OPINION:
How President Biden and left activists built the censorship conglomerate is the story of government activists, taxpayer slush funds and a determination by liberals not to share journalism with unwashed conservatives.
A clearer, uncensored picture emerged in the lingering months of Mr. Biden’s rule and its 2025 aftermath. The left’s free speech crackdown was finally exposed by dogged Republican officeholders and conservative foot soldiers.
Hoaxes like the Steele dossier, President Trump and a Russian bank, “Trump grabbed the steering wheel,” exoneration of Wuhan virus lab, Jussie Smollett, Michael Avenatti, Russian bounties on Americans, letter of 51 Obama former intelligence officials — all would have thrived for long destructive shelf lives if not for conservative debunkers.
That, of course, is what galls the liberal media. To them, there was no Biden senility. The southern border cartel takeover and the Biden family influence peddling were non-stories. Mr. Biden was “sharp as a tack.” Criminal illegal immigrants pick our crops. An ABC News anchor corrected Vice President J.D. Vance about Tren de Aragua. The imported Venezuela terrorists only took control of two apartment complexes in Colorado. Just two.
The journalism revolution came via the most important invention since fire and the light bulb.
With the internet, journalism was no longer locked up in a cabal of leftist urban newspapers, elite broadcasts like NPR and CBS “60 Minutes” and Democratic Party talking points.
Conservatives broke stories. We know, for example, how the FBI pressed Twitter and Facebook to censor the authentic Hunter Biden laptop story — even though the bureau verified it the year before.
If there was a dawn of the Biden censorship age, a conservative group discovered it.
On March 20, America First Legal, founded by now-Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, released new internal documents obtained through a lawsuit showing an important internal email.
The player was the Global Engagement Center (GEC) at the State Department. President Obama created the GEC to supposedly counter foreign enemy propaganda. But under Mr. Biden, it moved its sights to the homeland and focused on American conservative media.
GEC partnered with the U.S. Agency for International Development to shoot down the debate on COVID-19. GEC also coordinated with a foreign government, the British Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office.
But more importantly, GEC allied with private liberal censoring firms Poynter and NewsGuard, which provided its artificial intelligence tool which supposedly detects “fingerprints” of misinformation.
Here is the dawn. Three days after Mr. Biden won the Nov. 3, 2020 election, NewsGuard started an email chain to pitch its services. One recipient was Park Advisors, directed by an Obama State alumnus, which identifies “security threats in the information environment.”
Park Advisors received $6 million from the State’s GEC. According to the House Small Business Committee, Park Advisors then distributed awards to NewsGuard, the Atlantic Council and the Global Disinformation Index, a George Soros-financed operation that tries to get advertisers to abandon conservative websites.
NewsGuard, which maintains it is not government-funded, also shared its AI “fingerprint” with the military’s U.S. Cyber Command and the communications-hacking National Security Agency.
“The partnership between USAID and the Global Engagement Center is bad news for the American people,” said Andrew Block, American First Legal senior counsel. “Add in the fact that they were coordinating with internet censorship enforcers at NewsGuard and Poynter, and you can start to see just how dangerous this unholy alliance is for free speech and free expression.”
On March 12, Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, used his X account to publish a virtual spreadsheet on how the Democrat censorship machine geared up under Mr. Biden.
“The left spent the past decade building a vast censorship enterprise. A shadowy network of NGOs, tech groups and governments working to censor the left’s enemies — not just in America, but across the West,” Mr. Schmitt said.
He added, “But the Biden administration mobilized an unholy alliance of government power, taxpayer dollars, NGOs and Big Tech companies to build it into a global censorship powerhouse. Seemingly every agency was a partner in building this system: FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS, State Department, Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, USAID — even FEMA.”
For example, the National Science Foundation, a federal agency in 2020-22, handed out $31 million to research “the science of stopping viral ideas.” It gave $5.7 million to an AI company “dedicated to taking and censoring ‘misinformation.’”
Mr. Schmitt also highlighted one of the worst offenders: the government-funded Global Disinformation Index. The non-profit organization is in the U.K. So, the Biden administration launders cash through the State’s GEC to GDI, which then tries to ruin conservative news sites by scaring advertisers.
The House Small Business Committee found that the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy gave GDI hundreds of thousands of dollars. The committee said this “violated its international restrictions by collaborating with fact-checking entities in assessing domestic press businesses’ admission to a credibility organization.”
The website Unherd showed a list of media analyzed by GDI. All the good grades went to left-wing publications, some hard left such as NPR and ProPublica. The “most dangerous” grades were tattooed on conservatives, who write news stories with which the GDI disagrees.
In December, the House Judiciary Committee and the select weaponization subcommittee wrapped up work with a 17,000-page report that included “the government’s use of nongovernmental entities to censor Americans by proxy.”
One aspect: How Biden operatives attempted to rig AI public output to exclude conservative positions. Like other reports, it singled out the government’s National Science Foundation grants.
“In the name of combating alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election, NSF has been issuing multi-million-dollar grants to university and non-profit research teams,” the report said. “The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop artificial intelligence powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others.”
The dusk.
Mr. Trump now has plenty of data on which to strip the federal budget of censorship operations.
I concede there are vocal conservative critics of the liberal news media. But I know of no comparable organization like NewsGuard or GDI that tries to bully advertisers and shut down liberal news sites.
Congress cut off money for the State’s Global Engagement Center, which died in December. No Obama-Biden federal judge could save it.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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