Ben Cline applauds Trump effort to boost Russia, China misinformation campaign

Ben Cline thinks “government has no business targeting free speech.” Except when the “free speech” is woke, amirite?

Cline, our feckless Sixth District MAGA congressman, tweeted on Friday about the Trump administration’s move to close down the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office at the State Department, which the MAGAs have been whining about for years, claiming that the office was a censorship effort aimed at them.

We’ll ignore for the purposes of this story the ongoing efforts by the Trumpers to censor U.S. colleges and universities, literally kidnap foreign visitors off the streets for sharing their thoughts on U.S. imperialism, the threats to the news media with jail over unflattering news stories.

Because Ben Cline wants to make the point that “government has no business targeting free speech.”

What he means by that: free speech for Russians and the Chinese Communist Party, who spend billions of dollars a year with MAGA influencers to shape U.S. public opinion in their preferred direction.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who, by the way, got votes for his Senate confirmation from our supposed Democrats from Virginia, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, casts it differently.

Rubio said in a statement announcing the shuttering of the misinformation office that it had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”

“This is antithetical to the very principals we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America,” Rubio said.

The people who put this out under Rubio’s name apparently don’t know the difference between “principals” and “principles.”

Or maybe they do, and what they meant was, countering misinformation is “antithetical” to the “principals” – i.e. the people now in charge.

To that point, a current State Department official told Politico on Wednesday that “the Kremlin and Chinese Communist Party are cheering today.”

As is our Ben Cline, who used the misinformation center’s former name, the GEC – short for Global Engagement Center – for his victory-lap tweet.

“Biden’s State Dept spent $50 MILLION a year funding a censorship machine to silence Americans – and tried to rename it to keep it alive. Thanks to Donald Trump, the GEC is dead for good. Government has NO business targeting free speech,” Cline tweeted.

According to estimates from the State Department, Russia spends $1.5 billion annually on foreign influence efforts, and China invests “billions of dollars annually.”

What little we were doing to counter their efforts to shape public opinion to be favorable to their interests is now off the table.

And Ben Cline is out here clapping like a seal in glee.