The weaponization of government really began under Barack Obama, who masterfully used federal agencies to punish and persecute his political opponents. His understudy, the ostensibly mild-mannered moderate Joe Biden, has continued this banana republic hackery. Republicans in the House are busy challenging it and working to, as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy recently put it, “hold the Swamp accountable.”

Right off the bat once taking control of the House in January, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan established and is leading the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. That subcommittee, wrote our Douglas Andrews at the time, “will investigate, among other things, the FBI’s effort to censor and ban conservative Twitter users, and the Justice Department’s probe of ‘threats’ from parents who’ve had the temerity to speak out at local school board meetings against wokeness and rampant leftism.”

How goes that work?

Earlier this week, the subcommittee released a damning report regarding the Justice Department’s targeting of parents concerned over woke indoctrination in public schools. Republicans made official what we already knew:

Although the Biden Administration declined to cooperate with this oversight in the 117th Congress, whistleblower disclosures and a report commissioned by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) shed some light on how the Biden Administration colluded with the NSBA to create a justification to use federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources against parents.

The bottom line: Having “no compelling” justification for targeting parents, the subcommittee concluded that “the Biden Administration misused federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes.”

Unfortunately, Attorney General Merrick Garland stubbornly rejects accusations of wrongdoing and refuses to revoke the DOJ memo.

In other news, the subcommittee is investigating the U.S. Air Force over the improper release of Official Military Personnel Files to Due Diligence Group, LLC, which did opposition research against 11 Republican political candidates leading up to the 2022 election. An Air Force spokeswoman recently admitted that USAF “employees did not follow proper procedures,” but she insisted “there was no evidence of political motivation or malicious intent.” Jim Jordan and his fellow Republicans aren’t convinced.

Recruitment is hard enough under the woke regime headed by this commander-in-chief. Unlawfully releasing private information against military service personnel who belong to a certain political party is unlikely to help matters.

Finally, one of our humble team’s “favorite” organizations, NewsGuard, is under the weaponization subcommittee’s scrutiny. The New York-based company was started by some former journalists with the ostensible goal of objectively evaluating news reporting.

Predictably, it soon became apparent — including through our own experience — that NewsGuard would be better named LeftGuard or Praetorian Guard. It’s “fact-checkers” and evaluation team do little but use leftist opinion games to discredit, suppress, and censor conservative news organizations for reporting inconvenient facts. NewsGuard is a key part of what journalist Michael Shellenberger of Twitter Files fame told the committee is the “censorship industrial complex,” and he rightly says it’s been “caught spreading disinformation.”

We’ve likened the Left’s censorship scheme to racketeering.

It would be bad enough if only web users were paying for NewsGuard’s browser add-on, or if only social media sites were using its work. Yet the truth is that you, dear taxpayer, are helping to fill the coffers of these fact-checking thugs. The House committee learned that NewsGuard took in $750,000 from the Defense Department in 2021, after collecting $25,000 from DOD and the State Department in 2020.

NewsGuard cofounder Gordon Crovitz insists this doesn’t mean his company is “government-funded” because “government entities [simply] pay to license our data.”

If the federal government is using taxpayer dollars to pay a company that is demonstrably a part of the Democrats’ censorship industrial complex, that constitutes weaponizing government.

Perhaps worse is this from The Washington Times: “House Republicans previously raised questions about NewsGuard after it signed a deal with the American Federation of Teachers to put the rating tools on devices of millions of American teachers and schoolchildren.”

“Fact-checkers” like Crovitz may conveniently hide behind a phony wall of separation here if his company’s supposedly nonpartisan work is going to teachers and students without being directly paid for with tax dollars. Yet that’s a distinction without a difference. Ask those concerned parents above if they don’t see this infiltration into public school classrooms for what it truly is.

In short, House Republicans are doing important oversight work via this Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It’s an incredible uphill battle, however, and it remains to be seen what will come of it other than a few sternly worded memos.