In a few days, a State Department group that was censoring conservatives online was scheduled to be shut down, but House Republicans escaped defeat by extending company’s approval for another year in an federal spending package disguised as a” continuing solution.”
Hidden in a one-paragraph item on the 139th page of the gargantuan 1, 547-page pork-barrel bill is a one-year extension of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center ( GEC ), originally a counterterrorism tool that has been used to help Big Tech companies engage in industrial-scale censorship.
The State Department informed Congress of its intention to close the censorship office by December 24th after the censorship office was snubbed in the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act ( NDAA ). That means House Republicans, many of whom have claimed to be up-in-arms about the national repression, constantly found a work-around to keep the business intact for one more time by amending the 2017 NDAA’s vocabulary.
The State Department stated earlier this month in a speech to the Washington Examiner that it “remains cheerful that Congress will extend this crucial mission through various means before the December 24th termination day.” House Republicans appear to have veered off in order to prevent that from occurring.
The subagency is named as a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas which describes the GEC as “one of the most daring, deceitful, mysterious, and worst abuses of power and breaches of First Amendment right by the federal government in British history”.
The State Department is using a flimsy terrorism tool, allegedly intended to combat foreign “disinformation,” to rather judge American statement that the regime and the know-it-all bureaucrats in continuous D.C. use.
The Global Disinformation Index ( GDI) and NewsGuard, which have both been specifically targeted by The Federalist and The Daily Wire, were given the opportunity by GEC-funded grants to change the news and information landscape in the United States by working against almost entirely conservative media outlets to ensure that Americans could not hear viewpoints that were not consistent with the state-approved stenography conducted by corporate media outlets.
The State Department “is actively intervening in the news-media market by funding the infrastructure, development, marketing, and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” according to the lawsuit.
As The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann wrote, despite the fact that federal censorship of Americans is both illegal and unconstitutional, the GEC funded the development of hundreds of “disinformation” tools designed to scrub the internet for information deemed politically inexpedient by the regime. Based on how well the censorship is used, money is awarded.
The State Department then turns around and provides the tools to Big Tech companies with the intention of having them downgrade or blacklist certain information and outlets, or actively fight against it using subjective “fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology”, as the lawsuit states.
The tools then determine outlets ‘ compliance with regime messaging, and they use that rating system to compel major companies to place advertisements on their websites, effectively starving them of the revenue needed to operate and compete with regime-approved outlets.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered issues of education and culture for Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow and holds a degree from the University of Virginia. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
