Biden's censorship effort
The State Department has pulled the plug on its domestic censorship machine. Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week handed pink slips to the 50 full-time staff who were part of a shady subagency known as the Global Engagement Center. It’s a welcome move.
“Over the last decade, Americans have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions. That ends today,” Mr. Rubio announced last week.
Like every other government program, the center started with a reasonable mission: combating the messaging of radical Islamic terrorists overseas to prevent them from radicalizing youths. After a few years, the center’s capabilities were hijacked by activists who turned the focus inward against domestic enemies.
These activists leveraged the COVID-19 panic to direct taxpayer money to left-wing nongovernmental organizations that labeled American conservatives as spreaders of “disinformation.” President Biden’s entire administration backed the effort, compelling social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to act on these labels by silencing dissenting voices without notice or due process.
Taxpayer grant money went to outfits such as NewsGuard, which purports to provide “reliability ratings” for news outlets. These self-anointed arbiters of truth consistently give right-of-center publications lower scores so other members of the censorship cabal can point to that grade and persuade advertisers to drop their support for “low-rated” media outlets.
The goal is to silence alternative points of view. NewsGuard co-founder Steven Brill went on CNBC in 2020 to proclaim about the Hunter Biden laptop story, “My personal opinion is, there’s a high likelihood that this story is a hoax, maybe even a hoax perpetrated by the Russians.” That says it all about this organization’s lack of credibility.
Congress became fed up with the Global Engagement Center’s anti-First Amendment activities and pulled its funding at the end of last year. On the way out the door, however, Mr. Biden’s foreign policy team quietly rechristened the office as Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, hoping nobody would notice.
vThis is a typical bureaucratic move to avoid accountability, but it won’t work now. GEC employees have been sent home under a reduction-in-force action that ensures the same staffers won’t emerge elsewhere within the bowels of Foggy Bottom to resume their nefarious activities.
Mr. Rubio promises to release full details about the scope of the censorship effort once his investigators gather all the relevant documents.
“There’s two reasons to do it. I think people were harmed,” he explained in an interview with Mike Benz from the Foundation for Freedom Online. “And the other is to make sure this never happens again. … That’s why accountability is important.”
America First Legal has obtained internal papers from the GEC showing that the State Department’s sweeping effort to censor Americans under Mr. Biden involved foreign governments, including Britain.
This, too, is coming to an end.
President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that if he wants a trade deal with the United States, he needs to repeal his country’s anti-free-speech laws. Twelve thousand British citizens are questioned or arrested every year for posting something on Facebook that “causes annoyance” by expressing an unpopular opinion, especially related to unchecked immigration.
This administration is serious about reestablishing the primacy of free expression not just in the United States but also around the globe.
— The Washington Times