WASHINGTON, DC - A free press, able to use free speech, is one of the bedrock rights we enjoy in the United States. It is such an essential right that it is the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights.
Unfortunately, many right-leaning outlets have learned the hard way that free speech applies unless you refuse to tow the liberal line, with Law Enforcement Today being one of them.
That brings us to the Global Engagement Center (GEC), initially formed in 2011 as the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications (GSCC), which was tasked with countering extremist propaganda, Newsmax reported.
In a letter published in The Federalist last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the GEC, which he defined as being part of “the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” was being shut down. This move helps to fulfill a promise made by President Donald Trump during his campaign, vowing to address “the weaponization of America’s own government to silence, censor, and suppress the free speech of ordinary Americans.” Speech, including that of Law Enforcement Today.
“Today, it is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center,” Rubio announced.
Originally designed to counter extremist propaganda, the Obama administration rebranded the agency in 2016 to fight what it called “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”
That allowed the agency to morph into an organization that Democrats turned into a tool to censor political speech. When Republicans caught on to what the Democrats were doing and voted to sunset funding for the GEC, the Biden administration rebranded the agency as the “Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI)” initiative, Rubio wrote.
“Today, we are putting that to an end. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return.”
Our outlet, Law Enforcement Today, is the largest group of law enforcement publications in the world. We are proudly conservative, pro-police, pro-military, and God-fearing. These values made us a target of the GEC, particularly NewsGuard, a GEC-supported “misinformation” monitor. Another “misinformation” monitor was a British company called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). GDI once published a list of the top 10 “riskiest online news outlets,” and unsurprisingly, all ten were on the political right. The intent of GDI was clear – to scare companies off, thereby cutting off ad revenue from right-leaning sites and attempting to put them out of business.
That brings us to Law Enforcement Today and our battle against censorship.
In the case of NewsGuard, Law Enforcement Today was a favorite target. NewsGuard rates the “reliability” of various websites, again to drive traffic and ad revenue away from those it rated poorly. While NewsGuard claims to be nonpartisan, Rubio noted a man named Rick Stengel is on its board of advisers. Stengel built the GEC and has accused President Trump of using ISIS propaganda tactics.
NewsGuard hit Law Enforcement Today for our reporting on COVID-19, Biden’s open borders, the George Floyd case in Minneapolis, and many more. It got to the point where Law Enforcement Today was completely demonetized due to NewsGuard’s activities. Even stories that were clearly labeled as “editorial” or “opinion” were targeted by NewsGuard as “fake news.” Liberal outlets such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, and many others were never the recipients of such targeting.
NewsGuard was founded in 2018 by Steven Brill, a longtime Democratic activist, advocate, and donor who backed several liberal candidates, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
According to the Media Research Center, Rubio wrote, “NewsGuard consistently ranks conservative media outlets with lower ratings than liberal ones,” demonstrating a clear bias in their ratings system.
That results in conservative outlets being blocked on some browsers, including Microsoft’s Edge, and search and social media traffic craters, with ad revenue crumbling. That is what happened to Law Enforcement Today. However, it was only by the grace of God and some creative thinking by the outlet’s CEO, Kyle Reyes, that we were able to survive. Our resilience in the face of such adversity is a testament to the importance of free speech and the dangers of censorship.
“The NewsGuard products effectively handicap conservative media by de-ranking and defunding them,” Rubio wrote.
Many on the right have slammed NewsGuard’s activism. Independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who does not originate from the political right, has called NewsGuard nothing other than a “state-sponsored bullying operation.”
Elon Musk calls NewsGuard a “scam,” and Georgetown Univeristy law professor and legal expert Jonathan Turley has called NewsGuard’s work censorship and “blacklisting.”
So-called “disinformation monitors” routinely allowed easily disproven disinformation, such as the Russia collusion hoax, to go unchallenged while calling the Hunter Biden laptop story “misinformation.”
“Our republic is based on putting trust in the ordinary citizenry. Our Founding Fathers took the bold step of believing that ordinary citizens can sift through information, decide which policies and candidates are best, and vote accordingly,” Rubio wrote.
“Disinformation experts,” he continued, “reject this thesis, and in the process, reject our democratic republic itself. If citizens need the government to step in and tell them what is disinformation and what isn’t, then power doesn’t rest with the people at all–it rests instead with the people who write the propaganda telling the people what to believe.”
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