In the book Crisis and Leviathan, libertarian thinker Robert Higgs pointed out that the state uses crises to ratchet up its power and control over citizens. With each new “crisis” — often directly or indirectly caused by the state itself — government grows and our freedom shrinks.
The root cause of the September 11, 2001 attacks was US interventionism, for example. As I said in a presidential debate a few years later, they came over here because we were over there. But instead of looking to that root cause it was determined that the real problem was not enough government. So, taking advantage of the crisis, Congress created a Director of National Intelligence, a Department of Homeland Security, and passed the Patriot Act.
The “Russiagate” crisis was invented by the Hillary Clinton campaign as a dirty trick to use against Donald Trump in the 2016 election campaign. It may not have defeated Trump, but it hobbled his presidency. The result of this manufactured claim that the Russians (and Chinese and Iranians, etc) are meddling in our affairs and manipulating our elections is that the federal government determined that the First Amendment no longer applies to us.
They have decided that consuming certain media should not be allowed — for our own safety — so they have denied Americans the right to access media from countries the US government considers “enemies.” In the name of fighting imaginary foreign meddling in our elections, it’s Americans who find their rights curtailed.
They even created an entire government entity within the State Department — the “Global Engagement Center” (GEC) — right after the phony “Russiagate” operation was launched to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States…”
As it turned out, this “Center” was not at all about countering foreign “bad actors” but about silencing Americans who held views the powers-that-be in DC do not like. As Roger Kimbell wrote in a recent article about the GEC, “Because the GEC could not operate against Americans directly, it did so indirectly by funding entities like the British-based Global Disinformation Index, which compiled a list of publications and individuals that said things the regime did not like. That list was consulted by advertisers wary of winding up on the wrong side of the government…. Result? Millions of dollars of ad revenue dried up, imperiling the future of those outlets.”
And, as Kimbell further points out, even when they were caught red handed violating our rights they just hid the beast within leviathan. Thus, even though funding for the GEC was cut from Speaker Johnson’s 1,500 page omnibus spending bill, the beast lives on. The Biden Administration has re-named the Center the “Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub” and retained the same old GEC employees.
Now that this switch has been exposed, however, there is a chance — for once — to finally kill a bad government program. Elon Musk was one of the first to expose the evil of the GEC and as it turns out he is now working with the Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.) to cut this exact kind of government overreach. No more hiding government censorship programs with new names and new branding. Not another dollar should be spent censoring Americans!
Ron Paul is a former U.S. congressman from Texas. This article originally appeared at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and is reprinted here with permission.
