It's a scoop! Using Freedom of Information Act requests, the Media Research Center's Free Speech America division discovered Biden’s Department of Homeland Security is handing out “anti-terrorism” grants to colleges that are funding “media literacy” warnings about conservatives, even smearing us in with the Nazis in a “Pyramid of Far-Right Radicalization.”
This was an astonishing finding, months in the making. Dan Schneider, vice president for FSA and MRC Business, joins the show to discuss what all these FOIA requests are uncovering about the Democrats underlining a narrative about how domestic terrorism is caused by conservatives and fascists.
Schneider reminds everyone that President Biden gave a speech where he said about conservatives, “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the – I’m going to say something: It’s like semi-fascism.” It's this mentality that smears as fascist the Republican National Committee or the Heritage Foundation, or media outlets like Breitbart or the Christian Broadcasting Network.
DHS's Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP) provides funds to various public, private, and non-profit institutions — such as universities and county governments — "to establish or enhance capabilities to prevent targeted violence and terrorism." Grant applicants must be based in the U.S. and implement a U.S.-based program. The Biden administration has awarded 80 grants through the TVTP adding up to just under $40 million.
That includes a program at the University of Dayton in Ohio. In 2021, the university held a seminar on dangers to democracy, and their researcher Michael Loadenthal came up with this wacky chart:
The MRC report noted that at the same seminar, another speaker, Alexander Hinton, a member of the Rutgers University faculty who specializes in genocide, compared the Trump administration to the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia killed an estimated 1.5 million-2 million people from 1975-79.
A third speaker — Nicole Widdersheim, deputy Washington director for Human Rights Watch and a former senior policy adviser to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Center — compared Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proposing a volunteer civilian military force to assist the National Guard in emergencies such as hurricanes to the Nazis and the Holocaust during World War II.
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