In a recent piece that outlined the corrupt and lucrative relationship between the federal government and a wide-ranging network of non-governmental organizations, I suggested that perhaps you might not hate these NGOs quite as much as you should.

Today, we offer another reason for hating NGOs: They stifle conservative speech.

In a piece written last April by Unherd’s Freddie Sayers, he drilled into what he called the disinformation industry, noting that a specific NGO, the UK-based Global Disinformation Index, has been hard at work censoring journalism. The GDI, in an Orwellian twist, says that it exists “to disrupt online disinformation.” In fact, the GDI exists to disrupt inconvenient information — information that, as it happens, always seems to come from libertarian and right-leaning sources.

For example, consider the GDI’s ranking of online U.S. news outlets from lowest to highest on its disinformation scale. See if you can detect a pattern here.

Among the “least dangerous” news sites, according to GDI, are NPR, the Associated Press, The New York Times, ProPublica, Business Insider, USA Today, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed News, The Wall Street Journal, and the Huffington Post.

Now for the “most dangerous” news sites: The New York Post, Reason Magazine, RealClearPolitics, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, One America News Network, The American Conservative, The Federalist, Newsmax, and The American Spectator.

Imagine that. The GDI doesn’t think we’re smart enough to discern the editorial bent of the news we consume, so it’s eliminated the useful and traditional descriptors “liberal” and “conservative” and replaced them with “least dangerous” and “most dangerous,” respectively.

Here in the U.S., an NGO called NewsGuard provides the same disservice as GDI but with ratings based on “reliability” rather than the degree of danger. As our Nate Jackson explained last year, “NewsGuard is a gatekeeper — an ‘objective’ source relied upon by others who then decide what content from what websites is allowed to be seen by web users. When NewsGuard’s ‘fact-checkers’ disagree with us, it hurts our reach.”

We mention GDI and NewsGuard because they pose a threat to free speech and because they’re part of what Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt and others have dubbed the Censorship Industrial Complex. “This vast censorship enterprise represents an existential threat to the American way of life,” Schmitt said recently. “Over the past decade, we’ve watched as a global system of government bureaucrats, shadowy NGOs, Big Tech companies, and far-left activist groups have worked hand-in-glove to censor Americans.”

Schmitt knows of what he speaks. Prior to becoming a senator, he served as Missouri’s attorney general, and in 2022, he filed a lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden (which later became Murthy v. Missouri), charging that the Biden administration had been colluding with Big Tech companies to censor online speech in violation of the First Amendment. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court whiffed.

Earlier this week, in a series of X posts, Schmitt issued a sort of call to arms to his fellow Republicans: “Over the next four years, the GOP must expose and dismantle this system.”

How did we get here? “The censorship-industrial complex wasn’t built overnight,” says Schmitt. “It’s been festering for years. But the Biden administration mobilized an unholy alliance of government power, taxpayer dollars, NGOs and Big Tech companies to build it into a global censorship powerhouse.” This, of course, is what the Left does when it’s getting its clock cleaned in the marketplace of ideas: It censors.

Schmitt lists some of the governmental players in the censorship game. “Seemingly every agency was a partner in building this system,” he notes. “FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS, State Department, Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, USAID — even FEMA. Through grants and partnerships, these agencies funneled countless tax dollars to censorship groups.”

Schmitt also called out the nepotistic — or is it incestuous? — relationship between the Biden administration and Big Tech. “Biden’s transition team,” he says, “was STACKED with tech insiders. They staffed the entire executive branch — State, Treasury, EPA, OMB, etc. Many of them were Obama alumni. When Obama left office, they went to work in tech. When Biden’s presidency began, they transitioned right back.” Schmitt further noted how the Biden administration was in constant contact with its Big Tech henchmen, flagging problematic social media posts for censorship.

Of course, the most grievous case of this speech suppression was the collusion between the FBI and Big Tech to censor the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story in the crucial days just before the 2020 election — an act of election-rigging interference that proved decisive.

The larger point is that Republicans have an opportunity to do something about the Censorship Industrial Complex. But they’re on the clock. Schmitt knows this, which is why his final post in the series reads: “The stories I’ve shared in this thread are just the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned. This fight is just getting started.”