The report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business stated:

“The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech.”

The government’s actions fueled “a censorship ecosystem” that suppressed “individuals’ First Amendment rights” and “the ability of certain small businesses to compete online.”

The report focused on the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which promoted and funded “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space … with domestic censorship capabilities.”

The “fact-checking” firms named in the report include the International Fact-Checking Network — owned by the Poynter Institute — and NewsGuard.

The International Fact-Checking Network, established in 2015, has received funding from another State Department-affiliated group, the National Endowment for Democracy — and from Google, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

According to the House report, the federal government “assisted the private sector in detecting alleged MDM [misinformation-disinformation-malinformation] for moderation” and “worked with foreign governments with strict internet speech laws,” including European Union member states and the United Kingdom, to censor speech.

The report determined that the GEC and the National Endowment for Democracy violated international restrictions by “collaborating with fact-checking entities” to assess the content of domestic media outlets.

The “fact-checking” operations targeted independent media outlets, and as a result, “the scales are tipped in favor of outlets which express certain partisan narratives rather than holding the government accountable.”

Whether the State Department’s actions rise to “unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment is currently before the courts,” the report stated.

The State Department and several GEC officials are defendants in Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit alleging the Biden administration colluded with social media to censor free speech.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and its chairman on leave, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden, a similar lawsuit that last year was consolidated with Murthy v. Missouri.

The Poynter Institute is a defendant in another censorship lawsuit, CHD v. Meta, that CHD filed against Facebook’s parent company.

NewsGuard partnered with CDC, WHO to censor online content

According to the report, NewsGuard used money it received from the GEC and the U.S. Department of Defense to fund efforts to lower the advertising revenue “of businesses purported to spread MDM.”

“A system that rates the credibility of press is fatally flawed as it is subject to the partisan lens of the assessor, making the ratings unreliable,” the report states.

NewsGuard leveraged taxpayer dollars to develop Misinformation Fingerprints, a product that “catalogues what it determines to be the most prominent falsehoods and ‘misinformation narratives’” circulating online, “essentially outsourcing the U.S. government’s perception of fact to NewsGuard,” the report states.

NewsGuard later partnered with dozens of companies, organizations, universities and media outlets, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of the Surgeon General and the World Health Organization (WHO).

“During the pandemic, the WHO enlisted NewsGuard for its input, including regular reports, on which COVID-19 narratives it determined to be misinformation were prevalent online,” the report states. “The WHO then contacted social media companies and search engines asking them to remove this content.”

‘Nobody wanted’ fact-checkers until ‘actual truths started getting out’

Tim Hinchliffe, publisher of The Sociable, told The Defender, “These so-called ‘fact-checkers’ are not in the business of actually checking facts. They are in the business of controlling narratives … Nobody wanted or needed these organizations until actual truths started getting out.”

Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and publisher of the Solari Report and former U.S. assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told The Defender the government increasingly relies on censorship to promote its favored narratives.

“They need to institute more and more censorship,” Fitts said. “It’s hard to refute the gaslighting that flows from this imagination factory.”

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender he wasn’t surprised that the State Department is “working to censor those who disagree with U.S. government policies and their globalist agenda.”

The report recommends that no federal funds “should be used to grow companies whose operations are designed to demonetize and interfere with the domestic press” and that federal agencies “should not be outsourcing their perception of fact to speech-police organizations subject to partisan bias.”

GEC also faces the loss of its government funding. According to the Washington Examiner, “A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, aims to ban future checks to the GEC.”

But for Boyle, this is not enough. He said the State Department has, “at a minimum,” committed “the federal crime of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.”

Censorship ‘a pendulum that swings both ways’

The Gateway Pundit last week reported on additional links between the International Fact-Checking Network, other “fact-checking” firms and Big Tech.

In 2015, Poynter partnered with Google News Lab, which earlier that year, helped establish First Draft News. Active until 2022, First Draft was a consortium of social media verification groups that shared methods for combating “fake news.”

Another First Draft founder, fact-checking firm Bellingcat, also received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.

First Draft was previously led by Claire Wardle, Ph.D., a Brown University professor who, according to “Twitter Files” released last year, advised the Biden administration on COVID-19 “misinformation” — despite having no science or medical credentials.

In 2016, Poynter and the International Fact-Checking Network partnered with First Draft “to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the [news] verification process.” Other partners included Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, NBC News and BBC News.

In 2017, Google News Lab partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network “to dramatically increase the searchable output of fact-checkers worldwide, expand fact-checking to new markets and support fact-checking beyond politics, such as in sports, health and science.” The following year, Poynter acquired PolitiFact.com.

Google was also one of the original funders of The Trust Project, a consortium of news organizations that developed eight “trust indicators” to help the public “easily assess the integrity of news.”

These “trust indicators” later became “one of the sources being used by NewsGuard Technologies for a new product to improve news literacy,” and formed “a foundation for NewsGuard review development.”

