The public-private model used for censorship is now being used to undermine democracy
by npub1kkq37r7dkckhgzwgmnpfstanzequ7my0685aa58293kxrtumagjs5xpzzu (npub1kkq…pzzu)
Noah Bookbinder, advisor to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and president of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which is behind the effort to keep Donald Trump off the ballot; President Joe Biden and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows; George Soros (Photo credits: DHS; https://t.co/tJHEQafutr; Getty Images)
Maine’s top election official removed Trump from the state’s 2024 primary ballot on Thursday, joining the Colorado Supreme Court in disqualifying Trump from running for president. Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows determined that Trump was ineligible to run under the 14th Amendment due to his alleged role in the January 6 Capitol riot.
“Tonight’s decision relied heavily on the precedents CREW’s clients set first in New Mexico in 2022, then again in Colorado last week,” said Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “These decisions make it clear that nobody, including the former president, is above the law.”
But the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the storming of the Capitol was a security failure, not a coup attempt, and that undercover law enforcement informants or officers may have allowed, or even encouraged, it to happen. January 6 prosecutors have failed to prove a clear link between the rioters and Trump or his associates. And the fact that the Department of Justice declined to indict Trump for inciting an insurrection is a tacit recognition that Trump’s words leading up to the riot were legal speech.
Even some Democrats and mainstream news commentators agree the Maine decision has no merit. Said CNN’s senior legal analyst yesterday, about Bellows’ removal of Trump from the ballot, “She based her ruling on a lot of documents, but also YouTube clips, news reports, things that would never pass the bar in normal court. She’s not a lawyer, by the way.”
In trying to keep Trump off the ballot, Democrats and progressive advocacy groups say that they are protecting democracy. It’s true that some of Trump’s rhetoric is alarming to many liberal voters. For example, Trump recently said, after being asked if he would be a dictator if elected in 2024, “No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.’”
But America’s system of checks and balances survived one term of Trump and would survive another. During Trump’s presidency, the separation of powers, backed by the Constitution and the American people, remained in place. The real threat to democracy today comes from those trying to deny the American people their right to vote for the candidate of their choosing.
CREW has a nakedly partisan agenda and has received funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation (OSF). David Brock, founder of Media Matters and Democrat-aligned Super PACs, has served as chairman of CREW’s board of directors. Soros was one of the largest donors to Biden in 2020 and the largest donor to Democrats in the 2022 midterms.
Anti-Trump organizations like CREW claim that they are independent and do not act on behalf of the Biden Administration or government bureaucrats. But CREW’s president, Bookbinder, is currently an active member of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Advisory Council. There is additional overlap between OSF and anti-democratic state operatives. Rosa Brooks, a former Department of Defense (DOD) official, was special counsel to OSF before organizing the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), which plotted ways to undermine the 2020 election results in the event of a Trump victory.
This strongly suggests that OSF’s and CREW’s assault on democracy is part of a larger pattern that has emerged from Public’s reporting, in which government agencies use nonprofits and “public-private partnerships” to launder their censorship and anti-democracy activities through supposedly private entities.
These private groups may appear to be operating independently, but they are part of a coordinated effort backed by Soros, the intelligence community, and a network of long-term government bureaucrats sometimes called the “deep state.” Through this effort, government officials and well-funded NGOs are attacking democracy in the name of saving it.
Over the past year, Public has documented the close ties between non-governmental groups and federal security and intelligence agencies. Our investigations have revealed that these nonprofits and their government associates targeted conservatives, sought to interfere in the 2020 election, and called for censorship of true content about Covid-19. We also discovered that US and UK military contractors made a plan for “cognitive security” and planned offensive influence operations in direct response to Trump’s election in 2016. DOD and DHS employees actively participated in this project, and some censorship operatives appear to have had close ties to the Russiagate hoax.
What’s more, there is significant evidence that the State Department and other agencies collaborated with NGOs to deploy regime change tactics against Trump in 2020. Key figures and organizations in the campaign to delegitimize Trump’s presidency were also connected to the “color revolution” playbook used by the US in foreign countries. The FBI’s treatment of Trump supporters as an enemy population is part of the same pattern of counterpopulist and anti-democratic activity.
Since 2016, security and intelligence agencies have improperly meddled in domestic elections and speech, turning tools designed to combat foreign threats against US citizens. After Trump’s election, for instance, foreign policy groups like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a known CIA front, and the NED-funded National Democratic Institute (NDI) increasingly focused on the alleged threat of “disinformation” and collaborated with domestic censorship groups. In 2021, for instance, NDI produced a report with the Stanford Internet Observatory, a partner in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). The report, “Combating Information Manipulation: A Playbook for Elections and Beyond,” suggested that foreign elections and domestic elections should be subjected to the same counter-disinformation and counter-messaging strategies.
NED has developed many connections to the Censorship Industrial Complex. The Global Disinformation Index, which blacklists conservative voices, has received funding from the State Department through NED. Anne Applebaum, who has supported censorship and hyped the “Russian disinformation” narrative, sits on NED’s Board of Directors along with Scott Carpenter, Managing Director of Google Jigsaw, which aims to steer online discourse.
The conversion of deep state security agencies and their non-government allies into weapons of domestic censorship and control appears to have occurred in the UK as well. Big Brother Watch (BBW), a UK civil liberties group, recently obtained recordswhich show that multiple arms of the British military monitored UK citizens’ social media accounts to counter alleged mis- and disinformation about Covid-19. This information warfare operation involved the UK’s 77th Brigade and the Royal Air Force. Internal documents reveal that the military considered the “presentational risk” of these activities, which they knew could be considered “spying” or “conducting ‘PSYOPS’ on the UK.”
“The military has been turned inwards — absurdly dangerous,” Silkie Carlo, Director of BBW, wrote.
The ongoing campaign to prevent Trump from running for office, either by removing him from the ballot or by imprisoning him, is a continuation of this multinational counterpopulist campaign. Why is that? Why have government officials and NGOs weaponized foreign policy tools against the domestic population?
