!”

What’s up with Utah County? As it happens, blockchain was invented by a liberty-loving religiously serious Mormon, Dr. Scott Stornetta, who got his original college degree right in Utah County, from BYU!

Utah County thus has a claim on being the fertile ground for blockchain, the fundamental building block of the new-and-improved Web 3 that the world, including my fellow conservatives, is getting excited about.

Why? Because we can use it to defend our liberties.

As Dr. Stornetta said at a keynote speech last year at the National Press Club:

“… I really think that at a policy level the most apt analogy for the blockchain is the printing press, the invention of movable type. It was a hugely disruptive innovation for reasons that I think everyone here is quite familiar with. It was also considered a deep, potentially mortal, threat to government. And yet it didn't turn out that way. In fact, it enabled a new type of government structure. The blockchain’s transparency and peer-to-peer nature in effect is an echo of the whole notion of freedom of the press. Which was made possible by the invention of the press. Technology leads to new social structures. … Think about what the Constitution is. I posted a tweet the day before Thanksgiving last year recognizing the true O.G.s of decentralized algorithmic consensus mechanisms: namely the authors of the Constitution. … If there is any country on the face of the Earth that ought to embrace blockchain it is the United States of America. I'm not suggesting that there's a one-to-one analogy but the overlap between the impetus to individual freedom and liberty and the notion of a decentralized transparent peer-to-peer consensus is unavoidable. Let freedom ring.”

Thanks to the diamond hands of Amelia Powers Gardner, Utah has become a, perhaps the, preeminent leader among the 50 states in using blockchain technology to advance the cause of liberty while confining government spending.

To which I can only repeat what BYU alum, blockchain co-inventor, observant Mormon Scott Stornetta said: Let freedom ring.