Since 2017, MRCTV has been covering a metastasizing story that is umbilically tied to the continuing attempt by many U.S. Republicans, Democrats, and the establishment media to portray as “Russian collusion” any criticism of weapons-welfare to Ukraine, any defense of free speech, any opposition to censorship – and to paint as “disinformation” what actually is valid criticism of the “anthropogenic climate change” cult, valid promotion of medical liberty, and any defense of the Bill of Rights.
As I wrote at the time of its passage, the lynchpin of federal funding for this massive, multi-tentacled menace to free speech was the Portman-Murphy Countering Foreign Propaganda Act, a bill I criticized as it was debated in 2016, which levered the growing government canard of “Russian interference” while promoting the false notion of Russian antagonism against the U.S., and a bill that, when passed in December of that year as part of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA – a yearly blimp of “must-pass” spending that levers American people’s support for the military as a mask to pass all kinds of poison) allocated $150 MILLION dollars for two years to be sent to any media outlet or media-related outlet that operatives of the federal government claimed “countered” what they arbitrarily called “foreign propaganda.”
In 2018, MRCTV warned that conservative and libertarian media were being “shadow-banned” and silenced by pro-government forces at certain social media, and our posts were being unduly portrayed as “misinformation” by leftist cutouts such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.
By 2021, we were attempting to alert Americans that, after a brief pause during the Trump Administration, legislators in Congress had reauthorized the Portman-Murphy graft, and that, in addition to countless unknown media wings that might have been receiving “compensation” for singing the Siren socialist songs numerous DC politicians wanted, the feds had created something called the “Global Engagement Center.”
That collectivist censorship creature was – IS -- abbreviated “GEC." And, as some of the few people trying to warn others of this, even as more Americans justifiably opposed the obnoxious and immoral “Ministry of Truth” under Nina Jankowicz, MRCTV soon acknowledged investigative journalist Matt Taibbi's reports that the GEC had ties to the Pentagon and DARPA on the government side, and to propagandistic “fact-check” groups such as the falsely-purported “independent” NewsGuard, and the “Virality Project” and “Election Integrity Project” at Stanford University.
And now, nearly eight years after the passage of the constitution-insulting Portman-Murphy, a House Committee is shining more light on the wickedness of the GEC.
And Matt Taibbi is on it. Writing at Racket News, he reports:
“The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a ‘counter-messaging’ operation of the State Department created in Barack Obama’s last year in office, is raked over the coals in a new House investigation. The Committee’s work confirms reports by Racket and the Washington Examiner about taxpayer-funded censorship, but goes beyond to detail a more profound corruption of the agency’s ostensible mission.
‘The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech,’ the House Committee on Small Business found, adding that GEC ‘circumvented its strict international mandate’ by funding private contractors with ‘domestic censorship capabilities.’”
Evidently because the GEC did not promptly respond to the committee’s requests for files, the House report has been a long-time-coming, and, even in its eventually-released docs, the GEC has attempted to retain a veil of secrecy as to who, or what orgs, actually RECEIVED OUR TAX CASH TO SILENCE US.
Writes Taibbi:
“Not only did the Committee find evidence the State Department strategized to discredit reporting both by me and by Gabe Kaminsky of the Examiner (see reader note, coming), it also showed the State Department blazing new trails in the annals of ‘the dog ate my homework’ chutzpah in response to Congressional oversight requests. ‘Despite the fact the Committee subpoenaed documents which it had been requesting for more than 14 months,’ the Committee wrote, ‘State said it would take approximately 21 months from the date of the subpoena to produce these documents in full — around March 2026.’”
And how about that “promotion of truth” canard the feds overtly adopted or implied? The federal transparency of their censor-network stands in stark contrast to that illusion.
Writes Taibbi:
“Worse, when the Committee asked GEC for basic contractor information:
Categories were provided for several recipients rather than specific organizations or individuals, such as $240,136 for ‘Radio Programmes’ [sic] and $42,600 for ‘On-Air Discussion…’ In six instances, subawardees were just the first names of individuals… in one instance the field denoted ‘Report mentions subpartners; unable to find details…’”
What a shock!
“Since January of last year, GEC has been the focus of multiple Racket and Twitter Files stories, because of its role in Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, the ties GEC personnel had to the infamous Hamilton 68 “Russian influence” dashboard, and other reasons. In February of last year, meanwhile, Kaminsky of the Examiner launched a brutal investigative series that began by describing GEC’s funding of the UK-based Global Disinformation Index, showing how U.S. taxpayers unwittingly funded conscious efforts to take away revenue from American businesses like the New York Post, the Federalist, and RealClearPolitics.”
As I reported in February of 2023, the GDI blacklisted some 2,000 websites, even as it was utilized by then Microsoft-tied Xnder, an “advertiser advice” site that promoted or demoted sites that its people either liked or wanted to portray as “disinformation.”
