The Spending Bill Would Fund Censorship

Republicans should not give any more money to the Global Engagement Center.

The bipartisan spending bill that would avoid an upcoming government shutdown has run into trouble, with both President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk coming out against it.

Among the many good reasons to oppose the bill was the inclusion of a particularly pernicious spending item. Talk about betrayal: The bill would have appropriated funds for the State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC), the Biden administration's instrument of mass censorship.

The agency is reviled by conservatives, and rightly so. According to the Washington Examiner's Gabe Kaminsky, whose terrific reporting has shed light on serious free speech violations and wrongdoing committed by the GEC, Republicans have credibly accused "the GEC of orchestrating a speech suppression campaign against conservatives alongside left-wing nonprofit groups and social media companies." Indeed, defunding the GEC has been an important Republican policy goal.

Needless to say, this was quite the betrayal.

Recall that the GEC allocates State Department funding—i.e., taxpayer dollars—to the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British nonprofit that pressured advertisers to stop working with certain news sites. Those sites included several conservative news websites like The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and Newsmax; Reason was also a target. The index considered Reason to be one of the "ten riskiest online news outlets," for contradictory and misleading reasons.

The GDI has a First Amendment right to make whatever claims it wants. But an organization working toward greater restrictions on speech should not be a recipient of government funding. The muzzling of conservative and libertarian news sites is not a worthwhile State Department objective. If Republicans are serious about their commitments to rein in out-of-control federal agencies that have subtly—and not so subtly—pressured private companies and tech platforms to censor speech, then they should remove GEC funding from the spending bill.

 

This Week on Free Media

I am joined by Amber Duke to discuss the George Stephanopoulos settlement, privatizing the post office, CNN's erroneous prisoner release story, and the drones over New Jersey.

 

Worth Watching

Last week, I gave Wicked a favorable review. One of the reasons I liked the film was that it gave me an excuse to revisit one of my favorite childhood films: Return to Oz.

Released in 1985, Return to Oz is a forgotten and misunderstood gem. It serves as a sequel to the original The Wizard of Oz movie and stars Fairuza Balk as Dorothy Gale, a farm girl whose vivid memories of talking scarecrows and magic ruby slippers have convinced her aunt and uncle that she's insane. Dorothy is taken to a mental asylum but eventually escapes back to Oz. Mimicking the setup of the original film—in which the farmhands and other characters had doubles in Oz itself—the orderlies, nurses, and sinister asylum doctor serve dual roles as various antagonists during Dorothy's journey. She finds Oz a wreck and must work to save her friends from the clutches of an evil witch and a rock monster.

This is the only film directed by legendary sound editor Walter Murch, who lent his considerable talents to the Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now, and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Given his expertise, it's unsurprising that the sound effects in this movie are superb, from the creaking of the creepy wheeler characters to the ragtime-esque soundtrack that accompanies Dorothy wherever she goes.

The film is also plainly terrifying. If you saw this movie as a kid, you will certainly remember the sequence in which Dorothy disturbs a headless witch and is chased through a palace by the witch's torso. Terrifying, and thoroughly entertaining.