Biden's State Department swore under oath it would never target American media.
Discovery documents just blew that promise apart.
Now we know exactly which conservative outlet they went after first – and what the government built with what they learned.
State Department Promised It Would Never Target Americans Then Funded a Censorship Test on Glenn Beck
The Global Engagement Center was sold to Congress as a tool for fighting Russian and Chinese propaganda.
Its statutory mandate was explicit: foreign disinformation only, no domestic audiences.
So in September 2020, a GEC staffer sent a State Department official a written promise – the upcoming censorship technology test "will NOT focus on US audiences."
That same staffer added they hadn't even sought legal review because of that promise.
The State Department official signed off based on that assurance.
But the official asked one question the GEC never actually answered: "How do you determine if the narratives become integrated into domestic messaging without analyzing domestic messaging?"
You can't.
And the GEC knew it.
The test ran from December 14, 2020 through January 7, 2021 – the final weeks of the first Trump Administration.
When the results came back, PeakMetrics named two outlets as supposed disinformation sources.
One was Sputnik News – a Russian state outlet.
The other was The Blaze – Glenn Beck's Texas-based media company.
How Biden Used NewsGuard and Two Million Dollars to Build a Conservative Media Blacklist
The Biden administration didn't just fund the test.
It funded the entire infrastructure behind it.
The State Department funneled more than $2 million to a company called Park Advisors to build the testbed platform where PeakMetrics, NewsGuard, and Omelas – three private censorship technology firms – collaborated to create what they called a "joint dashboard" integrating all three companies' capabilities.
That dashboard was designed to identify conservative narratives, trace their spread into American media, and suppress the outlets carrying them.
After the test concluded, PeakMetrics kept working – refining the dashboard with Omelas and NewsGuard based on what the Glenn Beck test had taught them.
Biden's State Department used taxpayer money to pay private companies to build better tools for silencing conservative Americans, and The Blaze was the guinea pig.
A State Department official even flagged the obvious problem in May 2021, writing internally that the testbed looked like "money being used to benefit private vendors' R&D."
A colleague dismissed it: "That's a low risk – I don't believe that to be an issue."
NewsGuard – one of the three companies in the joint dashboard – went on to brand both The Daily Wire and The Federalist as "unreliable," costing both outlets advertising dollars and strangling the reach of their reporting.
The Daily Wire and The Federalist sued the State Department in December 2023 over exactly this scheme.
Last week, they won.
The Consent Decree That Locks Biden Democrats Out for a Decade
A federal judge entered a consent decree on April 1, 2026, placing The Daily Wire and The Federalist in charge of monitoring State Department compliance through 2036.
The State Department formally acknowledged in the settlement that its conservative targets were engaged in constitutionally protected speech on COVID-19, election integrity, and biological sex.
The department agreed it will never again fund, promote, or assist in developing tools that suppress, censor, demonetize, or fact-check the protected speech of Americans or American media outlets.
That prohibition extends to foreign governments and NGOs – the State Department cannot coordinate with international partners to do indirectly what it can no longer do directly.
State must also delete specific online material it funded – including "media literacy" videos that targeted The Daily Wire and The Federalist by name.
If a future Democrat administration violates the decree, a federal judge in Texas forces compliance.
The newly disclosed discovery documents confirm what conservatives knew all along: the GEC treated American citizens and foreign enemies as the same category of threat.
Biden's people lied to a State Department official in writing, ran the test on Glenn Beck anyway, then spent $2 million building a better version of the same weapon.
The next Biden who tries this faces a federal judge in Texas, not a compliant bureaucrat in the State Department's own building.
Sources:
- Margot Cleveland, "Government-Funded Censor Told State Dept. Its Testing Wouldn't Focus on U.S. Audiences – It Then Targeted The Blaze," The Federalist, April 7, 2026.
- M.D. Kittle, "The Federalist Scored a Huge Win for Free Speech and Exposed More of the Censorship Industrial Complex," The Federalist, April 1, 2026.
- "In Historic Settlement, NCLA Strikes Fatal Blow to State Department's Censorship Industrial Complex," New Civil Liberties Alliance, April 1, 2026.
- "State Department Settles Censorship Lawsuit with Daily Wire, Federalist, Agrees to Consent Decree," Just the News, April 1, 2026.
- "Daily Wire Wins Landmark Free Speech Victory in Censorship Lawsuit Against State Department," The Daily Wire, April 1, 2026.
