Inflation undoubtedly will be part of Joe Biden’s legacy. So will his massive promotions of, and demands for, transgenderism for children and abortion for the unborn. Also his open doors practices that created untold long-term problems for America with an invasion of criminal gangs and more.
But a constitutional expert has defined Biden’s legacy as censorship.
Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University, said in a commentary that one good thing is the recent closure of Biden’s censorship-demanding Global Engagement Center.
“However, even with the closure of this one office, Biden will leave behind the most comprehensive censorship system in the history of the United States,” he explained.
That work was done through “a comprehensive system of grants to academic and third party organizations to create blacklists or to pressure advertisers to withdraw support for targeted sites. The subjects for censorship ranged from election fraud to social justice to climate change,” he explained.
“The demise of the GEC is a good start. However, like weight loss resolutions, it will take much more of a commitment if we are going to restore free speech in the United States. It is time to make the ultimate resolution to rip out the censorship root and stem from our government,” he said.
He pointed out that Biden was fighting to keep the GEC funding as recently as just weeks ago.
“I testified at the first hearing by the special committee investigating the censorship system funded or coordinated by the Biden administration. It is an unprecedented alliance of corporate, government, and academic groups against free speech in the United States. The Biden administration established the most anti-free speech record since the Adams administration,” Turley explained.
“House investigations showed the critical role played by government officials in ‘switchboarding,’ or channeling demands for removal or bans in social media. Officials evaded the limits of the First Amendment by using these groups as surrogates for censorship.”
He said Biden has installed similar throughout the government, including in the bureaucracies in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security, “which emerged as one of the critical control centers in this system.”
It was Biden’s CISA chief, Jen Easterly, who insisted her mandate was to control “our cognitive infrastructure,” including “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “malinformation.”
Another feature of the scheme was the Election Integrity Partnership, “created in association with Stanford University ‘at the request of DHS/CISA.'”
That group even went after satire, putting the Babylon Bee in the crosshairs, he explained.
He continued:
”Stanford’s Virality Project pushed to censor even true facts since “true stories … could fuel hesitancy” over taking the vaccine or other measures. Emails show government officials stressing that they could not be seen as “openly endors[ing]” censorship while other groups sought to minimize public scrutiny of their work.
For example, one article featured the work of Kate Starbird, director and co-founder of the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public. In one communication, Starbird cautioned against giving examples of disinformation to keep them from being used by critics, adding “since everything is politicized and disinformation inherently political, every example is bait.”
Likewise, University of Michigan’s James Park is shown pitching that school’s WiseDex First Pitch program, promising that “our misinformation service helps policy makers at platforms who want to . . . push responsibility for difficult judgments to someone outside the company . . . by externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship.”
The conspiracy focused on targeting “conservative and libertarian sites” as “disinformation” but assuring the public that “liberal sites were … the most trustworthy.”
While he warned, “The system is still in place,” the closure of the GEC is “something to celebrate.”
He said Biden’s agenda included “an estimated 80 FBI agents secretly targeting citizens and groups…” in a system that “functioned like a multiheaded hydra where cutting off one head only allows two more to grow back.”
“These censors will not simply walk away and become dentists or bartenders. They have a skill set for censorship and this is now a profitable industry supporting scores of people who now market themselves as ‘disinformation specialists,'” he said.
He said the solution is a law “barring any federal funds for the use of censorship, including grants to academic and NGO groups.”
