On Tuesday, The U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs held a South and Central Asia Subcommittee hearing on the Censorship-Industrial Complex chaired by Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., which detailed the extent to which U.S. tax dollars have been used to censor conservative American voices.
Huizenga opened his remarks by describing how a former office of the U.S. State Department known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), was originally designed to work against foreign propaganda but ended up pushing back against American conservatives.
"Despite that mandate, the GEC for years deployed its shadowy network of grantees and subgrantees to facilitate the censorship of American voices," Huizenga said in his opening remarks. "Especially if those voices were conservative and refused to align with the left-leaning establishment politics.
"Worst of all, this was done using U.S. taxpayer dollars, your dollars."
The congressman then detailed how the Biden administration restructured the department and re-labeled it a counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub (FIMI).
Investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Benjamin Weingarten gave statements which detailed their experiences in uncovering censorship funded by the federal government.
Weingarten, who leads RealClearInvestigations, noted how two business risk-rating entities, NewsGuard and the U.K.-based nonprofit GDI, created "exclusion lists" for brands to provide ad agencies advice on where not to give their advertising dollars.
"NewsGuard's alleged viewpoint discrimination can be seen in the significantly higher scores on average that it has lavished on left-leaning sources over right-leaning ones," Weingarten said in his testimony. "Its seeming bias can also be observed in the Kafkaesque correspondence dissident sources left and right have had with its raters when challenging seemingly unmerited scores. The message seems clear: Toe the NewsGuard line or face the consequences."
Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., noted how the GEC gave "$100 million in grants since 2016 to fund 400 plus projects, including Newsguard and GDI which blacklisted 2,000 U.S. outlets."
Weingarten recalled in his testimony how two prominent conservative outlets, The Daily Wire and The Federalist, sued the State Department over GEC's support of NewsGuard that ultimately reduced the two company's ad revenue and social media reach.
The hearing was an extension of one of President Donald Trump's first executive orders, the Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Government Censorship order which established that no federal government employees or taxpayer dollars may be used to engage in or facilitate the unconstitutional censorship of American citizens.
"The State Department should never, and if I can help it, will never again, be in the business of silencing American voices," Huizenga said in his remarks.
James Morley III ✉
James Morley III is a writer with more than two decades of experience in entertainment, travel, technology, and science and nature.
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