Democrats looked like they were stifling a profound hatred during Tuesday’s Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia House Subcommittee reading titled,” The Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department”.
None more so than Nina Jankowicz, who led the short-lived, then dead Disinformation Governance Board for previous President Joe Biden. Now, she is the CEO of the American Sunlight Project and considers herself an “expert on propaganda and reform”.
Jankowicz refused to answer when Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Wash., asked her to share the name of donors for the American Sunlight Project.
” But, moonlight for different people but not for your contributors”, he said. Baumgartner even asked if there was a loss of trust with the British people when the Biden White House called clips of Biden acting disorientated” low scams”.
” I think in those circumstances, there were wicked processing methods being used to produce the results seem worse than it really was”, Jankowicz said. We then know that privately, the White House was worried about Biden’s butter was falling off his bread.
” Do you believe the 51 former intelligence officials who said that the] Hunter } Biden laptop was a product of Russian disinformation”? Baumgartner asked. ” Do you think they impacted the respect the British people and the knowledge formation to effectively use social media to go after terrorists?
Jankowicz initially responded by asking” Does completely talk only use when you like what’s being said? Those people were exercising their right to free speech. And basically what they said was the’ cornerstone’ of a propaganda campaign. Based on the evidence at the time, it was correct.”
She bravely made this claim on the same day records proved the FBI knew the computer was true, and it imposed , a joke attempt on staff to cast doubt on it’s integrity just before the 2020 election.
Jankowicz’s unwillingness to actually describe problems of the Biden Administration proves the fight against the censorship-industrial intricate is not over. Damage was done, faith was broken, and the conversation however is not fair.
” If the FBI authorities who buried the Hunter Biden laptop story aren’t held accountable, it will be difficult for Americans to have any belief in the company — or the political process,” Brianna Lyman, an Election Correspondent summed it up for The Federalist this year.
The FBI lied to the people, and it seems to have ignored legal activity shown on the computer. As long as Biden was president, responsibilities seemed unthinkable.
But never again. The new administration may remain the sensor and identify who was more faithful to the Biden home than the British people. Those who would keep the truth from individuals may be rooted up. We need a whole accounting of what happened to to try to make sense of it, and to prevent it from happening again.
Committee chairman Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., explained that the Global Engagement Center ( GEC ), was formed in 2016 for” countering foreign propaganda and disinformation.”
” Despite that authority, for decades the GEC instead deployed its shadowy system of donors and sub-grantees to facilitate the repression of American voices, especially if those voices were conservative and refused to connect with the left leaning creation politics,” Huizenga said”. Worst of all, this was being done using U. S. taxpayer dollars. Your dollars.”
Margot Cleveland, Senior Legal Correspondent for The Federalist, named some of the offending contractors in a 2023 piece.
Democrats did not love the hearing.
” The majority is relitigating a made-up conspiracy theory about a part of the State Department that no longer exists to distract from the dumpster fire foreign policy this administration is pursuing,” Ranking committee member Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif. said in her opening statement.
Through political pressure, GEC was terminated in December 2024. But that same month, under former President Joe Biden, the State Department restructured the office into the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (R-FIMI ).
” The question we will be exploring today is whether this restructuring is actually in name only,” Huizenga said”. Put simply, whether you call it GEC or R-FIMI, the State Department should never — and if I can help, it will never again — be in the business of silencing American voices.”
Democrats wanted the discussion to stay out of the past, and described Trump as the source of all problems.
” It is the height of hypocrisy for Republicans to hold a hearing on the so called censorship-industrial complex and the need for ‘ First Amendment safeguards at the State Department ‘ when President Trump and] Elon ] Musk are launching the largest attack on free speech in America in decades,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said during the hearing”. The administration is right now stripping people of the constitutional protection to free speech, to dissent, to express their views if they are counter to Trump and Musk, to use cold war era statutes … squashing fundamental American freedoms.”
One of President Donald Trump’s earliest executive orders, called” Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” says federal money cannot be used toward censorship of American citizens.
Huizenga intends to introduce legislation to codify that order into law.
” The Global Engagement Center and this entire effort is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the American system and the First Amendment, “testified Matt Taibbi, editor-in-chief of Racket News
” The American government has no role in protecting citizens from speech. The whole idea of the system that was designed by Jefferson and Madison, is that the American people view each other as adults who are capable of sorting out the truth for themselves. They do not need a nanny state or a guardian or a law enforcement agency to decide for them what’s true. We don’t need a truth squad, and that’s exactly what GEC was designed for, “he added.
Ending taxpayer funding of government censorship permanently is a no-brainier that should get bipartisan support. Based on this hearing, Democrats won’t get behind it, showing we have a long way to go to protect free speech.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
