Tag Archive for: State Department

Foreign Nationals Face Visa Loss for Mocking, Celebrating Charlie Kirk Assassination

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

The U.S. State Department is taking the “America first” principle seriously and barring foreigners who celebrated the murder of an American patriot from entering the country.

Following the assassination of conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk last month, the State Department announced that it would begin canceling and revoking visas for foreign nationals who publicly mocked or celebrated Kirk’s death. On Tuesday, the Department asserted that it is following through on that pledge. “The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans,” the Department’s official social media page posted, along with a list of examples of foreigners whose visas have been canceled or revoked.

One Argentine national posted that Kirk “can rest in f****** piss,” adding, “i do not give a f*** about the death of a person who devoted his entire life spreading racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rhetoric. It’s hot as f*** where this man currently is and it’s deserved.” Referring to the TPUSA event at a Utah college campus where Kirk was slain, a South African national whined that conservatives are “hurt that the racist rally ended in attempted martyrdom…” He continued, “Charlie Kirk won’t be remembered as a hero. He was used to astroturf a movement of white nationalist trailer trash!” A Mexican national said that Kirk died as a racist and misogynist, asserting that “there are people who deserve to die. There are people who would make the world better off dead.” A German national posted that “when fascists die, democrats don’t complain.” A Paraguayan national called Kirk a “son of a b****” who “died by his own rules.”

After each example shared, the State Department wrote, “Visa revoked.” The Department affirmed, “Aliens who take advantage of America’s hospitality while celebrating the assassination of our citizens will be removed.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, said, “Receiving or having a U.S. visa is a privilege, not a right. As the Biden years showed us, millions of people from all over the world want to come to the U.S. So, the U.S. can and should be very choosy about who gets to come here and to stay here.” Ries added, “Those who cheer the assassination of an American are not welcome in America and should have their visa revoked or denied. Good for the State Department for exercising this authority.”

Essica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, told TWS, “There are a number of good reasons for the State Department to revoke these visas. First, these individuals are here at our discretion; they have no right to be here, and there are grounds for expelling them if they hold views that are hostile to our nation or to Americans.” She added, “Most importantly, the social media posts they wrote are hateful and potentially constitute a threat of violence toward Americans who expressed support for Charlie Kirk or horror at his assassination.” Vaughan continued, “I cannot imagine traveling to a foreign country and inserting myself in their political affairs like this, or expressing this kind of animosity toward the host citizens. In a lot of countries, this behavior would lead to imprisonment. We should just kick them out. They have crossed a line of acceptable behavior.”

The State Department also recently revoked the visas of at least 50 Mexican government officials, citing concerns over apparent ties to drug cartels. Former acting Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Derek Maltz told The Daily Wire, “Travel to America, the greatest country in the world, is a privilege, not a right. Travel visas for individuals are not automatic and I’m glad to see that the State Department is scrutinizing them at a new level.” He added, “Nobody should be surprised that this administration is looking outside the box and will use all capabilities to make it difficult for the cartels to continue to kill Americans at record levels.”

The move comes as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has made public that Mexican drug cartels have placed bounties on the heads of DHS agents, especially Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, and have enlisted street gangs in American cities like Chicago to track and attack ICE personnel. “These criminal networks are not just resisting the rule of law, they are waging an organized campaign of terror against the brave men and women who protect our borders and communities,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement. “Our agents are facing ambushes, drone surveillance, and death threats, all because they dare to enforce the laws passed by Congress. We will not back down from these threats, and every criminal, terrorist, and illegal alien will face American justice.”

According to DHS, Mexican cartels are offering $2,000 for doxing federal agents, $5,000 to $10,000 for kidnapping or assaulting agents, and up to $50,000 for the assassination of “high-ranking” DHS officials. Spotter networks have been set up in areas like Chicago’s Pilsen and Little Village, where armed gang members positioned on rooftops spy on and track the movements of ICE and other federal law enforcement agents, relaying information to other gang members and allies and coordinating ambushes. These attacks are bolstered by Antifa militants, who stage protests and riots and have attempted to use lethal force against ICE agents on numerous occasions.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Trump And Kash Patel Give Major Update On Sweeping Crime Crackdown

DHS Calls Out Media ‘Smears’ After Illegal Aliens Allegedly Ram Border Patrol Car

‘We Need to Pray’: Expert Warns of China’s Escalating Crackdown on Christians

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump Admin May Have Eyes On New Regime Change War

/in , , , , , , , , , , , /by

The United States is reportedly planning to target drug traffickers in Venezuela, raising questions about the possibility of regime change in the country.

U.S. military officials are considering attacking drug traffickers in the coming weeks within the borders of Venezuela, four sources told NBC News.

“We’ll see what happens. Venezuela is sending us their gang members, their drug dealers and drugs. It’s not acceptable,” the White House told NBC, referencing a previous statement from Trump.

The report follows rising tensions over drugs and the mobilization of U.S. forces in the Caribbean.

Throughout September, President Donald Trump authorized striking several boats allegedly carrying drugs and drug traffickers.

“BE WARNED — IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!” Trump declared in a Truth post on September 15, attaching a video of the second boat strike. “The illicit activities by these cartels have wrought DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES ON AMERICAN COMMUNITIES FOR DECADES, killing millions of American citizens. NO LONGER.”

The attacks sparked the ire of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Maduro responded to the first strike on Sept. 2 by flying two F-16 fighter jets over a U.S. Navy destroyer two days later, according to Time magazine.

Maduro claimed the U.S. was seeking “to intimidate and seek regime change,” and that the U.S. was “looking for a military incident,” according to the Associated Press.

Trump has denied regime change in Venezuela is a goal of his administration, Time reported Sept. 6.

“We’re not talking about that,” he told reporters.

Maduro helped spearhead the Cartel of the Suns, a drug-trafficking group, and has a $50 million bounty for his arrest, according to the Department of State.

Republican representatives have warned that Maduro could face consequences.

In an interview published Sept. 13, Republican Florida Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart said Maduro has three options: leave now, end up in prison for the rest of his life or end up like Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani, which he describes as “basically being reduced to dust in a plastic bag.”

“Those are the three options that Maduro, the Maduro regime and those around them have,” Díaz-Balart added.

Florida Republican Rep. Carlos Gimenez posted in August that “Maduro’s days are numbered.”

The U.S. planned to deploy 10 F-35 fighter jets to the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, bolstering its already strong presence in the area, sources told Reuters in September.

“So we’re not going to have a cartel, operating or masquerading as a government, operating in our own hemisphere,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a mid-September interview with Fox News.

