Some Welcome Sunlight

Though we have not yet left the ancient regime for the new era that begins late next month, some welcome changes have already begun. The State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC) has been shut down. I've mentioned the GEC once before in this space. My old think tank used to attempt to bring it to bear on its mission -- I once spoke to the Heritage Foundation about its lawful role and why it wasn't performing it, and how important it was that it might begin to do so instead of not -- and yet they never were interested in doing their job of engaging foreign publics to address damaging anti-American information wars by the Chinese or arising incidentally out of the various religious wars worldwide. The only thing the GEC actually got interested in doing was censoring American free speech.

The most astonishing thing in this congressional report on government conspiracy to censor and silence right wing media and views is that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) was apparently an effective and enthusiastic part. As far as I know, this is the first time it’s ever been effective or enthusiastic; turns out they were really taken with silencing American citizens instead of doing their actual job. 

The GEC is assigned by Congress the role of aligning all American foreign communications in pursuit of national interests. This means diplomatic messaging aligns with Army psychological operations and CIA special activities of a communications sort; broadcasts of American state media align with the values and policies of the administration. 

Especially when Republican administrations have existed, the GEC is wholly uninterested in its mission. But even when Democratic heroes have held the reins, they’re ineffective. For one thing they’re entirely too small to actually perform the job effectively; for another, they are at State. Most of the communications infrastructure we have is military, and the military doesn’t respect the State Department. More, the State Department itself views actual diplomacy as its real job, and “public diplomacy” — that is, talking to ordinary citizens instead of other diplomats — has a lesser stature. 

So it’s a second-rate sinecure for bureaucrats who lack prestige, resources, or interest in doing the crucial job assigned to them. Occasionally they take meetings and accomplish nothing, which normally makes them one of the less harmful government bureaucracies. 

Give them a chance to play secret police and violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens, though, and apparently they were hot to trot. 

Now today the Brownstone Institute has a tremendous report, summarizing 500 pages of findings, on the work of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA has only been mentioned here once before, quoting RFK's endorsement of Donald Trump in which RFK notes that CISA was among those brought in to spy on and disrupt his independent campaign. Federal Judge Terry Doughty called the White House's censorship project, quote, "The most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America."

CISA was one of the ways that those who called themselves 'the Resistance' attempted to get the first Trump administration to give it the rope by which they would be hanged; and while their attempt to tie him to Russia failed when the Mueller investigation found no evidence of any Americans participating with Russian intelligence, at least in the 2020 election CISA largely succeeded. They were at the heart of changing the way that election was conducted by 'handling' election security in that race as well as in the surprise-victory of Democrats in 2022. The whole report merits reading.

This report should be trumpeted from the mountains and read widely. These are two government agencies that have abandoned their Constitutional mission, and become what the Declaration of Independence calls "any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e. protecting the natural rights of the citizenry]," activating "the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it[.]"

It's time for some alterations and abolishments. CISA should follow the GEC; let them be the first of all such institutions that have betrayed their mission.