Government Censorship, Election Manipulation Exposed in Congressional Report | Crossroads

Good evening and welcome to Crossroads. Now if you've been watching Crossroads for a while, you might remember us talking before about a U.S. government agency called CISA. This is the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Now, at first glance, you might think it's about protecting government infrastructure from things like cyberattacks. I mean, at least that's what the name would suggest. But in reality, CISA was carrying out a mass censorship campaign in the United States. Its main targets, interestingly, were conservatives. And this represents not just direct evidence of government censorship and violations of the First Amendment, but also the government's manipulation of every U.S. election since 2016. The House Judiciary Committee just released a detailed report on this government operation. It puts a serious damper on one of the big narratives on censorship we've been told for a while now. Conservatives, they've been crying afoul about government censorship for years. This had mainly to do with political censorship on social media sites, places like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. The common narrative on the left to counter that claim has usually been along the lines that censorship is only censorship if the government does it. And the argument was that private businesses, they have a right to moderate content, add as they see fit, which they do. And if government tried to step in and tell social networks, for example, that they couldn't remove content that they don't want on their platforms, then that would actually be government interference with the companies and also their freedom of speech. But it turns out this is not what was happening. Now we discovered through these so-called Twitter files that government agencies were in fact running campaigns of political censorship. This included evidence at the FBI, for example, that they were directly communicating with social networks to flag content, which was then deleted or hidden from the public based on their recommendations. Now this showed a type of public-private partnership. And this raised questions for whether censorship by proxy could still be regarded as government censorship and on that violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Now there are legal cases on that right now and the debate on it is likely not going to end until it goes to the Supreme Court and they make a decision. But now something else has been uncovered. It turns out now the Department of Homeland Security was running a large-scale censorship campaign even bigger than the FBI one. It follows a similar model to what we knew about before, the public-private partnership that lets government agencies censor people by proxy. Only now it seems the system actually goes deeper. Representative Jim Jordan of the House Judiciary Committee, the chairman, he gave a brief overview on X about the new findings and he detailed hundreds of secret reports that show Department of Homeland Security, CIA, and the State Department working with Stanford University to censor Americans. Now a big focus of this campaign was to impact the 2020 elections. And information that was censored, well, it included news reports that were accurate. It included people posting jokes and opinions. In other words, this was not about so-called misinformation or disinformation. It was protected speech that they were censoring. And this could represent a major violation of the basic rights of Americans. Not the fact, not, not, also in the fact in itself, it could represent a form of really just direct election interference. Now Representative Jim Jordan wrote that federal government disinformation experts at universities, big tech, and others worked together through the Election Integrity Partnership to monitor, censor American speech. It says the big bombshell here, really my opinion, is that new, the Election Integrity Partnership or EIP, he says, was created at the request of CISA. Now Representative Jordan posted two internal messages explaining this. One is an email stating, we just set up an Election Integrity Partnership at the request of DHS slash CISA and are in weekly comms to debrief on disinformation, IO, et cetera. This basically means that the government was not just communicating with platforms to flag content, which we knew about before. And that could, you know, then be removed. That type of action really walks a fine line when it comes to legalities. The new evidence is more direct. The new evidence means that the federal government was involved in creating an organization which then recruited private organizations to do its bidding. In other words, it gives the appearance that people and organizations were recruited by the government to do whatever it wanted, to violate laws that they could not themselves get around. Now Representative Jordan explained how it worked. He said that the Election Integrity Project, which included the federal government notably, would submit reports on so-called misinformation. The EIP would then analyze the report and find similar reports across the internet. Then the EIP would send the reports to big tech companies like social networks, along with recommendations on how to censor the content. Now the House Judiciary Committee report noted that Congress was only able to get the documents showing how the system worked after they threatened to hold people in contempt. In other words, even though this was a government operation being run with private companies, it was being hidden from the public. And the initial refusal of some of those involved to keep the documents from Congress suggests that at least someone didn't want the public or even members of Congress to know about what they were doing. Now the campaign mostly targeted conservatives, as I noted. It targeted everyone to an extent, all groups, but conservatives, the main ones. And among the people who were being silenced, it included President Donald Trump, as well as many news outlets and top influencers. This could represent a direct attack on the freedom of the press. Now I'd personally argue this represents a direct attack on the foundations of the American system of government. The ability of the public to cast their votes and choose their elected leaders. Our election system in America depends on an informed public making informed decisions. And if the government, or even worse, a particular political party decides to filter information that people rely on when making those decisions, then this represents a direct assault on America's foundation with its elections. Public debate was being stifled. Key information that could have changed the way people cast their votes was being deleted or hidden from the public. The House Judiciary Committee published internal communications detailing what was happening behind the scenes. And they show some of the content that was being flagged by EIP. And it turns out, guess what? The Epoch Times was being censored through this system. This includes many of our stories about problems with the 2020 elections. The internal communications, they even detailed the amount of engagement that our posts were getting on social media. I'll give you a few examples. It notes that the government system, this is the content made to flag our content for censorship. It says this. Biden getting 21K dead voters in Pennsylvania Epoch Times. Thousands of fake voters in Nevada. Consolidated narrative of ways Dems cheated through mail-in ballots. Consolidated narrative of how the CCP has influenced the elections. Now those are not headlines. Those are the notes from the EIP to categorize our content and to try to ensure the public didn't see our reports on those topics. It also includes communications on plans to censor news outlets on Facebook. Now this is a note in September of 2020. It flags both the Daily Wire and the Epoch Times for having Facebook pages where content goes beyond the technical scope of the pages they argued. Now it claimed that the Daily Wire's page called Angry Republican doesn't represent a real unique media brand. It claims that the Epoch Times Texas page doesn't represent any real media brand in Texas. But of course that's nonsense. Epoch Times does have a branch in Texas and many news outlets post content on local pages with national news. Now interestingly, the EIP internal communication, it even acknowledges that it did not have grounds to censor us or Daily Wire on these grounds. It says this, quote, these may not constitute coordinated inauthentic behavior as Facebook defines it, suggesting they knew what they were doing. And of course, most news outlets have social media pages and most of them have different pages for different audiences. But EIP stretched the definitions using their own interpretations in order to flag our articles. Well, everyone's it for YouTube for the rest of the episode. Come join us on Epoch TV. We're talking about what happened with the local elections yesterday, what they show us for 2024. And it's actually some interesting discussions around centrism and maybe the political parties have the issues wrong. Maybe they're not talking about the things Americans actually care about. We'll be talking about what Americans actually do seem to care about. All that's going to be on Epoch TV, E-P-O-C-H TV dot com. We're also going to be going more into how censorship is impacting the elections and other things like that. For the rest of the episode, again, come join us on Epoch TV, E-P-O-C-H TV dot com. I'll see you there. What use is a wall if the migrant crisis is being facilitated by the United Nations working with NGOs? Many of the people that can't get visas to come like start off in Mexico, they start in South America. Is this a coordinated effort? And if so, what's the motive? Families coming across claiming asylum because they had children, but there was the same children every week. They started testing DNA to make sure that the children were in fact children of the parents. 30 percent weren't. What's really happening at the U.S.-Mexico border? These are all human smuggling cases from the past couple of weeks. What caused the U.S. policy shift for mass immigration?