Well, dear reader, that is precisely what has been happening.

Our federal government has, for years, been using taxpayer funds to fatten the wallets of nonprofit organizations dedicated to silencing conservative content on the internet. I wrote about this before when a series of Washington Examiner reports revealed that the State Department has been financially supporting the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British-owned nonprofit that attacks conservative and libertarian news sites by persuading companies not to advertise on their platforms.

Now, new information has come to light about the organization’s effort to help the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cover up the fact that COVID-19 was developed in one of its labs. The Washington Examiner reported that a “publicly funded research lab at the University of Washington … partnered with a ‘disinformation’ tracking group that is blacklisting conservative news to fight alleged COVID-19 ‘disinformation’ online.”

From the report:

The State Department-backed Global Disinformation Index demanded groups cut ties with media outlets that boosted the coronavirus “lab leak” theory in 2020, which the Energy Department now says is the most likely origin of the virus. That same British group, which has come under fire for alleged censorship, teamed up in 2020 with the University of Washington for a COVID-19 “disinformation” research project that sought to “classify news articles according to their risk of containing disinformation about the coronavirus in real time,” according to records reviewed by the Washington Examiner.

Remember, GDI was paid a whopping $665,000 from two State Department-backed entities. The organization criticized Republican lawmakers who surmised that the virus could have been cooked up in a Chinese lab. It went after former President Donald Trump after he announced an investigation into the lab leak theory and blasted companies that advertised in an article in the Canada Free Press that talked about the theory.

Even further, the group published a report in which it claimed the lab leak theory was “fact checked and proven untrue,” and linked to an article to bolster its argument. “The BBC recently debunked evidence of the Wuhan lab conspiracy by breaking down the timeline of events, the protocols in place to protect researchers and civilians from pathogens, and evaluations of [the] lab in Wuhan by U.S. officials.”

Welp, now we know that GDI, just like the rest of its far-leftist compatriots, was full of it. The Energy Department recently became the latest federal agency to acknowledge that the coronavirus was most likely engineered in a Chinese lab.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the American taxpayer is funding these operations, which are designed to deceive the public into buying into narratives that only serve to advance the progressive agenda. In this case, they ran cover for the CCP and helped to squash the opinions of those speculating about the Chinese origin of the coronavirus. To put it another way, the federal government paid these organizations to lie to the American people about a pandemic that changed and ended tons of lives.

What is even more maddening about this situation is that we can’t say with confidence that anyone in the government will be held accountable for this atrocity. Republicans have done the usual chest-thumping as they shout “harumph” in front of cameras. But are they actually going to do something now that they have control of the House? Will they launch any investigations?

If Republicans manage to control both chambers of Congress after 2024, will Republicans halt the taxpayer financing of private companies that want to silence certain points of view? At this point, your guess is as good as mine. I’m not optimistic. But I would love to be proven wrong.