Taxpayer Dollars Must Not Fund the Government-Led Censorship Regime | Opinion – Newsweek
We Americans have been paying the feds to silence ourselves and interfere in our own elections, under a government-led Disinformation-Industrial Complex that has been brought into clear view through the yeoman efforts of a single billionaire entrepreneur, journalists, and activists, red state attorneys' general, and the House Judiciary Committee's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Perhaps because of this exposure, one of the federal agencies most integral to this byzantine censorship regime has been covering up its tracks.
Yet during a recent hearing of the House Appropriations Committee's Homeland Security subcommittee with the leader of said agency, the agency's scandalous behavior was not a core focus of the discussion.
One subcommittee member largely led the questioning touching on CISA's speech policing. Every member should have.
There was little indication appropriators intended to leverage the power of the purse to compel the agency to cease its censorship effortsthat is, to defund the censorship regime, and perhaps to dismantle it outright.
If Republicans are committed to combatting the ongoing assault against the core of our First Amendmentpolitical speechwhich could worsen as the 2024 election approaches, it is incumbent upon them to take a significantly more aggressive posture in defense of our liberties.
As disaffected liberal journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, as well as Sen. (and former Missouri Attorney General) Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, and Missouri Special Assistant Attorney General D. John Sauer all detailed in recent Weaponization Subcommittee hearings, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has served as a key cog in the Disinformation-Industrial Complex.
That complex, linking the administrative state to Big Tech and myriad often government-funded and ex-government employee-staffed "counter-disinformation" organizations, has created a moral panic over "mis-, dis-, and mal-information" (MDM), which it has tied to threats to public health and safety as a pretext to censoring unauthorized opinions.
The Disinformation-Industrial Complex's stated purpose is the protection of The People. The actual purpose is the protection of The Ruling Regime, through narrative control.
The plaintiffs in Missouri and Louisiana et al. v. Biden, who testified recently before the Weaponization Subcommittee, describe CISA as the "nerve center" of the federal government's censorship activities.
They allege that the Biden administration cajoled and colluded with social media platforms to "suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content...under the Orwellian guise of halting" MDM, violating the First Amendment and other laws in the process.
Among the defendants in the case are numerous Biden administration officials, including the president himself, former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, and CISA Director Jen Easterly.
As a measure of her perspective on speech, Easterly has previously asserted that "the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure," and has pledged that CISA will "work with our partners in the private sector," including social media companies, "to ensure that the American people have the facts that they need to help protect our critical infrastructure."
CISA has operated accordingly, expanding its definition of "infrastructure" to encompass virtually everything; its focus has shifted from "foreign interference" to domestic Wrongthinkcodified in transitioning its Countering Foreign Influence Task Force into its MDM teamand its mandate is now suppressing such Wrongthink if it has a nexus to "infrastructure."
This is the logic by which the Americans, myself included, who raised issues about the integrity of the 2020 electionand have thereby been treated by CISA as a threat to election "infrastructure"found ourselves censored.
A March 7, 2023 filing in Missouri and Louisiana et al. v. Biden, synthesizing voluminous discovery material and depositions from parties critical of the censorship regime, details CISA's centrality to the federal government's censorship efforts.
The filing records that CISA officials:
Much of the MDM these parties have combated concerns elections and aspects of the Chinese coronavirus, including information known by authorities to be true, if it undermined their preferred narratives. Evidence suggests CISA has also focused on "financial misinformation and disinformation," as well as offending content around the Russo-Ukrainian War. CISA has even pushed for censoring "supposed disinformation about CISA itself," according to the filing.
The day that filing hit the docket, Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, reported that in the prior week CISA had purged its website of references to its domestic censorship work.
Just over two weeks later, on March 24, Taibbi and journalist Susan Schmidt reported that CISA had several months earlier quietly disbanded its advisory "Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation" subcommittee.
Four days after that, CISA Director Easterly came before the House Appropriations Committee, asking for a 22 percent increase in CISA's budget for fiscal year 2024 to $3.1 billion. As the chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee, Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio), noted in prepared remarks, CISA's budget has already increased nearly 44 percent over the three preceding years.
Despite this ballooning agency budget, requests for still more money, and the well-documented ways such funds have fueled America's public-private censorship regimea conspiracy to violate the First Amendment that constitutes taxpayer-funded election interferenceCISA's speech policing garnered little scrutiny.
Rep. Michael Cloud's (R-Tex.) questioning of Easterly on her agency's role in the Disinformation-Industrial Complex was an exception. To Cloud's questions, Easterly responded that "We don't censor anything...we don't flag anything to social media organizations." She added: "We are focused on building resilience to foreign influence and disinformation."
By contrast, as Benz's organization summarized its extensive findings about CISA, this "agency in charge of securing elections is also in charge of censoring elections."
Two days later, before the Weaponization subcommittee, Louisiana Attorney General Landry would testify that CISA "aims to protect our collective consciousness from independent thought and inquiry at the individual level."
Neither CISA nor any government agency should be in this business whatsoever.
Nor should any government agency be weaponized against the public, in violation of our most fundamental rights.
Some House Republicans have acknowledged this in raising the threat of withholding funding for the FBI's new glitzy headquarters.
But efforts to leverage the power of the purse must extend far beyond any one agency, because our liberties are under virtually government-wide assault.
Why should Americans pay a single cent more for our own subjugation?
Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He also contributes to The Federalist, the New York Post, The Epoch Times, and other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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Taxpayer Dollars Must Not Fund the Government-Led Censorship Regime | Opinion - Newsweek