Matt Taibbi was recently interviewed by The Hill regarding government funding of censorship.
Taibbi talked about a recent hearing of the House Small Business Committee and the release of an interim report of the Committee on the subject of government censorship.
The Committee hearing was streamed live on June 26, 2024.
On September 12, 2024, the Committee released an interim staff report on their 14-month investigation into federally funded censorship of small domestic businesses.
Small Business: Instruments and Casualties of the Censorship-Industrial Complex
Notice that the report focuses primarily on the Global Engagement Center (GEC) which is a State Department Agency and to a lesser extent, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). NED claims to be an independent, nonprofit foundation “dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world”. They are NOT an independent foundation. They were created by the government in 1983 and they have been funded and doing the business of the government ever since behind the front of an independent foundation. Recommendation 4 of the report is for Oversight of the NED noting that they received $300 million from the government in FY2022.
NED – Origins and Color Revolutions . . .
Public Law 98-164, 98th Congress, establishing the National Endowment for Democracy.
For the most part, the hearing was about the government’s proxy censorship of conservative news and information media – with “government” being defined as the State Department in particular. Before the internet, it was newspapers, television and radio news, magazines, etc. that controlled the information flow to the American people. It was easy to control information because the reporting and distribution of information was cost prohibitive and therefore limited. The internet democratized information and we’ve been in an information war ever since.
Ironically – because I’ve been a conservative for my entire life, some of my first engagements in the information war were against alleged conservatives promoting ‘free trade’ and supporting the mass importation of H-1b visa holders (i.e. cheap labor) to take jobs that should have gone to American citizens. The Chamber of Commerce was the lead organization defending the concept of labor as a commodity and importing labor was no different than importing Japanese cars. National sovereignty along with the meaning and value of American citizenship was flushed right down the toilet. Money over loyalty to country became the highest value.
‘Free trade’ was the mantra of conservatives and guess who was and is the idol of “free traitors”? It was Ronald Reagan who sold out our country with signing of the La Paz treaty with Mexico in 1983 and then to corporate interests in 1984 when he joined the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC) in 1984. The 1986 Vancouver Statement lays out the agenda of the PECC.
