Texas, Daily Wire and Federalist Sue State Department, Antony Blinken and Other Officials Over Censorship Enterprise

The State of Texas, The Daily Wire and The Federalist have sued the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other government officials for “engaging in a conspiracy to censor, deplatform, and demonetize” media outlets disfavored by the Biden regime.

The lawsuit follows Consortium’s historic suit against the United States government and the internet “watchdog” NewsGuard Technologies, Inc. back in October for First Amendment violations and defamation.

The new complaint alleges that the U.S. Department of State through its Global Engagement Center (GEC) improperly intervenes in the news-media market by “funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech” of disfavored media outlets to make them unprofitable.

Defendants have been granted no statutory authority to fund or promote censorship technology or censorship enterprises that target the American press, tarring disfavored domestic news organizations as purveyors of “disinformation.” There is no enumerated general power to censor speech or the press found in the United States Constitution, and the First Amendment expressly forbids it, providing: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.”

The Complaint notes that “the full breadth” of GEC’s censorship scheme is currently unknown, but at a minimum, the defendant “has funded, promoted, and/or marketed two American censorship enterprises: the Disinformation Index Inc., operating under the name Global Disinformation Index (“GDI”), and NewsGuard.

These entities generate blacklists of ostensibly risky or unreliable American news outlets for the purpose of discrediting and demonetizing the disfavored press and redirecting money and audiences to news organizations that publish favored viewpoints.

In addition to the Daily Wire and the Federalist, GDI’s “Dynamic Exclusion List” targets other right-of-center news outlets, including the New York Post, RealClearPolitics, the Blaze, One America News Network, Newsmax, and the American Spectator, Matt Taibbi noted at Racket News.

Outlets GDI considers “trustworthy” include NPR, the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, all of whom enthusiastically peddled the Russia hoax, and among other government hoaxes.

“Now-dead Buzzfeed blazed real trails in disinformation by publishing the Steele Dossier, which it knew was not only ‘unverified,’ but ‘contains errors,’ Taibbi wrote.

“Meanwhile there are interstate gas stations whose lavatory wall writings are more reliable than HuffPost, which for years now has been jumping on obvious fake news tales like the pee tape with the enthusiasm of a dog humping a leg,” he added.

The Complaint argues that GDI and NewsGuard injured the Media Plaintiffs by branding them as “unreliable” or “risky,” thus reducing the circulation of their reporting, and starving them of advertising revenue.

The State Department co-sponsored a “COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation” tech challenge, and NewsGuard said in a press release that it would “help” the State Department by flagging COVID “hoaxes.”

NewsGuard, which has deep ties to Big Pharma and the WEF, has admitted that it falsely labeled and downgraded 21 news sites during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Websites were downgraded for reporting accurate information that contradicted the official government narrative, such as evidence that COVID-19 was manufactured or bioengineered in a lab.

The “watchdog” later acknowledged that they “mischaracterized” the sites’ claims about the lab leak theory when it referred to it as a “conspiracy theory.”

The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief to halt the unconstitutional actions of the State Department and “put an end to one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history.”

“I am proud to lead the fight to save Americans’ constitutional rights from Joe Biden’s tyrannical government,” Paxton said in a statement, Wednesday. “The State Department’s mission to obliterate the 1st amendment is completely un-American. This agency will not get away with their illegal campaign to silence citizens and publications they disagree with.”

“The Biden administration is illegally funding organizations with the stated goal of financially crippling media outlets whose coverage does not walk in lockstep with the government’s ideological agenda,” The Daily Wire said in a statement on the lawsuit. “We sued the Biden administration before over its unconstitutional vaccine mandate, and we won. This time, we’re suing for our rights, all news organizations’ rights, and the constitutional guarantee of a free press that all Americans deserve.”

“Thrilled to announce we are suing the federal government for its work funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises in order to unconstitutionally demonetize and suppress The Federalist,” said Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway.