Entitled "Censorship Laundering: How the U.S. Department of Homeland Security enables the silencing of dissent," the hearing, which you can watch the opening of below, unpacked how the federal government, via non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that were used as cover, targeted the online voices of millions of Americans – all in the name of fighting "misinformation," "disinformation," and "malinformation."
The nerve center of the government's censorship scheme, this censorship laundering effort, as Bishop called it, allowed DHS and CISA to stray well outside the bounds of their jurisdiction of keeping an eye out for foreign election interference, to instead begin targeting Americans and their free speech rights through a veil of NGOs, which includes the so-called Election Integrity Project (EIP).
"What was initially a limited effort to counter foreign disinformation on elections metastasized into a sprawling effort that directly or indirectly censors Americans' discourse and debate that are the hallmark of our democracy," Bishop stated at the hearing – watch below:
WATCH: My full opening statement at our @HomelandGOP oversight hearing on DHS's censorship laundering schemes.
These government efforts to censor public discourse directly threaten freedom of speech in America. pic.twitter.com/WNexkRaeB9
— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) May 11, 2023
(Related: Back in 2012, we reported that DHS was planning to build a high-risk vaccine research center in the heartland of the United States.)
CISA was explicitly tasked in 2018 with protecting America's election infrastructure, only to later unilaterally decide that it would also take on the role of censoring critics of fake president Joe Biden, for instance, and other Democrat infiltrators.
The EIP and other NGOs served as cover for this because CISA knew that censoring Americans directly would look bad. CISA also lacked the funding and legal authorizations it would have needed to do so, which is why EIP and the others were brought on board.
"CISA acted as a 'switchboard,' to use their words, to flag what they called misinformation and notify social media platforms who could independently choose to modify or deny the content," Bishop explained.
"This scheme resulted in 859 million tweets collected for 'misinformation' analysis, 22 million tweets and retweets categorized as 'misinformation,' and 21 Twitter users, Americans, domestic sources, identified and stigmatized as 'the most prominent repeat spreaders of misinformation,' all of whom were on the political right."
Covid "misinformation" was also censored, though most of this "misinformation" has since been proven true. We now know that face masks were a farce, as were the PCR "testing" kits and "vaccines." The entire thing was a psy-op, to put it in a nutshell, and yet CISA via its censorship laundering efforts kept the truth from the American public for as long as possible.
"Where are the civil liberty protectors within DHS, and what are they doing?" Bishop asked. "It is obvious that there has been an abject failure of leadership within the DHS to allow this expanded role of this nature to occur."
"This scheme of censorship by proxy represents an attempt by the government to accomplish indirectly and in secret what it would not have the power to do openly. It should give all Americans who care about civil liberties, who care about freedom of speech and association, great pause."
The latest news about the corrupt DHS and its efforts to nullify the First Amendment can be found at Tyranny.news.
Sources for this article include: