Taxpayer Funded Censorship Deserves To Be Destroyed
The National Endowment for Democracy targeted Americans on their own dime
Eli Lake has a piece in The Free Press this morning complaining that Donald Trump (via Elon Musk) is defunding the National Endowment for Democracy, a prominent CIA front group that has been one of the worst actors on press freedom over the past several years and deserves not one dime of taxpayer funds.
It’s inevitable that divides are going to emerge within the Trumpian coalition as the team he has in place goes after exactly the same NGOs which took sides against him personally, and escalated their targeted attempts to silence and sideline conservative/contrarian groups during the pandemic, given that many of them employ the vestiges of a neocon Republican foreign policy establishment that once played nice with the blob. This is one such example.
Here’s a report from September by The Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky — who has been all over the story in multiple articles (here, here, here) — outlining how the NED funded to the tune of millions the efforts to smear journalists, online entities, and attack the funding and advertising supporting them based on fraudulent claims, illegally attempting to influence (successfully) American media:
The 66-page report was prepared by investigators on the Republican-led House Small Business Committee. For over a year, the panel has sought sprawling funding records from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center on its programs fighting alleged disinformation and misinformation. That investigation began due to a series of Washington Examiner reports on the office bankrolling the Global Disinformation Index — a British group pressuring advertisers to defund right-of-center media outlets in the U.S.
The release of the report comes as the Global Engagement Center, which has an estimated budget of $61 million and a staff of 125, faces the potential to lose funding over GOP-led frustrations about its involvement with apparent domestic censorship groups. A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, aims to ban future checks to the GEC. The office is also facing a lawsuit from conservative media outlets over the $100,000 the GEC sent to GDI and its support of a company called NewsGuard that rates the “misinformation” levels of news outlets.
Titled “Instruments and Casualties of the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” the House report argues the GEC promoted “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.” Moreover, the report argues the National Endowment for Democracy, a State Department-funded nonprofit group that awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDI, “violated its international restrictions by collaborating with fact-checking entities in assessing domestic press businesses’ admission to a credibility organization.”
More here from Jonathan Turley. I don’t care if The Free Press thinks NED was a good guy during the Cold War, that’s like saying the FBI was the good guys during prohibition; it’s another bloated D.C. entity that weaponized the opinions of the likes of Anne Applebaum to deliberately target American journalists with smears and lies. It deserves no support whatsoever from the American taxpayer, who currently pay its former Susan Rice intern head more than the president of the United States. Go get your funding from shining Alexander Soros’s shoes like a typical gross international non-profit.
The weaponization of places like the NED has had a deleterious effect on the trust of Americans for the institutions they once thought were responsive to the American people, and ultimately their efforts to censor backfired when seen in the light of day thanks to the likes of Kaminsky, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Shellenberger. That's a good thing.
Tulsi Gabbard Confirmed Easily
Despite frequent claims that Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to be director of national intelligence was in danger, repeated ad nauseam in the Washington press, ultimately she didn’t even need J.D. Vance to come back to break a tie. Only Mitch McConnell broke with the rest of his Republican colleagues to oppose her confirmation, which — as I’ve previously written — was never in doubt once she got out of the Intelligence Committee.
Yet it’s worth noting one of the untoward prices paid along the way, given the egregious nature of its violation of the separation of powers. Indiana senator Todd Young, a member of the Senate Republican coalition not noted for his intellectual capacity or the respect of his peers, chose to make, as a price of his support, a list of demands of Lieutenant Colonel Gabbard. Young’s conditions were viewed as astounding by more than one of his Senate colleagues.
In a lengthy message on the eve of the Intel Committee’s vote, Senator Young insisted that the nominee commit to numerous promises that run afoul of any basic understanding of the separation of powers, in a litany that included a commitment to inform his office of every time that Gabbard travels abroad — something never asked of a previous DNI, a clear violation of expectations of secrecy on the part of service to the executive and a demand that would render moot the ability of the DNI to engage in sensitive behind-the-scenes negotiations.
One senator’s chief of staff joked to me that the price of serving in an intelligence role is apparently now “wearing a LoJack”, while another top staffer for a different senator labeled the Indiana Republican “Todd ‘Nanny-Cam’ Young”.
Yet there is something serious about all of this — and it will almost certainly be tested in the coming months of the administration. Given the levels of suspicion and demands some Republican senators have regarding Trump’s contrarian cabinet — including Gabbard but also Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel and potentially others — attempts to cordon off their ability to make sweeping change is absolutely something to expect from senators whose priorities align more with Trump’s critics than his supporters. Overstepping the bounds of the Constitution is already something they’ve shown a willingness to entertain with demands like this — and if they’re willing to do so publicly, expect more clumsy attempts to undermine behind the scenes.
The Pre-2014 Ukraine Borders Are Kaput
The prospect of Ukraine returning to its pre-2014 borders is “an unrealistic objective,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, the first territorial parameters to be publicly set by the administration amid a push for negotiated settlement to end the war with Russia.
Speaking Wednesday in Brussels during his first trip to Europe as Pentagon chief, Hegseth rejected sending U.S. troops to Ukraine, adding that any security guarantees offered to Kyiv “must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.”
He also took Ukraine’s accession into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization off the table. “The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” he said.
Hegseth’s comments were the first detailed outlines of what Washington’s support for Ukraine could look like going forward and what it would seek to end the war. During the presidential campaign, President Trump vowed to end the war immediately upon entering office.
Hegseth called for an outcome in which “a durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again.” But outlining the U.S. position before formal talks begin could cost the administration valuable negotiating leverage.