“The President of the United States made clear that he’s not going to allow cartels, that cartel or any other cartel, to operate with impunity in our hemisphere and send drugs towards the United States. And he’s going to use the U.S. military and all the elements of American power to target cartels who are targeting America.”

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth deemed Maduro “effectively a kingpin of a drug narco state” and added that he “should be worried” in an interview with Fox News.

“The Trump administration has carefully constructed a policy rationale that this is not ‘regime change’ for the sake of exporting democracy to the world’s benighted peoples,” former National Security Council and U.S. State Department official, José Cárdenas, told Newsweek.

“It is a national security initiative meant to eliminate a source of tons of cocaine from entering the United States. Main Street, USA, can identify with that,” he continued.

Trump recently detailed his plans to crack down on drug traffickers in his address to the United Nations (UN).

“We’ve recently begun using the supreme power of the United States military to destroy Venezuelan terrorists and trafficking networks led by Nicolás Maduro,” Trump said at the United Nations General Assembly. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence.”

“Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela; he’s a fugitive of American justice who undermines regional security and poisons Americans and we want to see him brought to justice. The U.S. is engaged in a targeted counter-drug cartel operation,” State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Tommy Pigott told The Daily Caller in a Statement.

AUTHOR

Derek VanBuskirk

Reporter

RELATED ARTICLES:

Hegseth Declares War On Fat Generals

Philadelphia Raises Chinese Communist Flag

Schumer’s Bid To Shut Down Government Exposes Democratic Fissures

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Trump Admin Puts Multi-Million Dollar Bounty On Vicious Haitian Gangster Nicknamed ‘Barbecue’

/in , , , , , , , , , , , /by

The State Department put a $5 million bounty on a notorious Haitian gangster nicknamed “Barbecue” who was indicted for allegedly funneling money from the U.S. to his gang’s coffers, the agency announced Tuesday.

The federal government will pay the bounty to anyone willing to provide information that leads to Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier’s arrest in any nation. The bounty follows the Department of Justice (DOJ) issuing an accompanying Tuesday indictment against Cherizier alleging that he violated U.S. sanctions on Haiti by funneling money to his gang with the help of Bazile Richardson, a U.S. citizen.

“The Department of State is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Jimmy Cherizier, the leader of Foreign Terrorist Organization Viv Ansanm,” Senior Bureau Official Chris Landberg of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs said in a statement. “The State Department will continue to apply its tools, including rewards programs, to combat the scourge of transnational organized crime and its violence — especially to stop the worst of the worst criminal ringleaders threatening the people of our hemisphere.”

Cherizier is the leader of Viv Ansanm, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization and powerful gang alliance operating in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, according to the DOJ. The organization formed to unite the nation’s gangs to oppose the government, igniting a brutal, protracted conflict that has killed and displaced thousands of Haitians.

The leader, with the help of his confidant Richardson, allegedly solicited money transfers from Haitian nationals living in the U.S., according to the DOJ. After allegedly laundering the money through intermediaries, Chierzier would use the funds to purchase weapons and pay his gang soldiers.

Richardson was arrested July 23 in Texas, and is currently awaiting his trial, according to the DOJ.

Cherizier is believed to be responsible for multiple human rights violations in Haiti, including the La Saline Massacre in 2018, which killed 71 people and destroyed well over 400 homes in the capital. From January to March, over 250 people were killed, 66 injured and more than 3,000 residents were uprooted by gang attacks in Port-au-Prince, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, citing United Nations (UN) data.

Gangs now control over 90% of the nation’s capital, according to the UN.

“Cherizier and a U.S. associate sought to raise funds in the United States to bankroll Cherizier’s violent criminal enterprise, which is driving a security crisis in Haiti,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said in a statement. “The National Security Division does not tolerate criminal gang fundraising in the United States, and will continue to pursue those who enable Haiti’s violence and instability.”

AUTHOR

Wallace White

Defense Reporter

RELATED ARTICLE:

Haitian Government Reportedly Partnering With Erik Prince To Fight Gangs

Democrat Who Said She Is Guatemalan Before American Calls ICE ‘Terrorist Organization’

Trump Administration Considers Immigration Ban on Muslim Brotherhood and Other Islamic Groups

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Watchdog Sues State Department to Force Release of Docs on Van Hollen El Salvador Junket to Aid MS-13er

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

Judicial Watch is asking a federal court to order the U.S. Department of State to turn over all official documents concerning Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen’s (Md.) recent trip to El Salvador to aid deported illegal immigrant and accused MS-13 gang member and human trafficker Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

In a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the nonprofit government watchdog told the court that on April 22, 2025, it filed a request with the State Department for “any and all records concerning, regarding, or relating to the April 2025 visit to El Salvador by Senator Chris Van Hollen. This request includes, but is not limited to, all related agendas, briefing materials, and records of communications.”

The State Department acknowledged receiving the Judicial Watch FOIA request and assigning it a processing number. In a May 29, 2025 email, the government told Judicial Watch that its Van Hollen request was “In Process.” But then just four minutes after sending the “In Process” email, Judicial Watch received another email from the State Department saying its request processing was “closed.”

Judicial Watch told the court that it “has received no further communication from the State Department regarding the request” since the “closed” email.

The federal FOIA law requires federal agencies and departments to provide all official documents requested by any individual citizen or group of citizens within 20 business days, except those covered by a series of exemptions such as personal privacy, protecting commercial secrets, and national security considerations.

The law further requires officials to explain to a requester which documents it opted to withhold and why each of those documents was covered by an exemption. If a particular requested document cannot be found or is thought to have been lost or destroyed, officials are also required to provide an explanation for such circumstances.

To date, the State Department has not explained why it closed the Judicial Watch request without providing any documents or a required explanation for its actions.

In its suit, Judicial Watch asked the court to “(1) order Defendant to search for any and all records responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request and demonstrate that it employed search methods reasonably likely to lead to the discovery of records responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request; (2) order Defendant to produce, by a date certain, any and all nonexempt records responsive to Plaintiff’s request and a Vaughn index of any responsive records withheld under claim of exemption; (3) enjoin Defendant from continuing to withhold any and all non-exempt records responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request; [and] (4) grant Plaintiff an award of attorneys’ fees and other litigation costs reasonably incurred in this action …”

Judicial Watch has filed thousands of FOIA requests and obtained critically important documents that exposed waste, fraud, prevarication, coverups, and criminal wrongdoing in countless federal government scandals since the nonprofit’s founding in 1994.

