Over the past few years, we have seen revelation after revelation about the government’s abuse of its power to censor speech.

It’s hard to know how common the knowledge is among average Americans. Still, anybody actively engaged in debating contested issues in public knows that the government has been abusing its powers and violating citizens’ First Amendment rights.

The MSM has done its best to defend censorship, characterizing it as defending Americans against “misinformation” and pretending that censorship has only been directed at bad foreign actors. Still, this characterization is blatantly and provably false.

In most (but hardly all) cases of government censorship, it is not the FBI, CIA, NSA, or CDC doing the actual work of suppressing speech–although just about everybody in government has gotten in on the action at some point by directly asking social media companies to suppress speech. The social media companies have complied, sometimes under duress, because, as one Meta executive said, “we have bigger fish to fry in Washington,” referring to the fact that these companies were getting threatened by politicians and agencies with all sorts of bad consequences if they didn’t comply with government requests.

In most cases, government agencies exercise their power through proxies. And not just any proxies, but ones that they created and funded. This served to provide a fig leaf if a tiny one. “We didn’t ask for that to be censored; The Global Engagement Center did!”

The Global Engagement Center, if you didn’t know, was created by the State Department. Newsguard, another censorship-by-proxy corporation, is basically the intelligence community outside the government. Look at its “advisors:” Tom Ridge, former Homeland Security Secretary; Richard Stengel, former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Michael Hayden, former CIA Director and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO chief.

Most people who have been subject to censorship have little recourse; they are too small, and their adversaries too big to fight. We are helpless, and they know it. But that isn’t true for everybody.

Elon Musk, for instance, had the wherewithal to snap up Twitter and rip control of it out of the hands of the government. At least so far; they have returned the favor by creating a coordinated campaign to destroy him and his company.

And a few media organizations have joined the fight.

Alternative media, of course, since the MSM is basically the home of government lickspittles.

“Federalist, Daily Wire Sue State Department for Censorship” https://t.co/3udgidzoIL via @YouTube

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 7, 2023

The Daily Wire and The Federalist have filed a lawsuit against the Global Engagement Center, which funds organizations that push censorship and blacklisting of news sites (which demonetizes their content, as frequently happens to Hot Air and other Townhall properties). In doing so, they have followed an earlier suit by liberal investigative news site Consortium News against Newsguard.

In late October, the liberal anti-establishment investigative site Consortium News filed a historic suit against the United States of America and Newsguard,* describing a state-funded effort to label, defame, and stigmatize “media organizations that oppose or dissent from American foreign and defense policy.”

Now, a pair of conservative media outlets, The Federalist and The Daily Wire, have filed a bookend suit to match the Consortium News action. This time the defendant is the Global Engagement Center, the State Department organization ostensibly dedicated to countering “foreign state and non-state propaganda.” Much as Consortium News alleged the Pentagon funded Newsguard to censor its critics, the Federalist/Daily Wire action alleges the State Department sponsored Newsguard and the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index as “censorship enterprises” targeting domestic speech, in direct violation of its charter.

Fighting back with a lawsuit is the most American thing possible. As we have seen, our elected officials have been unable to slay the hydra of censorious agencies, so the hope is that the courts might have more luck.

The GEC was created under the Obama Administration (of course) and is specifically prohibited from trying to influence American public opinion.

That was never realistic, but these days, the GEC barely even tries to hide its mission to sway American public opinion. They dole out cash to third parties who are the attack dogs for the Establishment.

What is the alleged “censorship scheme”? The suit outlines a number of issues, but the most damaging appears to involve the use of GEC as a mechanism to funnel money to various censorship-by-proxy organizations. One of those groups is NewsGuard, which in a recent press release said a goal of its subscription-based “credibility assessment” services is to “systemically defund sources of harmful misinformation.”

NewsGuard in a presentation of its Library Partnership to the Alaska Department of Education explained in the unabashed dystopian style these organizations are becoming known for that “We are also licensing our White List of legitimate news sites to advertisers, which will cut off revenues to fake news sites”

I reached out to NewsGuard about this passage. If the company licenses a “whitelist” of “legitimate” sites with the express goal of cutting off “revenues to fake news sites,” aren’t they effectively engaged in a blacklisting service whose real aim is to target what it considers illegitimate sites? Is there any reason, I asked, that this service should not be described as blacklisting?

As I said, the site you are reading right now is one of those that the State Department of the United States Government is helping to strangle. “Systematically defund” means “put out of business.”

Let’s take a look at some rankings from the Global Disinformation Network, funded by the State Department, about sites to advertise on and sites to avoid:

They recommend Buzzfeed over RealClearPolitics. Think about that. And they clearly state that their mission is to put these “risky” sites out of business.

Your tax dollars at work.

Matt Taibbi has an excellent piece on the scheme, and he does so much good work that I am having trouble keeping up with it. So, I recommend you read the whole thing and perhaps subscribe as I do. He is on my “must-read” list, which is ironic as I would never have guessed that a few years ago.

I am pretty sure I am not on his, but them’s the breaks.

It is impossible to overstate how destructive of our constitutional order this government interference in the marketplace of ideas truly is. Regardless of whether you believe the 2020 election was “stolen,” there is zero question that it was “rigged” by the censors who filtered what people saw and heard in a manner that no amount of Russian money could ever have.

Lots of people use the word “psyop” to describe what is going on, but I have refrained from doing so since it sounds conspiratorial. However, in terms of what is being done here in the United States to create an information environment suitable to the wishes of our political elite, it fits the definition. They are using the exact same tactics used on foreign adversary populations to manipulate the information sphere to get the desired results.

Call it what you want. I call it unconstitutional.