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Rubio Announces Visa Restrictions On Foreign Nationals Involved In Censoring Americans
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced new visa restrictions on foreign nationals involved in censoring the speech of U.S. citizens.
"For too long, Americans have been fined, harassed, and even charged by foreign authorities for exercising their free speech rights,"Rubio announced in a post on social media platform X.
“Today, I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans. Free speech is essential to the American way of life—a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority.”
Rubio said foreign nationals involved in suppressing the rights of Americans shouldn’t be allowed to visit the United States.
“Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over,” he said.
In October of 2023, journalist Paul Thacker noted in Tablet that former British Labour party operative Imran Ahmed heads up the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which in March of 2021 released a report about online misinformation that quickly reached the pre-Musk Twitter regime, and was used to silence Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who the report named as one of "The Disinformation Dozen." The report was then cited by by the Biden administration.
"There’s about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms," claimed former White House spox-turned-MSM gaslighter Jen Psaki in July 2021.
After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he was running against Biden for the Democratic nomination and appeared on Joe Rogan, Ahmed told the BBC, “He’s working really hard to keep people from knowing he’s a hardcore anti-vaxxer.” -Tablet
The report notes how Ahmed's group, funded by all sorts of dark money, pulled off a near-impossible feat in DC - climbing to the upper echelons of influence in the DC cesspool dominated by massive think tanks and hardball lobbyists.
The scale of the CCDH’s success must be emphasized for those unfamiliar with the crowded mob of D.C.-based nonprofits churning out reports that seldom get a passing glance from the nation’s policymakers. For a tiny, unknown, nonprofit to gain so much attention in D.C.’s crowded, competitive policy space is akin to a pudgy, amateur athlete catching the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl, while setting a new world record in the marathon, all in one week.
So who is the CCDH’s founder and leader Imran Ahmed? Where does he get his money? Why did he decide to leave behind politics and start a nonprofit focused on misinformation? And perhaps most importantly, how did a relative unknown from London gain such enormous influence from the White House bully pulpit and within Democratic Party politics? -Tablet
Founded in 2018 in London, CCDH's funding has been the focus of numerous articles, independent "X" threads, and of course, the Twitter Files, while Ahmed's previous group, "Stop Funding Fake News," has also come under scrutiny. The CCDH's influence has also been covered extensively by journalist Matt Taibbi.
CCDH also targeted ZeroHedge with a false report initially claiming that we were demonetized by Google for peddling hate speech, when in fact the CCDH took passages from our comments section and claimed they were the views of ZH. The report was laundered through NBC's "verify" fact check unit. NBC News was internationally condemned for going after a rival using CCDH research, and written by a 25-year-old (trust fund) UK journalist who has since bounced around various outlets without much in the way of actual journalism to show for it.
Thacker confirmed that CCDH took in $1.47 million in 2021 after Ahmed took the helm - of which $1.1 million (nearly 75%) came from the Schwab Charitable Fund, which allows people to anonymously donate money via private accounts.
Meanwhile, CCDH's chairman is Simon Clark, a former senior fellow at the John Podesta-founded Center for American Progress (CAP), a Democrat think tank. CAP also had close ties to the Biden administration.
"Indeed, one might conclude that CCDH functions as an arm of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, to be deployed against the perceived enemies of corporate Democrats, whether they come from the left or the right." -Tablet
Thacker also noted that Clark was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Lab, which Taibbi noted is funded by various US government agencies and defense contractors, and which remains a key element to the "censorship industrial complex."
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