Van Hollen’s April 17 trip to El Salvador was paid for with taxpayer dollars. The day before the senator departed for the Latin American country to which Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials had deported Garcia, federal immigration officials released documentation that Garcia was associated with MS-13, one of the most violent and murderous of the many Latin and South American criminal gangs.

Garcia has since been returned to America where he is being held pending further litigation in his case in a federal prison in Tennessee.

The Judicial Watch suit seeking to force the State Department to release the Garcia documents comes as something of a surprise since that agency has an above-average record for responding promptly to simple FOIA requests, according to data maintained by foia.gov.

On average, the State Department responds as required by the FOIA law within 15.49 days of receiving a request judged not to be complex or to require a time-consuming and costly search for older documents that may be difficult to locate in official archives. But the department’s record is much worse when requests are considered complex, requiring an average of 564 days.

The Washington Stand recently reported, based on official data compiled by Open the Books, that many federal agencies and departments are guilty of taking hundreds more days than required by the FOIA law to respond to requesters.

Government-wide, the average response time for simple requests of 836 days was compiled by the Commerce Department’s Office of the Undersecretary for Economic Affairs. The second-longest wait time among federal departments and agencies was 811 by the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Enterprise Integration.

Third among the longest wait times was the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) at 367 days. The fourth-longest average wait was registered by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board at 360 days, followed in fifth by the Executive Office of the President in the White House at 350 days.

The five federal agencies with the fastest average turnaround time in responding to simple FOIA requests include the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at one day, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) at 1.69 days, followed by the Job Corps, the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) at two days. The average response time for all federal departments and agencies for complex requests was 267 days.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Judicial Watch Sues State Dept for Records on Sen. Van Hollen’s Visit to Deported Illegal Alien in El Salvador

Criminal Aliens Infiltrate U.S. Through Program to Help Abused, Neglected or Abandoned Kids

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

State Department Begins Sending Bureaucrats To The Unemployment Line

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

The State Department notified its staff Thursday that it is beginning its wide-spread layoffs, according to a notification obtained by the Daily Caller.

The Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to move forward with his executive order directing agencies to prepare “large-scale reductions” in the workforce in a ruling Tuesday. The State Department began prepping in April for a reorganization that would close 132 offices, representing a 17% reduction, a senior official shared with the Caller at the time. Deputy Secretary of Management and Resources Michael Rigas notified officials on Thursday that the “Reduction in Force” would soon be underway, according to a document obtained by the Caller.

“Once notifications have taken place, the Department will enter the final stage of its reorganization and focus its attention on delivering results-driven diplomacy,” Rigas wrote.

The mass firings were to be underway as soon as Friday, Semafor first reported

As a part of the reorganization, redundant offices within the State Department will be removed including those that did not “align with President Trump’s priorities and [the dept’s] national interests,” a senior State Department official previously told the Caller.

In the transition, 137 offices will be put in another location within the Department “to consolidate/increase efficiency,” the official told the Caller.

In the weeks to come, Under Secretaries will communicate with their “family organizations” and host “town halls,” the memo writes.

“On behalf of Department Leadership, we extend our gratitude for your hard work and commitment to executing this reorganization and for your ongoing dedication to advancing U.S. national interests across the world,” Rigas wrote.

“Secretary Rubio, at the direction of President Trump, has undertaken a historic reorganization of the State Department, which was thoughtfully and deliberately executed by department leadership. The America First State Department will better serve the American people,” a senior State department official told the Caller about Thursday’s announcement.

In a similar move, the State Department ended a program that for decades has given benefits and funds to low-performing diplomats rather than phasing them out of the department, according to a memo previously obtained by the Caller on July 2. Under the Annuity Exception, Foreign Service members were able to remain on the State Department payroll beyond their scheduled departure from the administration, the internal memo explained.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House Correspondent. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Rubio Slaps Sanctions On UN Palestine Envoy After ICC ‘Lawfare’ Stunt

Deep State Steps Out of the Shadows, Using Their Regime Change Skills to Destroy Trump Presidency,“ CIA’s Simple Sabotage”

RELATED VIDEOS:

Radical leftist USAID shut down for good

‘ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC’: Miller Blasts Dems for Putting ICE Agents in Danger

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump Admin Hopes To Bring ‘Thousands’ Of Refugees From South Africa By Late Summer

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

The Trump administration hopes to begin taking in thousands of Afrikaner refugees from South Africa by the end of this summer, a State Department official told the Daily Caller Friday.

In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order promoting resettling Afrikaner refugees in the U.S. In early May, 59 Afrikaners arrived in the U.S. before a meeting later in the month between Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. The official told the Caller that the number of Afrikaner refugees is expected to rise sharply “towards the second half of summer.”

“We won’t be talking about dozens of arrivals, but hundreds and perhaps thousands,” the official said.

Although the official said he does not have an exact time frame, he said he “would feel confident in saying that … towards the second half of summer, we’ll start to massively scale this up.”

The official said that there is a backlog of over 50,000 refugee applications, and they expect that this number will “continue to rise.”

Trump’s EO accused South Africa of showing “disregard” for the rights of its citizens through “countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”

The order cut off aid to South Africa and announced that the U.S. will “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”

“Everyone who has been admitted to the United States thus far … has demonstrated a persecution claim,” the official told the Caller. “People have suffered attacks on their farms that were racially motivated.”

The official said nine Afrikaner refugees arrived in Atlanta on Friday morning, following the first wave. Many advocates for refugee settlement have inexplicably changed their tune when the Afrikaners are involved. Episcopal Migration Services, the Episcopal Church’s refugee service, decided to begin winding down its partnership with the federal government when Trump started promoting Afrikaner resettlement. The Church World Service, another Christian group, said it was willing to assist the Afrikaners but claimed they had received preferential treatment over other applicants.

AUTHOR

Derek VanBuskirk

Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: The TRUTH About What’s Happening In South Africa

RELATED VIDEO: President Trump stuns the world forcing South Africa’s President to watch a video of his people yelling ‘k*ll White people’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

U.S. State Department Closes Censorship Office

/in , , , , , , , , /by

Big Brother is no longer watching Americans from Foggy Bottom. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced “the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” an office which “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”

The State Department censorship office had “cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year,” according to the agency. It placed all 30 full-time staff on leave, eliminated all 50 full-time positions, and notified Congress of R/FIMI’s dissolution, with total savings of $65 million annually.

“GEC was supposed to be dead already,” Rubio declared in an op-ed for The Federalist. As TWS previously reported, the legislative authority for GEC expired on December 23, 2024, after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives “declined to enact several proposals to extend the GEC’s mandate,” according to the Congressional Research Service obituary.

Instead, the Biden administration merely staged a funeral and put the censorship apparatus into hiding. “When Republicans in Congress sunset GEC’s funding at the end of last year, the Biden State Department simply slapped on a new name. The GEC became the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) office with the same roster of employees. With this new name, they hoped to survive the transition to the new administration,” Rubio related. “Today, we are putting that to an end. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return.”

President Barack Obama first “directed the Secretary of State to establish the GEC by executive Order” in March 2016 “to carry out U.S.-government-sponsored counterterrorism communications to foreign publics.” Congress later expanded that mission to include “counter[ing] foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts,” as well as leading and coordinating inter-agency counter-propaganda efforts.

Progressive operatives lurking in the bureaucracy twisted this mission into a license to suppress any domestic political speech they disliked, even before the Biden administration made it official policy. Rather than censor Americans’ speech directly, which would raise obvious First Amendment concerns, GEC and other federal agencies “effectively outsourced to the newly emerging censorship-industrial complex” to private proxies, according to a report published by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — as if that made the First Amendment problems go away.

Through a so-called Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), the GEC collaborated with private institutions to “monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election,” the report continued.

“Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA,” testified journalist Matt Taibbi, after reporting on the Twitter files. “For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same thing, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, NewsGuard, the Global Disinformation Index, and many others — many taxpayer-funded.”

In fact, the GEC was responsible for much of that taxpayer funding, a U.S. House Committee on Small Business (HCSB) report found, providing start-up capital through a murky sub-award to NewsGuard, an American tech company that rates the trustworthiness of news outlets with a manifestly leftward bias. The HCSB report concluded that the GEC had “circumvented its strict international mandate by funding, developing, then promoting tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.”

But the GEC had problems beyond its ravenous appetite to censor domestic speech. A 2022 inspection by the State Department Office of the Inspector General (OIG) faulted the GEC for a poor internal structure, conflict with other units within the State Department, and competition with “counter-disinformation efforts housed in other government agencies” that did a better job of executing what should have been its main mission: countering propaganda from hostile foreign actors.

The problems with the GEC weren’t going to disappear simply by changing the office’s name. “Over the last decade, Americans have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions,” wrote Rubio. “That ends today.” Thus, for the second time in four months, the State Department has declared an end to its office engaging in domestic censorship. This time, it seems that the GEC is dead for good.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

U.S. State Department Mulls Closing 27 Embassies and Consulates

/in , , , , , , , , /by

The U.S. State Department is formulating plans to close 10 embassies and 17 consulates, reported The New York Times, based upon an internal memo. The plan, which expands on one circulated in an earlier March memo, is part of an internal budget-cutting campaign, which aims to reduce the State Department operations budget by as much as 20%.

The memo proposed shuttering six embassies in Africa (Central African Republic [C.A.R.], Eritrea, Gambia, Lesotho, the Republic of Congo and South Sudan), two in Europe (Luxembourg and Malta), one in the Caribbean (Grenada), and one in the Indian Ocean (the Maldives), according to the Times. However, the official State Department list of embassies does not list a U.S. embassy in Grenada.

The memo also proposed closing all five U.S. consulates in France, two out of five U.S. consulates in Germany, and both branch offices of the embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Times said. It also proposed closing the consulates in Thessaloniki, Greece; Florence, Italy; Ponta Delgada, Portugal; and Edinburgh, Scotland, plus four outside of Europe: Douala, Cameroon; Medan, Indonesia; Durban, South Africa; and Busan, South Korea.

The U.S. operated 271 diplomatic missions overseas (embassies and consulates) in 2023, according to the Lowy Institute’s Global Diplomacy Index. These proposals therefore represent a 10% cut to the number of U.S. missions.

The Times complained that closing embassies “would hinder the work of large parts of the federal government,” especially the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which usually posts its officers at embassies under a diplomatic cover. “Embassies house officers from the military, intelligence, law enforcement, health, commerce, trade, treasury and other agencies,” they explained. They especially fretted over “ceding vital diplomatic space to China,” which according to the Lowy Institute operates 274 overseas missions.

But diplomatic influence cannot be measured simply by counting the number of foreign missions a nation operates. There are many important factors, including how a nation uses the diplomatic missions it has. (In that respect, the U.S. is never going to leverage its overseas missions as far as China, which has operated secret police stations even inside the U.S. to keep tabs on its own citizens.)

The point is, if some U.S. missions see little to no use, or are more of a liability than an asset, then they should be shut down. And suggesting “then we’ll have less than China” is not a good argument for keeping them open.

There are already at least 25 nations without an official U.S. embassy in-country, TWS found. The U.S. embassies in six nations (Afghanistan, 2021; Belarus, 2022; Sudan, 2023; Syria, 2012; Venezuela, 2019; and Yemen, 2015) have suspended operations entirely due to dangerous conditions persisting there. Meanwhile, the American embassy to Guinea-Bissau is located in neighboring Senegal, the embassy to Libya operates out of Tunisia, and the embassy listed for Iran is really the Swiss embassy.

For 16 other nations, the U.S. has no embassy listed at all. This includes six Caribbean island nations (Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines), which all use the U.S. embassy in Barbados. It also includes four Pacific island nations (Kiribati, Nauru, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu) and one African island nation (Sao Tome and Principe). Rounding out the list are three tiny European nations (Andorra, Liechtenstein, and Monaco), and two nations with whom the U.S. has no formal relations (Bhutan and North Korea).

The clever reader will likely notice a theme to nations lacking U.S. embassies: most are tiny nations with small populations, small economies, and therefore little business to transact with the U.S. What little business there is can more easily be conducted through an embassy in a neighboring country than by establishing a whole new embassy, requiring infrastructure, staff, vetting procedures, etc.

The embassy closures proposed by the State Department largely continue this theme: Lesotho and Gambia are entirely surrounded by another country, while Luxembourg, Malta, and the Maldives are small (and, for two out of three, also islands). It’s less obvious why the State Department chose certain consulates to shutter, but it could be for the same reason: little work to do that could not be handled more easily somewhere else.

The most notable embassies to be closed are those in the relatively larger nations of C.A.R., South Sudan, and Republic of Congo. The first two are landlocked, impoverished nations that have little intercourse with the U.S.; C.A.R. ranks among the world’s most repressive countries, while South Sudan has little infrastructure or civic stability. The Republic of Congo is better off, but perhaps the State Department noticed that the U.S. operated another embassy only four miles away (as the crow flies), across the river in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It is also notable that so many proposed consulate closures are in Europe. This could reflect a downturn in European tourism, likely due to lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in fewer Americans requiring consular services.

This could also reflect the Trump administration’s wariness about European countries that have retreated from certain fundamental freedoms. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia; it’s not China; it’s not any other external actor,” Vice President J.D. Vance said in February. “What I worry about is the threat from within: the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”

This raises another factor the State Department must consider: the potential threats to U.S. diplomatic missions. The 2012 attack on America’s consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in four American deaths, dramatically underscores the real risk associated with operating far-flung diplomatic missions in hostile corners of the globe, with only a handful of staff.

So far this year, the State Department has seen an unusually high number of resignations (about 700), including 450 career diplomats. For the safety of America’s own diplomats, it makes sense to consolidate our diplomatic missions, so that America operates no more than it can fully staff.

With staffing cuts and budget cuts, it makes sense for the State Department to trim away the least important overseas missions, too. And, once those reductions are made, a slimmer State Department — and the U.S. taxpayers who fund it — will benefit for years to come.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Newsham: “The Elites, Wall Street, The Business Class, They Have Funded The Build Up Of The CCP.”

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

U.S. State Department Paying For Play Where God Is Bisexual And Communists Are Good In Bid To Push LGBT Rights Abroad

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

The Biden-Harris administration is paying to put on a play that portrays God as bisexual, sharply criticizes former President Ronald Reagan and paints communists in a positive light, all in an effort to push gay rights on Southeastern Europeans, federal grant records show.

Earlier in September, the State Department greenlit funding for a showing of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” in North Macedonia, with the agency claiming the production will raise awareness about “LGBTQ+ issues” in the country, federal grant records reveal. The play follows multiple storylines, among them the ghost of convicted communist spy Ethel Rosenberg antagonizing dying conservative lawyer Roy Cohn and a gay man having sexually explicit visions of heaven as he struggles with AIDS.

Prior Walter, the man with AIDS, begins to have prophetic visions in his hospital room after his lover, Louis Ironson, abandons him, according to the play’s text.

In one such vision, he finds that angels have “eight vaginas” and are “equipped as well with a bouquet of phalli” and that the universe was created by God “copulat[ing] ceaselessly” with these hermaphroditic beings. Ejaculate from angels “fuels the Engine of Creation,” the play recounts.

Walter recounts these visions to a man named Belize, a former drag queen who is tending to him as a nurse.

The State Department has committed $20,000 to staging the play in Macedonia, according to grant records. An additional $10,500 in non-federal funding has also been allocated for the production.

“In the Manichaean world of Angels in America, everything Reagan stood for (capitalism, etc.) is evil,” a National Review critic wrote of the play’s HBO adaptation in 2003. “The most vocal Republican in the film is Roy Cohn — the unscrupulous gay lawyer who denied his sexuality and AIDS diagnosis to his death. In Cohn, a man ultimately undone by his own lies and hypocrisy, Kushner finds his embodiment of Reagan’s administration.”

Angels in America portrays Cohn, a real lawyer who was deeply involved in the conservative movement and helped Reagan get elected, as a bigoted hypocrite prone to outbursts of anger.

Cohn was instrumental in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted in 1951 of spying for the Soviet Union and executed in 1953. Activists long maintained that the Rosenbergs were innocent, however, documents released by the government in the 90s proved that the couple was involved in a Soviet espionage operation.

Rosenberg, portrayed positively in the play, antagonizes Cohn throughout the story, telling him on his deathbed that she “take[s] pleasure in [his] misery.” She later guides Ironson, who is a secular Jew, through a funeral prayer for Cohn, who also had Jewish ancestry, symbolically forgiving him.

“We have no system of universal health care, we don’t educate our children, we can’t pass sane gun control laws, we elect presidents like Reagan,” Kushner wrote in his play’s afterword, blaming those purported problems on “individualism.” A gay character, at one point in the play, asks “if [Reagan] didn’t have people like me to demonize where would he be?”

“Kushner strips Reagan of any merit, and reduces him fictionally to an anti-gay crusader,” the National Review critic wrote of the play.

The State Department’s production of an anti-Reagan, pro-LGBT play is not its first exercise in using theatrics for the purposes of social engineering as it spent $120,000 in 2023 to “improve communication at the level of the local community on the social issue of LGBTQ rights and domestic violence via participatory theater” in the African nation of Chad.

The new grant isn’t even the State Department’s first theatrical operation in North Macedonia, as it paid to teach the country’s residents about environmental issues through theater and dance in 2023, federal grant records show.

“Culture — from music to sports to theater — is a vital component of the United States’ people-to-people diplomacy efforts in Chad and around the world and supports broader U.S. foreign policy goals,” a spokesperson for the department told the Daily Caller News Foundation at the time.

The State Department did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

Robert Schmad

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Admin Funding Theatrical Productions To Teach Africans About LGBTQ Rights

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

China Hawks Slam Biden-Harris Admin For Ignoring Growing Evidence Beijing Is Running Spy Ops Out Of Diplomatic Posts

/in , , , , , , , , /by

The Biden State Department has seemingly ignored mounting evidence of China running influence and intel operations from its diplomatic posts. And national security experts and China hardliners say Americans shouldn’t expect the administration to take action anytime soon.

Linda Sun, a former high-level official under Gov. Kathy Hochul, was arrested on Sep. 3 on allegations of acting on behalf of China’s government at the direction of the New York Chinese consulate, adding to a growing list of allegations of Chinese influence activities. The State Department has several tools to deter Beijing and Chinese consulates from such activities but has not taken any visible measures to do so, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“There is a range of things the State Department could be doing… The least they could do is to reiterate the warnings of the previous [Trump administration], and where they see need of it, improve upon the warnings of the previous administration,” Steve Yates, a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) and former national security official, told the DCNF. “That hasn’t happened, and I don’t expect it to happen now.”

Yates pointed to an example where the Trump administration shut down a Chinese consulate in Texas in 2020 over concerns that it was a hub for espionage and influence activities. The Biden administration has not closed any of the four remaining Chinese consulates located across the U.S.

Sun was accused of using to position to alter public statements to read as favorable to Beijing, block Taiwanese officials from meeting with New York officials and help smuggle foreign nationals into the U.S. using falsified immigration documents — all in exchange for bribes and gifts from the Chinese consulate, which coordinated with her and provided her guidance in committing the alleged crimes, according to Sun’s indictment.

Sun is not the only alleged Chinese operative in New York’s political orbit who has been arrested for their involvement in espionage or influence activities. The DCNF previously found that Lu Jianwang, an alleged Chinese spy who was arrested in 2023, had a long history of mingling with Democratic New York Rep. Grace Meng, who herself previously praised the Chinese Communist Party’s “leadership,” according to a separate DCNF investigation.

Lu was allegedly helping operate an illegal Chinese police station in New York City — which the FBI raided in 2023 and was eventually shuttered — that spied on and intimated critics of the Chinese government and was linked to a China-based law enforcement unit that specializes in extraditing Chinese citizens. Chinese operative Chen Jinping was arrested alongside Lu in 2023 for his alleged involvement in the police station.

Lu had received an indirect request from New York’s Chinese consulate to help counter a protest of the Chinese government in 2015, according to his federal indictment. He was also present at a protest against Taiwan in 2023 that was partially orchestrated by the consulate, according to National Review.

“China has an extensive spy and infiltration network in the United States,” John Lee, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former national security adviser in the Australian government, told the DCNF, noting that New York politicians who have potentially interacted malignly with Chinese operatives should face legal consequences. “I would like to see the federal government publicize these infiltrations and condemn them openly and frequently to alert Americans at all levels of government that this is occurring.”

The State Department, tasked with overseeing U.S. relations with other nations, can take a number of steps to deter Beijing, such as by confronting and issuing warnings to China’s U.S.-based consulates or issuing public condemnations, experts told the DCNF.

In certain cases, the State Department could even expel a diplomat from the U.S., a significant move that would likely be met with an equal response from Beijing. But experts told the DCNF they feel there has been an alarming lack of action from the State Department on the matter, even though the department has an annual budget of over $80 billion. and approximately 70,000 employees domestically and abroad.

“The State Department appears to be doing everything it can to downplay this situation and avoid retaliation from Beijing,” Michael Sobolik, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, told the DCNF. “Deterrence is just as real in diplomacy as it is in the military realm. The State Department is signaling that it is unwilling to make it painful for Beijing to influence U.S. politics for its own gain. That’s a mistake, one that will leave us vulnerable to future predations from the Chinese Communist Party.”

Hochul said last Wednesday that she had asked the State Department to expel Huang Ping, the highest-ranking diplomat at China’s consulate in New York, given that he frequently coordinated with Sun, according to Politico. However, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters later that day that Huang did not need to be expelled because he had already left the U.S. at the end of August as his term had ended.

But Huang was seen in New York and serving in his post as of last Thursday, according to public records. China’s Embassy in the U.S. confirmed to the DCNF in a statement this week that Huang is “performing his duties as usual.”

The State Department told the DCNF that diplomats usually have 30 days at the end of their term to leave the U.S. or seek to change their diplomatic status.

“It is possible that they just didn’t do the due diligence to see what was going on. They accepted a talking point that wasn’t fact-checked and took it out publicly. That’s malpractice on their part, but you have to judge whether that’s major malpractice or a little screw-up,” Yates told the DCNF. ” I would think that it’s a degree of laziness on the part of the State Department. There’s also a degree of defensiveness on the part of this administration, which doesn’t want to escalate this because it is an embarrassment to them and an embarrassment to the government of New York.”

Broadly, the Biden administration has faced questions for its handling of U.S.-China relations in recent years, with some critics arguing that Beijing has failed to respond to diplomatic pressure and continues to attempt to undermine the U.S. through a variety of methods, including cyberwarfare, election interference, domestic espionage activities and drug trafficking.

Though New York has become a focal point for China’s influence activities, its malign influence extends well beyond the state and into the rest of the country, director of the China Policy Initiative at AFPI Adam Savit, told the DCNF.

“Unfortunately, New York is only one of many hotspots for CCP spying activity in the U.S.,” Savit said. “In many cases, the federal government has acted too late, or not at all.”

AUTHOR

Jake Smith

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

‘You Will Never See Him’: Fate Of Top Chinese Official Who Mysteriously Vanished Reportedly Revealed

US, UK Spy Chiefs Hold Unprecedented Joint Public Meeting Over Global Challenges

‘It’s Alarming’: US-Funded Research Led To Over 1,000 Patents For China-Based Entities

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

U.S. State Department Stabs Israel in the Back, Twists the Knife

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

Biden administration promotes Hamas propaganda by smearing Israel as a human rights abuser.

On Tuesday, the State Department published its 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. What should have been a non-political document completed the betrayal of Israel that the Biden administration began on March 25, when it refrained from having the U.S. veto a UN resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire, the impact of which would enable the leadership of Hamas to survive and launch more attacks on Jews and Jewish babies. The clear meaning of the October 7 massacre was witnessed in Palestinians burning infants alive to cries of “Allahu Akbar” as though the incineration of the innocent – should they be Jews – is a holy sacrament rather than a sick episode in the wretched history of humanity’s inhumanity to its weakest members.

Far from being horrified by this celebration of evil, the Biden administration conflated the practices of the only civilized society in the Middle East with the monsters seeking its destruction.

Fox News noted that the Biden State Department report “highlighted Israel prominently, featuring concerns over the country’s precautions to minimize the civilian toll of Palestinians on the first page, which is normally reserved for the most egregious of human rights abusers.”

Not only does the report include Israel among the most barbaric human rights abusers – China, Putin’s Russia, the Taliban, and Iran, the would-be exterminators of the Jewish state — but “Israel was mentioned before the Biden administration’s State Department addressed ‘ongoing and brutal human rights abuses in Iran’ or ‘the Taliban’s systemic mistreatment of and discrimination against Afghanistan’s women and girls.’”

In Iran, they chant “Death to America” and have been waging war against their own people, brutally suppressing nationwide riots that broke out after Sharia police murdered a young woman, Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for not wearing her hijab properly. In Afghanistan, girls have been denied the right to an education, and the Taliban regime’s Supreme Leader announced in late March: “We will flog women in public, we will stone them to death in public.” No similar quotes were offered by the State Department from Israel’s leaders… because there are none.

The State Department report treats Israel as a worse human rights abuser than any of the above.

As far as the State Department is concerned, Israel’s alleged human rights violations are so egregious that they warrant being discussed immediately after the report mentions “the Kremlin’s disregard and contempt for human rights,” which “are on full display in its war against Ukraine,” and the “horrific violence, death, and destruction, including mass killings, unjust detentions, rape, and other forms of gender-based violence” that the Sudanese Armed Forces have unleashed in that country. In other words, Israel – the only non-racist democracy in the Middle East – is worse than the slaveocracy in Sudan, when it comes to the Jews’ human rights records.

This is an obscene libel. John Spencer, who is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, analyzed the IDF’s actions in Gaza and reported in late March that “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Likewise, the British Colonel Richard Kemp stated early this month that in Gaza, “the ratio of deaths of civilians to military personnel was far lower than in other wars where armies had not been accused of war crimes, adding that he was ‘not aware of any war crimes [committed by the IDF].’”

The State Department has ignored both Spencer and Kemp, and shown its appreciation for Goebbels’ infamous advice that people will more readily believe a Big Lie than a small one – as it happens in this case also to further the latest campaign – to exterminate the Jews “from the river to the sea.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has insisted that not a single Jew will be allowed to live in a Palestinian state. This is not a plan for coexistence; it’s a recipe for genocide.

An Egyptian imam, Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub, made that plain in a 2009 televised sermon in which he articulated the neo-Nazi character of the anti-Israel war, saying that Muslim hatred of Jews had nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with the Qur’an:

“If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them. Absolutely not…. Your belief regarding the Jews should be, first, that they are infidels, and second, that they are enemies…. You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth.”

Got that, Secretary of State Blinken? This is a thousand-year Islamic imperative, rooted in the Qur’an’s calls to “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, cf. 9:5).

Israel is in the midst of a war for its survival – not as a state but as the home of the Jews. The war against the jihadist military base in Gaza is not a political war but a desperate effort to stave off a genocidal campaign which has been pursued without relief for 75 years in Gaza and more than a thousand years in the historic home of the Jews – the land around the Jordan. Yet its principal foes are radical Islamists – aided and abetted by a criminal White House seeking votes and support from a neo-Nazi Left based in American universities and funded by a self-hating Jew – George Soros – who long ago should have been prosecuted for organizing illegal street demonstrations attacking Wall Street and endangering the lives of ordinary Americans in the process.

Thanks to the oddities of American elections, the Jews’ main enemy at this point is a criminal sitting in the White House who is desperately seeking votes in Michigan and selling his political influence to America’s enemies – and giving less of a damn about American citizens than any president in history before him.

AUTHORS

DAVID HOROWITZ AND ROBERT SPENCER

RELATED ARTICLES:

MEF Report Details ‘Principles of Victory’ in Gaza and Beyond

France: Muslim, 16, plotted jihad massacre at Olympics, wanted to ‘die as martyr in name of Islamic caliphate’

Germany: Schoolchildren converting to Islam, Christian students feel like outsiders and are desperate to fit in

Biden, His Uncle, Cannibalism, and Papua New Guinea

Egypt: Muslims attack Christian homes following rumors of planned church construction

Italy: Muslim migrant screaming ‘Allahu akbar’ spray-paints ‘Allah’ on church wall

Ritchie Torres and the Million-Dollar Grant to the Bronx Muslim Center

Pakistan: Muslim drugs 13-year-old Christian boy and coerces him into converting to Islam

Fatah TV anchor accuses Hamas of killing aid workers, stealing food and water, manufacturing Gaza food crisis

RELATED VIDEO: U.K. Police Visit Man for Saying ‘Christians Need to Take a Stand’

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

U.S. To Hand Billions To United Nations’ ‘Green Climate Fund’ For Poor Countries

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

President Joe Biden’s administration is committing an additional $3 billion to help developing countries fight climate change, the White House announced Saturday.

The allotment will go toward the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund and will be pledged by Vice President Kamala Harris at the COP28 summit in Dubai, according to the White House. The U.S.’ pledge will bring the fund to its largest level so far, as other countries like France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan have already made similar commitments that totaled $9.3 billion, according to Bloomberg, who first reported the funding.

“Since day one, President Biden, Vice President Harris, and the entire Biden-Harris Administration have treated climate change as the existential threat of our time,” the White House’s announcement reads. “After spearheading the most significant climate action in history at home and leading efforts to tackle the climate crisis abroad, the United States heads into the 28th U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) with unprecedented momentum.”

The U.S. reached $5.8 million in international funding geared toward curbing climate change in 2022, compared to $1.5 billion allotted during 2021, according to the State Department. The Biden administration will exceed $9.5 billion this year, and the president is already planning on topping $11 million in 2024.

Wealthy countries are supposed to commit $100 billion per year to help developing countries fight climate change, a pledge that began in 2020, according to Bloomberg.

The Biden administration’s commitment follows a trend of funding green energy initiatives the president has focused on during his tenure, including his signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA approved $750 billion in new spending, $370 billion of which went toward Biden’s green energy initiatives aimed at curbing climate change.

The U.S. pledged over $17 million toward an international “climate reparations” fund at the summit on Thursday. The fund is also geared toward helping developing countries fight against the impacts of climate change.

AUTHOR

MARY LOU MASTERS

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Admin Pledges Millions To International ‘Climate Reparations’ Fund

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Biden Admin Doubles Down On Climate Cooperation With China As Xi’s Economy Goes On Coal Binge

/in , , , , , , , /by

The Biden administration announced on Tuesday that it is doubling down on efforts to work with China on climate change.

The State Department unveiled a comprehensive strategy reaffirming the administration’s commitment to taking on climate change as a global problem alongside China, even during a time of rocky relations between the two nations and clear signs that China may not be inclined to ditch fossil fuels anytime soon. The countries are on the same page regarding emissions reduction targets and strategies, cooperation through international institutions, subnational agreements and numerous other specific topics, according to the State Department.

China permitted an average of two coal-fired power plants per week in 2022, according to NPR, and their climate envoy said in September that the complete elimination of fossil fuel energy is an “unrealistic” goal. Nevertheless, the Biden administration is committed to working with China to reduce numerous classes of emissions, including methane and nitrogen oxides, both of which are associated with coal.

Both countries welcome subnational agreements focused on climate, such as those reached by Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and representatives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to the State Department. Additionally, the countries are jointly committed to turning back forest loss, reducing plastic pollution and rapidly developing green energy generation sources.

Tuesday’s agreement on climate stands as one of several tentative deals reached this week between the two countries. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to halt the production of illicit fentanyl and resume inter-military communications in California during their first meeting in a year.

Notably, the State Department announcement also alludes to a joint plan to hold “a high-level event on subnational climate action” at some point in the first half of next year.

The two countries also committed to working together to keep United Nations average temperature targets in reach in ways that “[reflect] equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in light of different national circumstances,” according to the announcement. China is technically a developing nation in the eyes of the United Nations, despite being by far the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases and its status as the world’s second-largest economy, and it appears unwilling to pay into the so-called “loss and damages” fund, a de facto international climate reparations program by which rich countries would pay developing, poorer countries for the impacts of climate change.

The “loss and damages” program is poised to be a major topic of discussion at the upcoming United Nations climate conference, which itself is another point of collaboration between Washington and Beijing, according to the announcement.