And, as Taibbi notes, it was that facet of this giant bureaucratic balloon of corruption that inspired the members of the House Small Business Committee to investigate and pinpoint the GEC.
“Chairman Roger Williams of Texas last year demanded the State Department turn over an ‘unredacted list of all GEC grant recipients’ from 2019 through the present. As reported here at Racket and in the Examiner, Secretary of State Antony Blinken responded with a remarkable letter. Complaining about Examiner reporting, Blinken declared that without a ‘better understanding’ of how the Committee planned to ‘utilize this sensitive information,’ he would only release information in an ‘in camera setting.’ Even in camera, however, the State Department claimed lost records while submitting answers of the ‘We spent money on discussions and stuff’ variety.
Despite stonewalling, the Committee was able to answer a slew of key questions raised in nearly two years of reporting. The struggle to identify GEC’s contractors (especially those with stateside presences) ultimately revealed a larger ugly truth, namely that the ostensibly outward-facing State Department is pouring resources into a broad new propaganda mission at home…”
This Congressional investigation could have started in 2016, as deceitful and thuggish members of Congress pushed the Portman-Murphy Act, sponsored by then-Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) and Chris Murphy (D-CT), because not only was the concept of it an insult to the US Constitution and civilized society, its pushers simultaneously were promoting the bogeyman of Russian “influence” in virtually everything from the DNC email leak (which former NSA computer specialist William Binney definitively showed could not have been a HACK, but had to have been done inside the building) to libertarian websites like Zerohedge.
Related: New Twitter Files Reveal DoD, CIA, DARPA, More, In Massive Network To Silence Conservatives
There is much, much more to be garnered from Mr. Taibbi’s excellent report, but two final takeaways stand, at this moment in the “investigate-but-do-nothing” Congressional committee process.
First: GEC influence saw Twitter censorship.
Second: using what were, in essence, shell organizations, GEC spread money and influence to those orgs, which, in turn, portrayed their “misinformation analyses” as “independent” when they all were working in unison or pushed by the same centralized censorship mentality, originating in DC.
Writes Taibbi:
“The New York Post last week reported that the State Department circulated an internal memo strategizing talking points to poke holes in reports by Kaminsky (the Examiner's Gabe Kaminsky) and me. The memo described in Christenson’s (NY Post’s Josh Christenson) ‘State Department tried to discredit reporters’ story is more amusing than scary. Memo is more amusing than scary. It contains lines like ‘GEC does not and has never attempted to moderate content on social media platforms,’ which is a little like Starbucks saying it never sold coffee. GEC’s claim that it never tried to ‘moderate’ content is a semantic somersault: that above the gigantic lists of account names it sent to the platforms, it wrote things like ‘Below is an initial list of accounts that Twitter could consider,’ instead of ‘Zap all 5000 of these.’”
And Kaminski discovered the funding connection between the GEC and the GDI:
“During the months that I was first looking into GDI, I noticed that the British group listed one of its supporters on its website as Park Advisors, a counterterrorism firm affiliated with the State Department,” he says. “It was only after repeatedly contacting the State Department that the agency informed me that its Global Engagement Center awarded $100,000 to GDI through Park Advisors. The award was for a program that counted the Atlantic Council as a partner, among other organizations.”
MRCTV readers likely are aware that the Atlantic Council is tied to NATO, and that, in 2016, the DNC did not give its computers to the FBI after its claimed “Russian Hack” but gave the drives to Crowdstrike, which, at the time, was run by Dmitri Alperovich, who, simultaneously, was a member of - you got it - the Atlantic Council.
Hence, we keep in mind the fact that the “Russian Hack” canard was unfounded, as William Binney pointed out, because the data could not have been transferred through external lines as rapidly as it was moved. It had to have been transferred via direct, internal computer connections.
And, to wrap up this multi-year tale of corruption, Taibbi reports:
“The issue wasn’t the size of the award, but rather what that money funded. GDI puts out a product called a “Dynamic Exclusion List” — a blacklist— designed to help firms like Google “eliminate digital advertising as a revenue source” for disfavored outlets. Nearly all GDI’s blacklisted outlets were conservative, while NPR (rated ‘neutral, fact-based content’) and The Atlantic (a perfect 100/100) topped trust lists.”
So, when we consider this ongoing problem, let’s also consider the fact that the majority of “Justices” on the US Supreme Court recently claimed that doctors such as Jay Battacharya and other plaintiffs in the “Murthy v. Missouri” federal-social-media censorship case could not bring the suit to be argued at that level because they “had no standing” as victims who were harmed.
The very idea that the government takes our money to silence anyone means we have been HARMED.
The insults added to it, and the attempts to hide the multitudinous ways they try to silence us are the dark polish on their ugly art.
And it does not matter how the censors try to hide what they do. MRCTV and diligent journalists such as Taibbi are uncovering the truth, and more people are seeking it.