MRC's censorship investigators have published a two-part report on how the Department of Homeland Security used a "Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention" program to malign conservative information as "misinformation" and worse. This program had faded, but was rejuvenated under Miles Taylor, the anti-Trump advocate within DHS who wrote a wildly popular column (and then book) as "Anonymous," on how he and others bravely resisted the Trump menace from within.
Then Taylor exposed himself and became an MSNBC regular and declared about the pandemic that "Republicans are quite literally murdering their base of support with their disinformation."
He also claimed "radicalized elements of the Republican party now represent a bigger threat to our democracy than organizations like Al Qaeda or ISIS ever did."
But complain about anonymous bureaucrats waging policy war within the "deep state," and you're defined as one of those conspiracy kooks who could turn violent.
Dan Schneider, MRC's vice president for Free Speech America, explains just how deep this censorship effort goes. DHS grants for "media literacy" and "terrorism prevention" went toward denouncing conservatives, as in this example: “Donald Trump was also adopting the shock-jock style that Rush Limbaugh built into a cultural phenomenon, including his misogynistic and racist comments, conspiracy theories, and grievances.” But it also included teaching children how to be leftist political advocates, paying them taxpayer dollars to advocate for the Left.
There were State Department seminars focused on bringing longstanding German censorship strategies to American classrooms. Among the strategies educators were instructed to employ were using videogames to teach children to reject so-called “misinformation,” instructing students to rely on hopelessly biased, anti-conservative fact checking sites like PolitiFact and Snopes and training educators how to use censorship tools like Ad Fontes and NewsGuard to block student access to websites with dissident views.
Documents gained through the Freedom of Information Act led to the University of Rhode Island's "Courageous RI" program, which exemplified this government-funded effort of liberal propaganda with their so-called "Courageous Conversations" (one-sided conversations). The MRC report laments the Biden Administration is "supercharging a censorship industry devoted to an inherently anti-American philosophy hidden beneath the asinine moniker of 'media literacy.'”
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