On Tuesday, two media outlets joined Texas’ lawsuit against the State Department, alleging the government agency funded censorship technology designed to bankrupt domestic media outlets with unfavored political opinions.
According to the lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas by the New Civil Liberties Alliance the State Department is tasked with foreign relations and has no authority over domestic affairs, yet it took a government office designed for countering foreign terrorist propaganda, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), and unleashed it against Americans engaged in what it claimed was “disinformation.”
It was “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,” said the suit.
The lawsuit says that the government used tools developed to be used against foreign nations against political opponents at home.
“State Department disinformation tools were developed… as tools of warfare… in the context of national security” and “foreign relations,” then “misdirected to be used at home against domestic political opponents,” it said.
The suit names Secretary of State Antony Blinken and five other officials as defendants.
The lawsuit asks a judge to declare the State Department’s attempt to interfere with domestic speech illegal and to permanently bar it from developing, promoting, or encouraging others to use technology to de-amplify, shadow ban, or restrict “the lawful speech of the American press and Americans.”
The New Civil Liberties Alliance’s Mark Chenoweth, who is representing the outlets, told The Daily Wire “the federal government cannot do indirectly what the First Amendment forbids it from doing directly.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says he is “proud to lead the fight to save Americans’ precious constitutional rights from Joe Biden’s tyrannical federal government.”
“The State Department’s mission to obliterate the First Amendment is completely un-American,” Paxton said. “This agency will not get away with their illegal campaign to silence citizens and publications they disagree with.”
The lawsuit argues that Paxton’s ability to enforce Texas’ anti-censorship laws were infringed by the State Department’s funding of censorship tools.
“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.”
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