House Republicans are expanding their ongoing investigation into the federal government’s vast efforts to censor Americans’ ability to speak freely online.
“The federal government cannot circumvent constitutional protections by using private actors to accomplish what the State itself is prohibited from doing,” Texas GOP Reps. Roger Williams and Beth Van Duyne write in a letter to the Global Engagement Center’s (GEC) James Rubin. Williams and Van Duyne chair the Committee on Small Business and the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Regulations, respectively.
As The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland reported, the GEC is a U.S. State Department subagency that “funded the development of censorship tools and used ‘government employees to act as sales reps pitching the censorship products to Big Tech.’”
Through GEC, State funded the Global Disinformation Index, a so-called “disinformation” tracking organization “working to blacklist and defund conservative news sites,” including The Federalist. Notably, Rubin and the GEC are named defendants in a lawsuit filed by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas last month to stop the federal government’s censorship operations.
In their letter to Rubin, Williams and Van Duyne highlighted how the GEC subsidized third-party organizations that “discredit certain small businesses (and their owners) based on their political speech and viewpoints,” which sought to “pressure advertising and social media companies to remove certain businesses’ online advertisements, disallow ad placement on businesses’ websites, remove online speech, and ban accounts entirely.” As noted by the GOP representatives, this censorship apparatus “overwhelmingly” blocked conservative speech.
While Rubin and the
