(Eli Pacheco, Headline USA) Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading a lawsuit alleging President Joe Biden’s State Department censored conservative voices online to bankrupt certain news agencies’ ad revenue.
Paxton’s office filed paperwork on Wednesday in the suit, joined by the nonprofit New Civil Liberties Alliance and two prominent conservative media outlets, the Daily Wire and The Federalist.
It keys in on the State Department-backed Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, two operations that have colluded with the Biden administration to create an “exclusion list” of “disinformation” spreaders.
Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire editor emeritus, mentioned the lawsuit on his show on Wednesday.
“Their goal is to paint us as unreliable and therefore to push advertisers away from advertising on programs like this one, websites like the Daily Wire, websites like The Federalist,” Shapiro said. “That is being pushed by the State Department. That is an ongoing problem.”
Last month, the House Weaponization Subcommittee released its Homeland Security report. The document detailed the agency’s plans to censor content in 2020 via social-media platforms, a web of academic agencies and organizations the government funded.
Paxton’s suit outlined how the government targeted media plaintiffs whose politics they disagreed with in order to devalue their credibility with advertisers.
“These entities generate blacklists of ostensibly risky or unreliable American news outlets for the purpose of discrediting and demonetizing the disfavored press and redirecting money and audiences to news organizations that publish favored viewpoints,” the suit alleged.
The document said the plaintiffs were suing to end “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history.”
