The Biden administration built a censorship machine for the Left with your tax dollars.
It’s still running – and the Left thinks nobody can touch it.
What one congressman just slipped into a must pass bill will smash it to pieces.
How Taxpayer-Funded NGOs Built the Censorship Industrial Complex
Federal agencies couldn't legally pressure Americans online directly – so they didn't.
Instead, the State Department, Pentagon, and intelligence agencies funneled taxpayer money to a web of nonprofits, universities, and foreign contractors.
Those groups then leaned on Big Tech platforms, advertisers, and foreign governments to do the dirty work.
Nobody's fingerprints were on the knife.
When conservatives got thrown off platforms, stripped of ad revenue, or buried by algorithms, every player in the chain pointed somewhere else.
The National Endowment for Democracy sent grants to a British outfit called the Global Disinformation Index.
GDI compiled a blacklist of the ten "riskiest" news outlets in America – every single one of them a right-leaning publication.
The goal was to dry up their advertising money and destroy them financially.
Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership monitored millions of social media posts during the 2020 election, flagging content for moderation while officially claiming independence from government.
The State Department's Global Engagement Center bankrolled the whole operation.
Your tax dollars. Their blacklists. Your silence.
Mike Benz Helped Write the Law That Could Defund Government Censorship for Good
Mike Benz spent years inside the first Trump State Department watching this infrastructure get built.
He saw how censorship tools originally developed to silence ISIS propaganda got quietly redirected at American conservatives after 2016.
The same NGO network that once propped open authoritarian countries for U.S.-friendly media got turned around and aimed at domestic political opponents.
Benz left government and built the Foundation for Freedom Online specifically to document and dismantle what he calls the censorship-industrial complex.
This week, the House is voting on H.R. 8595 – the National Security and State Department funding bill for 2027.
Benz helped consult on the anti-censorship language buried inside it.
In what Benz calls the most sweeping counter-censorship restrictions ever placed on recipients of U.S. government grants, any NGO or contractor receiving funds under this bill faces a blanket ban on using that money for social media censorship activity of any kind.
That means no leaning on platforms to remove accounts, no pressuring advertisers to cut off conservative outlets, and no helping foreign governments weaponize laws like the EU Digital Services Act or Brazil's court orders against American speech online.
Any activity touching "disinformation," "misinformation," "hate speech," or "brand safety" – the euphemisms the Left uses to dress up censorship as a public service – is off limits entirely.
Every federal agency issuing grants must now proactively report to Congress the steps taken to ensure compliance.
The institutions that built the machinery – the National Endowment for Democracy, The Asia Foundation – face explicit restrictions on merging their democracy promotion work with content moderation pressure campaigns.
Mario Díaz-Balart – a Florida Republican who chairs the subcommittee that controls State Department funding – fought to get every word of this into the final bill.
He's the reason the language is there at all.
If the Senate Strips This Language the Censorship Machine Runs Free
Getting through the House is the easy part.
The Senate is where spending bills go to get gutted.
John Thune runs the chamber now, and these funding fights always end in backroom trades – language stripped out, provisions watered down, priorities quietly buried.
But what this bill does is something Congress has never done before – going after the funding arteries of the middleman apparatus rather than arguing about Big Tech moderation policies after the fact.
If the Senate strips this language in the back-room fight ahead, the NGOs keep their grants, the blacklists keep getting built, and the next conservative outlet that loses its ad revenue will have no one in Washington even trying to stop it.
If it survives and lands on Trump's desk, the Left loses the one mechanism that lets them outsource censorship through your own government and call it public service.
Sources:
- Mike Benz, "@MikeBenzCyber," X (formerly Twitter), June 23, 2026.
- House Committee on Appropriations, "Díaz-Balart Remarks at Rules Committee on H.R. 8595," appropriations.house.gov, June 23, 2026.
- Center for Renewing America, "Policy Brief: Dismantle Entities Actively Censoring Americans," americarenewing.com, February 7, 2025.
- GovTrack.us, "H.R. 8595 – 119th Congress," govtrack.us, April 30, 2026.
- Congress.gov, "H.R. 8595: National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2027," congress.gov.
