The United States Department of State has, for some curious and unprecedented reason, decided to wade into domestic political persecution of the Deep State’s political opponents,
A new congressional report sheds further light on its dirty deeds done in the dark — activities, by the way, that have earned their place as a defendant in the notorious Murthy v. Missouri free speech lawsuit regarding the government’s massive COVID-19 censorship regime.
Related: Hillary Clinton Demands ‘Criminal Penalties’ for Americans to Deter ‘Misinformation’
Via The Defender (emphasis added):
The U.S. Department of State-funded [sic] domestic and international fact-checking entities that censored American independent media outlets and social media users who questioned the Biden administration’s COVID-19 and other policies, according to a congressional report…
The report focused on the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which promoted and funded “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space … with domestic censorship capabilities.”*
The “fact-checking” firms named in the report include the International Fact-Checking Network — owned by the Poynter Institute — and NewsGuard.
The International Fact-Checking Network, established in 2015, has received funding from another State Department-affiliated group, the National Endowment for Democracy — and from Google, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation**.
*The State Department, as far as I am aware, is occupied with foreign policy and not only doesn’t have any mandate to affect domestic policy but definitely doesn’t have the capacity to surveil domestic targets as it pleases.
**The extent to which Bill Gates effectively has purchased the corporate state media is, unfortunately, not as well-known as it should be. It’s my job, I consider, to reverse that injustice.
Via Mint Press News (emphasis added):
While other billionaires’ media empires are relatively well known, the extent to which Gates’s cash underwrites the modern media landscape is not. After sorting through over 30,000 individual grants, MintPress can reveal that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has made over $300 million worth of donations to fund media projects.
Recipients of this cash include many of America’s most important news outlets, including CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS and The Atlantic. Gates also sponsors a myriad of influential foreign organizations, including the BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom; prominent European newspapers such as Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain); as well as big global broadcasters like Al-Jazeera.
Congressional Republicans agree these pernicious influences must be prevented from further encroaching on constitutional rights like free speech to advance their various sordid interests.
Via the congressional report (emphasis added):
The Federal government has fueled a censorship ecosystem impacting not only individuals’ First Amendment rights, but the ability of certain small businesses to compete online.
The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech, impacting domestic businesses’ operations, reputation, customer reach, and revenue.
The Global Engagement Center (GEC), an interagency body housed within the U.S. Department of State (State), circumvented its strict international mandate by funding, developing, then promoting tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private non-profit funded almost entirely by Congressional appropriations, violated its international restrictions by collaborating with fact-checking entities in assessing domestic press businesses’ admission to a credibility organization.
Civil libertarians warned many decades ago — the Ron Pauls of the world — in the midst of the War on Terror madness and the neocon grip on the GOP and the White House that the brutal military-industrial complex surveillance and repression regime enacted on populations overseas would inevitably be imported to be deployed on a captive American domestic populace.
Twenty years later, here we are.
It’s perhaps a matter of time until waterboarding is standard operating procedure for domestic terrorists (flyover people).
