If you want to go down a rabbit hole, look up federal spending on combating “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” at the USASpending.gov website. But before you do that, you should listen to Mike Benz describe the massive national security state and its unconstitutional efforts to prevent you from viewing “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” And then remember how the government pressured social media companies into censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. There’s more on that below.
For example, as Benz (see his Foundation for Freedom Online) told the Daily Wire, “You can find over $60 million in funding from the National Science Foundation directly to a censorship mercenary army just within the universities alone.” I did the search, and it’s true. Universities in New York received almost $12 million of that $60 million.
I also found a company called Hacks/Hackers that purports to be “an international grassroots community of people who seek to inspire and inform each other to build the future of media.”
Hacks/Hackers received $6 million in “grassroots” federal funding in FY 2021-23, and just happens to live in the same building as the Aspen Institute at 2300 N St. NW in DC, which happened to issue a report on “how to restore trust” in the media and has a new program called the AI Elections Initiative.
The Aspen Institute has received $48 million in federal funding since 2018. This is their pitch for the AI initiative: “While much about the 2024 elections is uncertain, we know bad actors will try to manipulate public opinion and to sway voter behavior at key moments before polls open. Our country needs concerted leadership and strategic focus at the intersection of AI, elections, and social trust.”
As Benz notes in the Tucker Carlson interview (see below), the Aspen Institute is just one of many “government-funded non-governmental organizations” (NGO’s) involved in the mass censorship of information that criticizes the government.
As you read the next few paragraphs, pay attention to the dates.
In September 2020, Aspen hosted a “tabletop exercise” with former Politico editor Garrett Graff and former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller that “imagined” how hacked information stolen from Burisma — the Ukrainian company that hired Hunter Biden — might be used to influence a presidential election. To see the agenda of the Aspen “exercise,” check Michael Shellenberger’s account.
On October 14, 2020, the New York Post broke the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was immediately characterized as an attempt to influence the election with fake information supposedly hacked from former Burisma board member Hunter Biden.
Here is Graff’s explanation of the exercise, published October 7, 2020, one week before the Post story broke:
“We imagined how the media might respond to an anonymous ‘DCLeaks’-style website that appears and purportedly contains internal document stolen from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that was at the center of the impeachment inquiry. It wouldn’t take much effort for such an operation to reveal a few key doctored documents, appearing to allege that perhaps we don’t know the full truth about Hunter Biden’s role with the company. In the days ahead, journalists compete ferociously, racing to confirm the authenticity of the documents and, within a relatively few days, determine that the most damning documents are false — that there’s no concrete evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens at all, just some Sony-style internal Burisma corporate gossip, some financial records, and strategy PowerPoints.
“In the meantime, though, the mere existence of the leak ricochets through the right-wing media bubble — it is speculated about on Fox & Friends, OAN, and elevated online by Trump fan sites. The president — who in real life today spent the anniversary of the Podesta leaks tweeting unceasingly about some made-up scandal about ‘Obamagate’ — begins amplifying the claims as evidence that Joe Biden is crooked. He calls for the FBI to investigate. He tweets something reckless and unproven, like ‘Is Joe Biden biggest criminal of all time?’ His supporters break into ‘Lock him up!’ chants at rallies. Before the authenticity of the documents are even disproved by reporters, ‘senior Justice Department officials’ leak that a grand jury has been empaneled to investigate the Biden family, and secretary of state Mike Pompeo and director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe announce that they’re traveling to Ukraine to find out the truth. The Biden campaign hits back, saying that the Trump campaign is acting as a pawn of Russia, weaponizing the US government for the president’s reelection. By that point, even if responsible news organizations decide the underlying documents are forgeries, the story has morphed from an “information operation” to an arguably genuine political controversy.
“Through the exercise, which was designed to build upon the work of Stanford researchers Janine Zacharia and Andrew Grotto — who have studied hack-and-leaks and published 10 guidelines for what they call ‘propaganda reporting’ — we tested how various responses by journalists and news media might alter the trajectory of the story.”
Of course, the media did “alter the trajectory” of the Biden laptop story, Stanford University did use taxpayer funds to build an “Internet Observatory” that enabled the media alterations, and American intelligence operatives did influence the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.
Since “professional journalists” covered both the Aspen “exercise” and the Biden laptop stories within 30 days of each other, you might have expected them to connect the dots and ask: “How could a federally-funded NGO get such accurate advance information about an ‘October surprise’ news story, and who was really trying to influence the election?”
But that would require “professional journalists” to be fair and honest, traits which have been abandoned by the vast majority of professional journalists.
The literal definition of fascism is when government controls the “partnership” between it and private companies, and forces those companies to do the government’s political will. And as I have noted elsewhere (Well, Why DID so Many Doctors Become Nazis?) fascism really takes hold when a society’s most respected individuals start volunteering.
Today, thanks to respected journalists, university researchers, and government officials, America has an essentially fascist government. And if we can’t stop it now, we will have to try to take it down later. Charter 24.
Exactly when did the Republic die?