America First Legal has expanded its lawsuit against private-government censorship collusion, adding the Aspen Institute as a defendant.
America First Legal (AFL) added Aspen Institute to a previously filed lawsuit against the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and Virality Project (VP), which coordinated with Big Tech and the federal government to crush online free speech during the 2020 and 2022 elections. AFL announced the update in an Oct. 24 thread on X (Twitter). Notably, the Aspen Institute previously received millions of dollars from radical leftist billionaires George Soros and Bill Gates.
“In Sept 2020, Vivian Schiller of the Aspen Institute hosted a ‘tabletop exercise’ to shape how social media would cover a potential ‘Hack-and-Dump’ operation relating to Hunter Biden,” AFL explained, including a post from Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger. Shellenberger explained that the exercise was meant to shape the media and social media narrative on the Hunter Biden scandal, which served as a precursor to the allegations of bribery and corruption in which the Bidens are mired. A Media Research Center survey found censorship of the Hunter scandals swayed the election in Joe Biden’s favor.
AFL also included screenshots of alleged emails illustrating a direct Aspen Institute role in the contentious work of EIP and VP. The emails were between Aspen Digital Executive Director Vivian Schiller and Kate Starbird, the chairwoman of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and an EIP/VP major player.
“An email chain with Craig Newmark, a major Aspen funder, shows Starbird's academic collaborator reporting to Newmark about the EIP/VP's plans for censorship during the 2022 midterm elections, stating that ‘I have a meeting with Kate soon to talk about mid-term monitoring and election response,’” AFL added. AFL further noted that Starbird was part of an August 2021 Aspen Institute strategy session on implementing “key censorship priorities” and demoting certain sites online.
There are layers of anti-free speech collusion here. The leftist Aspen Institute received funding from globalist Microsoft founder Bill Gates and globalist liberal billionaire George Soros. MRC Business previously reported that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $101,854,593 to the Aspen Institute between 2003 and 2020. Meanwhile, two organizations within Soros’s Open Society Network — Foundation to Promote Open Society ($2,594,780) and the Open Society Institute ($445,000) — poured at least $3,039,780 into the Aspen Institute during the same period.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand government agencies and Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
