President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security paid leftist activists more than $700,000 to fight “disinformation” with disinformation of their own.
According to The Daily Wire, which cited public records recently obtained by the conservative Media Research Center, Biden’s DHS tapped a federal grant program that targets suspected terrorists to funnel money to liberal activists to write blog posts denouncing former President Donald Trump, other conservatives and Trump followers.
The effort using the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Program, or TVTP, was supposedly to promote “media literacy,” the MRC reported.
Read: Reports: Sports Illustrated Cuts Nearly All Writers Faces Perilous Future After AI, Woke Scandals
The funding went to the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab, which argued in its grant application that “disruptive” conservative criticism of liberals on topics such as immigration and racial justice amounted to “propaganda and misinformation.”
The remedy, the group maintained, was for DHS to fund “community-created counter-propaganda.”
“Propaganda can also be used for socially beneficial purposes,” the application stated.
“Indeed, because the public has long been recognized as being suggestible, the United States has long made use of beneficial propaganda during WWI, WWII, and the Cold War.”
In response to the revelation by the Media Research Center, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri called for heads to roll at the DHS.
“This is an outrageous use of federal funds and abuse of power,” Hawley said in a statement on Thursday.
Read: Despite Passage Of “Turd Sandwich” Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz Not Giving Up On Securing Border
“This amounts to the use of government funds to further President Biden’s political agenda,” the senator continued. “All these funds should be clawed back by the federal government immediately, and anyone involved in making this grant should be fired.”
The Daily Wire reported that the Media Education Lab used taxpayers’ money to pay people $250 each to write blog posts about misinformation, disinformation, and media literacy.
“The articles pushed for left-wing policies, even though federal grants cannot be used to fund lobbying,” Daily Wire noted. The outlet cited the National Rifle Association and Stand Your Ground laws as examples of targets of the counter-propaganda effort.
“We are all living in a darker, scarier, angrier, less hopeful country thanks to Mr. Trump’s influence. Are we on the verge of civil war?” one post said, adding that Trump “was able to crawl into the safety of First Amendment protections.”
“It won’t be easy, but we really have to reduce Trump’s influence,” the post argued.
Read: Utah, South Carolina, Missouri And Maine Legislatures Take On Gender Ideology To Kick Off 2024
“Content moderation decisions of digital platforms actually do not violate ordinary people’s constitutionally guaranteed speech rights,” another post said. “That’s because private social media companies are not bound by the First Amendment.” The same post also maintained that “the political right enjoys higher amplification compared to the political left.”
The Daily Wire also pointed out that the activists, using DHS money, enlisted federal and Rhode Island state law enforcement officials, anti-free speech advocates, public school teachers, and Democratic groups in the promotion of anti-conservative rhetoric.
One of them was Rhode Island’s Secretary of State Gregg Amore, a Democrat, who was behind materials that argued “anti-government theories … can lead to targeted violence and domestic terrorism.”
“We have become so focused on individual rights, we have forgotten about the collective good,” Amore said.
Moreover, the DHS-supported group created a podcast series to promote left-wing ideas. According to Daily Wire, one of the guests on the series was former Democratic Congressman David Cicilline, who called the GOP the “key threat to our democracy” because it is “a Trumpist authoritarian cult.”
Android Users, Click To Download The Free Press App And Never Miss A Story. Follow Us On Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our free newsletter.