One day before lawmakers on the House Weaponization Committee held their second hearing last week, Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken decrying State Department censorship.
In February, the Washington Examiner exposed the Department of State funneling taxpayer money to a shadow network of corporate censors that operate to suppress dissident media. The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British group that recommends where advertisers spend their marketing dollars, received $330,000 from the Biden State Department.
GDI’s list of websites says the “riskiest” or “worst” offenders of disinformation include conservative outlets such as the American Spectator, Newsmax, The Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post. Some of the outlets it calls the least risky are those that peddled the Russia-collusion hoax and suppressed both the Hunter Biden laptop story and revelations about the pay-to-play scandal implicating then-candidate Joe Biden right before the 2020 election.
“The GDI has used this funding to create a list of news organizations for advertisers and business interests to abstain from doing business … in an attempt to limit these organizations’ participation in the marketplace of ideas,” Buck wrote on Wednesday. “Paying foreign (and domestic) entities to perform what is essentially censorship is troubling on two fronts: it wastes taxpayer funds and undermines constitutional protections for freedom of speech.”
On Thursday, the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government convened its second public hearing with