The State Department did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Biden Admin Approved Huge Loan To Green Company As It Was Allegedly Defrauding Investors. Now Its Stock Is Tanking

Biden’s Energy Secretary Says ‘We Can All Learn From China’ On Climate Policy

‘Obvious Violation Of Federal Law’: Forthcoming Litigation Could Gum Up America’s Largest-Ever Offshore Wind Farm

Organizer With Deep CCP Ties Helped Bus Hundreds Into San Francisco To Welcome Chinese Dictator

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

State Department Funded Foreign Think Tank Working To Censor Americans

/in , , , , , , , , /by

  • The State Department funded the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a foreign organization that works to police online platforms.
  • ISD has partnerships with YouTube and Spotify to inform their content moderation decisions, and claims it helps platforms curb “misinformation.”
  • “By funding organizations – including foreign organizations, no less – that put their thumbs on the scale of hot-button domestic political debates, the federal government is wading into a dangerous Constitutional minefield,” Michael Chamberlain, director of government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. 

The U.S. State Department funds and partners with a U.K.-based think tank that collaborates with online platforms to censor perceived mis- and disinformation.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is a British nongovernmental organization that styles itself as a research group working in partnership with several online platforms to combat extremism, hate and disinformation. However, the organization frequently classifies typical conservative discourse and journalism as hate and/or disinformation and has received funding from the U.S. government.

The State Department awarded the organization a grant in September 2021 to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in Europe and the U.K. after it won the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge. The event, which was held in collaboration with the “U.S. Embassy Paris, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) [and] the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),” was also won by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization which reportedly seeks to demonetize conservative news sites.

The State Department confirmed that its Global Engagement Center funded ISD to study Russian disinformation tactics against Wikipedia through a grant to Park Advisors. The department told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it plays no role in content moderation decisions on social media platforms.

“By funding organizations – including foreign organizations, no less – that put their thumbs on the scale of hot-button domestic political debates, the federal government is wading into a dangerous Constitutional minefield,” Michael Chamberlain, director of government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, told the DCNF. “The government cannot get around First Amendment restrictions by outsourcing or using surrogates or agents for prohibited activities.”

Additionally, the State Department and ISD partnered to create the Strong Cities Network, a United Nations-affiliated initiative that seeks to combat “hate, polarisation and extremism” abroad; the State Department solicited several grants as part of this arrangement, naming ISD as a sub-awardee.

The organization also lists as funders left-wing billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Group, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with several European government agencies.

ISD maintains several partnerships with platforms to inform their content moderation decisions, largely regarding extremist and terrorism-related content, but also, significantly, what it deems hate and misinformation.

The organization has a special advisory role with Spotify to “curb” misinformation on the audio streaming platform, and is tasked with flagging content for YouTube.

“The State Department’s partnership with the ISD is problematic at best and unconstitutional at worst,” Mike Davis, president of the Internet Accountability Project, told the DCNF. “Taxpayer dollars essentially funding the censorship of conservatives under the guise of ‘misinformation’ shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed the Biden administration’s assault on the marketplace of ideas.”

While much of ISD’s work focuses on various forms of extremism such as radical Islam and white supremacy, a significant portion involves “disinformation” and online hate. However, the organization frequently characterizes staples of conservative discourse as hateful and/or as disinformation.

For instance, ISD appears to consider the comparison of abortion to murder as misinformation, admonishing social media platforms for not enforcing their abortion misinformation policies against such claims.

Moreover, in a 2022 report on “climate disinformation,” ISD profiled a form of discourse it labeled “delayism,” which accepts as a premise the existence of climate change but does not, in ISD’s view, advocate strong enough or urgent enough policy solutions. Criticism of particular policies designed to address climate change, such as the promotion of electric vehicles, were also included within the “disinformation” report.

“In contemporary discussions on what actions should be taken, by whom and how fast, proponents of climate delay would argue for minimal action or action taken by others. They focus attention on the negative social effects of climate policies and raise doubt that mitigation is possible,” the report read.

ISD cited as an example a Facebook post from Republican Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw that warned of the “radical obsession with wind and solar as the only clean energy solution” and argued instead for nuclear energy and natural gas with carbon capture technology.

Another example was a meme that compared an electric vehicle to a Flintstones-esque rock car.

“This outlandish form of censorship cannot be allowed to happen in America, such as simple policy preferences related to electric cars being labeled as misinformation,” Davis told the DCNF.

The organization characterized Libs of Tik Tok, a conservative Twitter account that publicizes examples of left-wing pedagogy including Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender ideology, as a “prolific spreader of hate,” and classified conservative journalist Scott Morefield as an individual “known to spread disinformation and amplify hateful right-wing talking points.”

ISD also considered “misgendering” an example of “anti-trans hatred” in a report on social media discourse surrounding the participation of men in women’s sports. ISD concluded by urging platforms to take action against posts that misgender trans individuals.

While ISD’s work is primarily research-oriented, the organization has successfully embedded itself in roles informing content moderation decisions within hugely influential social media and technology companies. Much of ISD’s work with online platforms focuses on terrorism and violent extremism, but the organization’s purview also includes mis- and disinformation.

ISD is a member of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council, formed in 2022 as a response to criticism of the audio streaming platform for Joe Rogan’s December 2021 interview with COVID-19 vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone.

The council, though not tasked with directly making content moderation decisions, is nevertheless empowered to “inform” Spotify’s policies and enforcement actions regarding “misinformation.” In ISD’s own words, the group will help Spotify “curb the spread of misinformation” on its platform and “independently keep watch over the platform’s content and safety policies.”

Additionally, ISD is part of YouTube’s “Trusted Flagger program,” an initiative in collaboration with several nongovernmental organizations and government agencies designed to improve YouTube’s enforcement of its guidelines. Trusted Flaggers are able to flag more content than average users, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014, and receive special treatment from YouTube.

“[O]ur teams prioritize flags from Trusted Flaggers for review,” Google’s description of the program reads.

ISD partnered with Google.org for its Impact Challenge on Safety grant initiative which distributed €10 million to organizations working to “counter hate and extremism” in Europe, and also received a $1.3 million grant from Google in 2017 to counter hate in the U.K.

The organization also boasts partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon’s audiobook platform Audible and Facebook.

“The State Department exists to represent the American public’s interests abroad,” Chamberlain told the DCNF. “If they are interested in countering concerns about weaponizing the government, they could start by not assisting outside groups that target the speech of American citizens.”

ISD did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

AUTHOR

AILAN EVANS

Associate Editor.

RELATED ARTICLE: A Dem-Linked Dark Money Network Is Quietly Funding The ‘Misinformation’ Research Industry

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.