The Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department and aiming to thwart disinformation and misinformation, has been forced by Congress to close up shop. It's no mystery why; the taxpayer-backed GEC violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States.
Here's how.
Founded in 2016 and technically the product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism, the GEC lapsed in December and lost congressional funding. Over the last two years, my investigative reporting in the Washington Examiner as well as that of Racket News journalist Matt Taibbi pulled back the curtain of the GEC's ties to foreign and domestic NGOs trying to defund news outlets they say peddle disinformation -- including RealClearPolitics. My reporting showed that the GEC and the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy combined granted almost $1 million to the British Global Disinformation Index, which created a blacklist of U.S.-based websites that published content it determined to push "adversarial narratives" and then pressured advertisers to shut them down (think the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis).
The GEC, moreover, was involved with the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of left-wing nonprofit groups, universities, and federal agencies that pressured Twitter and Facebook to remove GOP-aligned content in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. The GEC also bankrolled New York-based company NewsGuard, a "misinformation" tracker that, along with the Global Disinformation Index, has found itself at the center of a lawsuit brought by the Federalist, the Daily Wire, and the State of Texas against the GEC for allegedly funding an unconstitutional "censorship scheme" that suppressed voices on the right.
Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone writer, demonstrated that the GEC pressured social media platforms in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to moderate extensive content, testifying to Congress in March 2023, "We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation 'requests' from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA."
In turn, these revelations and others culminated in a high-level pressure campaign in December that resulted in the GEC losing out on a one-year lifeline through a congressional spending package. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy joined President-elect Donald Trump in demanding that House Speaker Mike Johnson -- who had initially brokered a controversial deal to allow the GEC to continue to receive more of your tax dollars -- remove the pro-GEC provision. Once this powerful trio came out against more GEC funding, the nail was squarely in the coffin. It didn't help Johnson that conservative lawmakers with clout in Trump World such as Dan Bishop, Trump's pick for a high-ranking role at the Office of Management and Budget, fervently opposed the bill.
Soon, the bill was dead. And the GEC with it.
More at the link.
More about the CIA's censorship arm, CISA, from the Brownstone Institute.
The most astonishing court document just came out. It was unearthed in the course of litigation undertaken by America First Legal. It has no redaction. It is a reverse chronicle of most of what they did from February 2020 until last year. It is 500 pages long. The version available now takes an age to download, so we shrunk it and put it on fast view so you can see the entire thing.
What you discover is this. Everything that the intelligence agencies did not like during this period -- doubting lockdowns, dismissing masking, questioning the vaccine, and so on -- was targeted through a variety of cutouts among NGOs, universities, and private-sector fact-checkers. It was all labeled as Russian and Chinese propaganda so as to fit in with CISA's mandate. Then it was throttled and taken down. It managed remarkable feats such as getting WhatsApp to stop allowing bulk sharing.
...
AFL summarizes the document as follows.
* CISA's Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF) relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex to inform its censorship of alleged foreign disinformation narratives regarding COVID-19.
* Unelected bureaucrats at CISA weaponized the homeland security apparatus, including FEMA, to monitor COVID-19 speech dissenting from "expert" medical guidance, including President Trump's comments about taking Hydroxychloroquine in 2020. Many of these "false" narratives later turned out to be true, calling into question the government's ability to identify "misinformation," regardless of its authority to do so.
* To determine what was "foreign disinformation," CISA relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex's usual suspects (Atlantic Council DFR Lab, Media Matters, Stanford Internet Observatory) -- even those discredited for erroneously attributing domestic content to foreign sources (Alliance for Securing Democracy). CISA even relied on foreign government authorities (EU vs. Disinfo) and foreign government-linked groups (CCDH, GDI) that advocated for the demonetization and deplatforming of individual Americans to monitor and target constitutionally protected speech by American citizens.
For years, this story of censorship has unfolded in shocking ways. This document among tens of thousands of pages is surely among the most incriminating. And discussing it is apparently still taboo because the Subcommittee report on Covid never once mentions CISA. Why might that be?
In the strange world of D.C., CISA might be considered untouchable because it was staffed out of the National Security Agency which itself is a spinoff of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thus does its activities generally fall under the category of classified. And its many functioning assets in the civilian sector are legally bound to keep their relationships and connections private.
Thank goodness at least one judge believed otherwise and forced the agency to cough it up.
We're in the very best of hands:
As others have said: We're now in the Looting phase as the Regime comes to a (very temporary) end.
Looting and selling pardons to Regime operatives, of course.
In his detailed critique on RealClearPolitics, Robert Moffit explores the controversial possibility of President Joe Biden issuing a preemptive pardon to Dr. Anthony Fauci, focusing on the broader implications for public trust and the principle of accountability in governance. The prospect of such a pardon, Moffit argues, could undermine the integrity of both the accused and the accuser in the public's eye, by preempting legal processes.
The article addresses the contentious issue at the heart of potential charges against Fauci: whether his 2021 congressional testimony involved misleading statements about U.S. funding for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). This research involved manipulating bat coronaviruses to make them more pathogenic, a practice that has drawn intense scrutiny amidst the COVID-19 pandemic's origins and spread. Moffit points out that the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has issued a report asserting that Fauci's testimony was, at best, "misleading." This is based on an analysis of EcoHealth Alliance's work at WIV, which was found to fit the NIH's own definition of gain-of-function research.
Moffit delves into the semantic nuances that have clouded this issue, specifically the differences between the broader NIH definition of gain-of-function research and the more restrictive P3CO Framework which was cited by Fauci in his defense. The P3CO Framework focuses on preventing enhancements of potential pandemic pathogens (PPP), a narrowly defined category that does not encompass all gain-of-function research. Fauci's insistence that NIH funding did not cover PPP enhancement under this framework was met with skepticism and further inquiries by lawmakers, including Senator Rand Paul, who has been a vocal critic of Fauci's explanations.