In this episode of “Try to Control Your Shock and Amazement…”
As I reported on November 22, the Biden-Harris administration has spent more than a quarter of a billion taxpayer dollars to suppress “misinformation.” According to a nongovernmental nonprofit, much of the spending went toward studying information about COVID-19 and Americans’ response to the pandemic.
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OpenTheBooks reported that the federal government has spent $267 million since 2021 on contracts and research grants that include the term “misinformation” in the proposals. During the first Trump administration, just $7 million was spent on grants involving misinformation. That works out to a 44-fold increase in spending under the Biden-run government on a topic about which even experts disagree over what constitutes misinformation and its cousins, disinformation and malinformation.
I ended that article with “Nuff said — until next time.”
READ MORE:
Welp, “next time” has arrived.
According to an op-ed written by New York Times bestselling author and senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, Justin Haskins, which was published on FoxNews.com on Monday, the administration’s research included the creation of “counter-messages.”
Incidentally, this is yet another example of cognitively-vacant Biden’s presidency being run by handlers.
‘Disturbing Details’
“On its own,” wrote Haskins, “the fact that the Biden-Harris administration has spent $267 million on misinformation grants and contracts is extremely disconcerting.”
Yet, as is often the case, the difference in in the details (emphasis mine), which Haskins explained.
The federal government shouldn’t be involved, directly or indirectly, in the fact-checking industry. Nor should it engage in efforts designed to limit the speech of citizens, particularly when taxpayers are the ones footing the bill.
But the cost and creation of these misinformation programs is just the tip of the iceberg. Open the Books conducted a detailed review of many of the programs, contracts and grants as part of its report, and I subsequently verified and expanded upon some of their findings.
What we found is clear evidence that the Biden-Harris White House used funds to support or develop Orwellian surveillance and propaganda strategies, create methods and tools to restrict speech online, and even to finance highly politicized reports critical of Trump.
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Orwellian indeed.
This is the point where I usually suggest that if the above story were flipped; if the first Trump administration had spent more than a quarter billion dollars trying to restrict speech on the left and to finance highly politicized critical of, say, Kamala Harris, the histrionics on the left would have set off alarms on seismic detectors across America.
Haskins provided examples, including:
For example, Open the Books reports that in 2022 the Department of Health and Human Services provided $2.3 million to the University of Pennsylvania for “investigating and identifying the heterogeneity in COVID-19 misinformation exposure on social media among black and rural communities to inform precision public health messaging” because “misinformation contributes to confusion, distrust, and distress around health behaviors such as vaccination, mask wearing, and social distancing.”
The research description suggests that the project requires collecting and analyzing large amounts of social media posts online, all in the name of stopping public health misinformation — a term that has been used to justify silencing the speech of Americans questioning the views of government, academia and other powerful institutions.
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Biden-Harris funded similar misinformation projects at other universities as well, including the University of Texas and Michigan State University.
Here’s another example:
Despite overwhelming evidence that mask mandates do not prevent the spread of COVID-19, the Biden administration forced Americans to wear masks while using public transportation systems, such as airlines. It also required masks for many federal workers and for citizens entering government buildings. This continued until 2022 — two years after the pandemic began and long after government health data had shown mask mandates do not work.
Yet some people became so programmed that we still see them wearing masks, including while driving alone in their cars.
It Gets Worse
According to Haskins, the Department of Homeland Security hired a defense contractor, Guidehouse, to conduct “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation analysis.”
Public and private sector clients use Guidehouse to help them combat alleged misinformation online. In one report published by Guidehouse about the “growing threat of misinformation,” the group noted that it helps its clients, including governments, using a “six-step approach to misinformation and disinformation detection.” Among the six steps is a plan to “Configure and deploy the tools and technologies that will be used to monitor the information landscape,” as well as the creation of “counter-messages to inaccurate or false information.”
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Did I already say “Orwellian indeed”?
Again, ’nuff said — until next time.