As if the Google-Facebook-Big Brother complex weren’t enough.
Apparently, the federal government is also now investing in other nations’ surveillance apparatuses, which, unsurprisingly, are skewed in favor of censoring and silencing conservatives.
As reported by the Washington Examiner, the State Department has poured more well over $300M into the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Unsurprisingly, a former director of NED includes Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, alongside other suspect “progressive” politicians.
NED in turn backs the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a UK-based organization effectively dedicated to the censorship of free speech, in particular free speech originating from conservative-leaning websites.
Outside of its massive, (minimum) nine-figure “donation” to NED, the State Department has also sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDI directly.
How comforting, to observe how well hard-earned tax dollars are being optimized.
Not so surprisingly, GDI appears the most resistant to media outlets that have proven to be the most truthful in the long run, such as the New York Post.
“GDI has also identified the 10 ‘riskiest’ news organizations, which includes the New York Post, who broke the Hunter Biden laptop story that was censored by Big Tech outlets and falsely dismissed as Russian disinformation in some media outlets. The laptop has since been authenticated by a variety of news organizations and Hunter Biden’s own attorney essentially owned up to it earlier this year before backtracking,” Fox News reports.
In addition, The Federalist, RealClearPolitics, and Reason also made the dubious “cut” for GDI’s list of alleged disinformation peddlers, which is known as the “dynamic exclusion list.”
This list is subsequently fed to woke corporations, like Microsoft, whose advertising subsidiaries, namely Xandr, subsequently starve conservative-oriented websites of vital advertising dollars.
In essence, starving modern media of advertising dollars is an indirect way of achieving censorship, much in the same way that Biden is allegedly attempting to help Ukraine through sanctioning Russia.
The difference is that the GDI has a far more pronounced effect on silencing conservatives than Biden’s lame sanctions have on sanctioning Russia. If anything, Biden’s sanctions have boomeranged backwards on the United States and its allies.
Indeed, approximately a year ago, GDI CEO Clare Medford bragged that her suspect company has “had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites.”
Per Ilya Shapiro, who serves as Director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute, the federal government theoretically could incur serious legal trouble for its direct payments to GDI, especially if such efforts can be demonstrably proven to “censor information, pressure publications to censor, or pressure advertisers not to publish, in a way that harms U.S. citizens or companies.”
Robby Soave of Reason, however, is far less than impressed with such an assertion, noting the incredibly slippery slope the State Department is on with regards to funding the censorship of individuals whose taxes funded the asinine $300M+ investment in the first place.
The same kinds of individuals the State Department appears keep to suppress.
“Should the State Department spend public money to help an organization pressure advertisers to punish U.S. media companies? The answer, quite obviously, is no: The First Amendment prohibits the U.S. government from censoring private companies for good reason, and government actors should not seek to evade the First Amendment’s protections in order to censor indirectly or exert pressure inappropriately,” Soave inquired.
Valid point, though if they’re paid enough, apparently government actors will do just about anything.
Just as Xi about Biden …
Author: Ofelia Thornton