US politicians should be looking out for our interests. Instead they’re conniving with foreigners.
And now this infiltration of the Biden-Harris administration puts Capitol Hill on total lockdown.
Newly released documents reveal that senior Biden-Harris administration officials took cues from British “disinformation” operatives on how to collaborate with social media companies and create an all-encompassing government effort to combat content they disfavor, including information on elections and COVID-19.
This revelation, surfacing as Congress investigates potential censorship tactics by the executive branch ahead of the 2024 election, has sparked a legislative proposal from a House Republican to stop U.S. tax dollars from funding foreign governments that regulate online speech.
The National Security Council (NSC) hosted a private meeting with the U.K.’s Counter Disinformation Unit on August 21, 2021. The British unit, part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, advised U.S. officials on strategies to counter “disinformation.”
America First Legal, a conservative watchdog group, obtained a slide deck shown during the meeting through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The slides, part of hundreds of pages of CDC documents, offer insight into the administration’s potential coordination with foreign governments to regulate speech.
The timing of this document release aligns with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.)—chair of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation—sending letters to President Biden and Vice President Harris requesting information on any political speech suppression campaigns the administration might be running.
Mace is also looking beyond U.S. borders, introducing the No Funds for Fascists Act to block taxpayer money from aiding foreign governments that suppress free speech. The bill would also prevent U.S. assistance to regimes that pressure social media platforms or news outlets to silence certain viewpoints.
“The Biden-Harris administration is so desperate to control speech and information that they’re actually taking advice from foreign governments on how to violate our core constitutional rights,” Mace told Fox News Digital.
“It’s extreme, over-the-top, and un-American. We introduced our ‘No Funds for Fascists’ bill in response to this.”
Michael Ding, counsel for America First Legal, said a congressional investigation into censorship and meetings with foreign governments “that have taken place and are likely still taking place” is critical.
He emphasized the global push to police speech under various banners, whether it’s “election misinformation or COVID-19 disinformation.”
Although the stated focus of the NSC’s 2021 meeting was combatting COVID-19 falsehoods, the British presentation expanded to election-related disinformation.
The British Counter Disinformation Unit boasted about their previous operational responses during the 2019 European elections, the U.K. general election, and other local elections, showing how they coordinate with social media firms, strategic communications teams, and analysis units.
The meeting involved top U.S. government agencies, including the Defense Department, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC, CIA, FBI, and others.
The CDC has declined to comment on the documents, and spokespeople for the NSC and the White House have remained silent on the matter.
The British Counter Disinformation Unit spans multiple departments and agencies, including foreign and domestic policy branches and intelligence services, and aims to present a unified government response to so-called misinformation.
The slide deck from the meeting advised the U.S. to create a similar government-wide unit and proposed regulatory measures targeting tech companies’ handling of misinformation, akin to the U.K.’s Online Safety Act.
One slide promotes the Online Safety Act as making the U.K. “the safest place in the world to be online, while defending the freedom of expression.”
However, Ding dismissed this as “gaslighting,” arguing that the real agenda is censorship. He also warned that U.S. policymakers should consider First Amendment implications, especially in situations where Britain might try to extradite violators of their speech laws.
The British slides also referenced the “duty of care” imposed on tech companies to protect individuals from harm, including disinformation, and suggested leveraging multilateral institutions like the United Nations, G7, and NATO to push this agenda on a global scale.
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