While Ukraine has said it wants all of its territory back, it also has said it now would struggle to reclaim the roughly 20% now occupied by Russia as a result of the war, which began in 2022. Zelensky has said that he hopes Western partners will help Ukraine negotiate a diplomatic deal for the return of its territory. Russia also seized Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula, from Ukraine in 2014.
More: Ukraine prepared to offer territory swap.
The Realignment Continues
Donald Trump’s pro-union Labor pick.
Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Oregon’s first Republican congresswoman and Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Labor, was raised in California by a Mexican American Teamster. Her father, Richard Chavez, who worked at a Safeway milk plant in the Central Valley, reportedly leaned on his union card to help his daughter last year, when she was seeking labor endorsements in a bid for reëlection. The Portland-area Teamsters council was persuaded to pledge its support, the first time it had backed a Republican for Congress in more than twenty years. Chavez-DeRemer lost that race, then quickly pivoted to a new campaign—for Labor Secretary. She was put forward by Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, who described her as “the exact type of champion for the American worker that Republicans should get behind if they are serious about becoming the working-class party.” O’Brien identifies as a Democrat but gave a speech on behalf of the labor movement at last year’s Republican National Convention. Trump, in his first term, had established a national council “for empowering American workers,” and promised in his second Inaugural Address to fix “our trade system to protect American workers and families.” His policy record is something else entirely; the A.F.L.-C.I.O. union federation has described it as “catastrophic and devastating.” He has opposed increases in the minimum wage and favored right-to-work laws that make it difficult for unions to operate. He cut public health care and used tax cuts to redistribute more than a trillion dollars to the richest Americans.
Chavez-DeRemer generally stuck with the G.O.P. during her two years in Congress, but diverged in telling ways: by co-sponsoring both the PRO Act, a bill strongly associated with Joe Biden and the Democrats, which would make it much easier to form a union, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would guarantee the right to organize for state employees. By nominating her, “the Administration is trying to deliver on the idea of the conservative labor movement,” Abigail Ball, the executive director of American Compass, a conservative economics think tank, told me. Vice-President J. D. Vance has lamented the country’s decline in union membership and vowed to “protect as many workers’ jobs as possible.” Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, of Pennsylvania, who just this week paid tribute to the “millions of hardworking public servants” in the federal workforce, has a voting history that’s far more labor-friendly than Chavez-DeRemer’s, according to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. And the Missouri senator Josh Hawley has presented himself as a guardian of the American working class, though often in nativist terms, against the threat of “illegal aliens newly authorized to work.”
If, at least in recent history, the labor movement has situated itself within a progressive coalition, some unionists may now be breaking out, to get what they can from the Republicans. Many workers voted MAGA—sixty per cent of Teamsters wanted the union to endorse Trump—and expect the G.O.P. to follow through on its promises. According to Mike Ingrao, a former A.F.L.-C.I.O. official who worked as a labor consultant for Chavez-DeRemer, it’s important for the trade-union movement not “to be tied exclusively to any party.”
Next week, Chavez-DeRemer will appear before the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) on her way to a full Senate vote. If confirmed, she will lead a large agency whose two dozen sub-agencies enforce more than a hundred and eighty laws on wages and overtime, child labor, health and safety, plant closures, and pensions, affecting a hundred and sixty-five million workers. The loudest opposition to her nomination so far comes from the HELP committee member Rand Paul, the junior Republican senator from Kentucky, who said that he would vote against her, based on her advocacy of the PRO Act. (Other Republicans have publicly criticized her views, too.) Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of the committee, was measured in his assessment of her independence. “Do I think that this Secretary of Labor, or any Secretary of Labor, will have enormous power?” he told me. “She will not.”
So far, Chavez-DeRemer has been a faithful, if vague, messenger for Trump, promising to “Make America Work Again” and to find “pragmatic solutions to support hardworking Americans.” (Her social-media posts are almost all we have to go on, since she isn’t speaking to the press.) Yet the first weeks of Trump’s second term—a blizzard of attacks on federal employees, labor-related agencies, immigrant workers, and jobs programs—have shown the fundamental contradiction of having “a pro-union supporter of the PRO Act nominated by an Administration that has Elon Musk at the helm,” Judy Conti, the director of government affairs at the National Employment Law Project, told me. “I don’t know how much authority she is going to have to do good things for workers, or whether she is going to enact Elon Musk’s agenda.”
Feature
R.R. Reno: Pope Francis’s Apocalyptic Dream.
Items of Interest
Foreign
Marc Fogel released from Russian prison.
Russia plans to target Americans with nuclear propaganda.
Sheinbaum tries to refocus tariffs conversation.
U.S. ramps up surveillance of Mexican cartels.
Vance sends a strong message to Europe.
The future for Hamas’s tunnels.
Domestic
The method in Elon Musk’s madness.
Are Trump’s workforce overhauls legal?
John Thune takes a victory lap on cabinet confirmations.
Lawmakers split over reining in the Fed.
Trump’s executive orders tee up power contest.
Why Trump loves corrupt Democrats.
Eric Adams owes Donald Trump now.
Steve Bannon pleads guilty in New York case.
DOGE will only work if government gets more competitive.
School cellphone bans spread across the country.
FAA wants permanent restrictions at Reagan.
Media
AP reporter barred from Oval Office over Gulf dispute.
Ephemera
Fox rakes it in with Tubi on Super Bowl Sunday.
Salman Rushdie’s stabbing attack testimony.
Criminal probe into Vince McMahon dropped.
First impressions of new Captain America flick.
Quote
“Look at everything that exists, and observe that it is already in dissolution and change, and as it were putrefaction or dispersion, or that everything is so constituted in nature as to die.”
— Marcus Aurelius