Hinchliffe warned that the beneficiaries of censorship based on today’s “fact-checking” may become its targets in the future.

“One of the problems of censorship that operates under the guise of misinformation and disinformation, apart from stifling free speech and suppressing actual truths, is that it’s a pendulum that swings both ways,” he said. “The people calling for censorship now may be in a greater position of power to do so, but it will one day swing back at them.”

The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. Mr. Kennedy, an independent candidate for president of the U.S., is on leave from CHD. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy or his support for President Donald Trump’s campaign.

Or perhaps those already working in the State Department prided themselves on how ultracompetitive it is to win a job as a foreign service officer (FSO)—securing such a position is something of an elite accomplishment—and therefore perhaps they tried behind the scenes to preserve State’s long-established meritocratic character.

Be that as it may, Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, who has served as State’s diversity and inclusion officer since April 2021 (and who plans to step aside soon), defended the department’s push for more DEI in the coming months and years in congressional hearings last week. Among other details, Abercrombie-Winstanley noted that more than 80 percent of the State Department’s diplomatic corps currently is white, implying that that percentage may be too high from a DEI perspective.

The common political slogan used to sell DEI initiatives to the public is that its proponents want such-and-such a workforce to “look more like our country as a whole.” On a superficial level, that slogan may seem innocuous and unobjectionable, but on closer examination, it’s problematic. If looks make the difference between an employee doing a good job or a not-so-good job, then looks would be an important factor in hiring. In reality, however, looks by themselves don’t cut it.

As is always the case with DEI, it introduces a battle of the Q’s—quotas on one hand versus qualifications and qualities on the other. Imagine a volatile political situation in a South American country. The American president wants to pursue a policy of maintaining contacts with various political figures and parties in that country without offending any of those parties since they don’t trust each other. That can require very delicate diplomacy. Do you think the Secretary of State or one of his top deputies would say, “Wait a minute, it’s about time we put a black gay person out there to speak on behalf of our country”? Don’t you think it would be better to deploy a FSO who understands the history, economics, culture, tradition, and language(s) of that country—one with a deep feel for personal sensitivities in that country, and someone who has the moxie and wisdom to accurately communicate our government’s intentions while not committing any potentially disruptive verbal faux pas? We certainly don’t want to risk triggering an international incident just so someone can say domestically, “Well, at least our State Department matches the demographic profile of American society.”

What concerns me most about what looks like the Biden administration’s push for more blacks and fewer whites in the State Department is that the president’s proposed budget calls for $76 million to be spent by the State Department in the next year on DEI initiatives. $76 million?! I realize that amount is probably considered pocket change in today’s Washington, but you could hire 500 people to work in DEI at State for $150,000 in annual salary and still have change left over.

Abercrombie-Winstanley says that State wants to be able to provide a precise breakdown of the composition of its workforce by race, gender, ethnicity, status of disability, etc. Pardon me, but why would State need millions of dollars to do this when computers can keep track of each employee’s identity and print out updated profiles of the entire workforce as often as wanted?

Or maybe the plan for the $76 million is to “beat the bushes” and see how many more of various minorities State can drum up through various recruitment and advertising activities. This is the approach that some colleges have taken. They hire a DEI officer whose job amounts to scouring the countryside to locate members of the desired minority group. Then they convince them to enroll in the DEI officer’s college. (Alas, in the college town where I lived for years—not in Grove City, where I taught —the students that were recruited by DEI turned out to be a disaster for the college. They just weren’t able to handle the coursework.)

The question that State will inevitably have to deal with, whether they like it or not, will be whether the people they’re looking for even exist—that is, whether sufficient numbers of members of various minority groups have the professional expertise and personal qualities needed to handle the formidable challenges of a FSO.

Certainly, in this day of Zoom conferences and instant communications, State can find inexpensive ways to send recruiting materials to every college in the land without coming close to spending $76 million. If they want to try to find more qualified minorities, fine, but throwing a lot of money at the problem seems gratuitous.

One problem with the DEI movement is that they’re looking for a quick fix to a longstanding problem. It is true that certain minorities seem underrepresented in important places like the State Department. But what if the desired numbers of truly qualified minorities just aren’t there? We, as a society, need to address the root causes of underqualified minorities. My nominee for first among those root causes is the sorry state of public education in so many of our inner cities. I say that as one who did some teaching in urban schools decades ago, both visiting a number of schools in a substitute capacity and then teaching and counseling at a special inner-city school for dropouts. Frankly, by the time students left those broken schools (finally escaping from them), they were doomed never to acquire the intellectual skills needed for a demanding job like FSO.

If the Biden administration wants to start expanding opportunities for minorities, it should turn its attention to improving education. That means somehow breaking away from its codependence on teachers’ unions and making school choice universal. Fix the schools, and over the next generation, many of the undesirable racial and other disparities in the adult job market will show marked improvement.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times. Image by AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.