The Spending Bill Would Fund Censorship
The bipartisan spending bill that would avoid an upcoming government shutdown has run into trouble, with both President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk coming out against it.
Among the many good reasons to oppose the bill was the inclusion of a particularly pernicious spending item. Talk about betrayal: The bill would have appropriated funds for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the Biden administration’s instrument of mass censorship.
The agency is reviled by conservatives, and rightly so. According to the Washington Examiner‘s Gabe Kaminsky, whose terrific reporting has shed light on serious free speech violations and wrongdoing committed by the GEC, Republicans have credibly accused “the GEC of orchestrating a speech suppression campaign against conservatives alongside left-wing nonprofit groups and social media companies.” Indeed, defunding the GEC has been an important Republican policy goal.
Needless to say, this was quite the betrayal.
Recall that the GEC allocates State Department funding—i.e., taxpayer dollars—to the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British nonprofit that pressured advertisers to stop working with certain news sites. Those sites included several conservative news websites like The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and Newsmax; Reason was also a target. The index considered Reason to be one of the “ten riskiest online news outlets,” for contradictory and misleading reasons.
The GDI has a First Amendment right to make whatever claims it wants. But an organization working toward greater restrictions on speech should not be a recipient of government funding. The muzzling of conservative a
Article from Reason.com
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