The Biden administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, paid activists to create state-sponsored propaganda.

From The Daily Wire. The Department of Homeland Security paid an activist group $700,000 to create self-described propaganda that attacked conservatives, a new investigation found.

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DHS used a grant program intended to combat terrorists, called the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) Program, to pay activists to write blog posts that criticized Donald Trump and other conservatives under the guise of “media literacy,” the Media Research Center found through public records requests.

In its funding application, the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab declared that “propaganda and misinformation concerning topics including immigration [and] racial justice” had become “disruptive.” It asked DHS for funding to run “community-created counter-propaganda.”

“Propaganda can also be used for socially beneficial purposes. Indeed, because the public has long been recognized as being suggestible, the United States has long made use of beneficial propaganda during WWI, WWII, and the Cold War,” the grant application said.

The findings position the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab and a closely linked activist group, Media Literacy Now (MLN), at the center of a sprawling, government-funded campaign to run propaganda on Americans to create a mandate for increased censorship. The Daily Wire reported last week that the same groups were also paid by the State Department, which had them arrange for German anti-“disinformation” activists to train U.S. school teachers on the techniques used in that country, which has some of the most anti-free speech policies in the West.

MRC said the grant shows that Congress must abolish all domestic censorship programs.

“The Biden administration is able to get something quite special with its $700,000 TVTP grant,” the MRC concluded in its investigation. “Harnessing the Media Literacy Now ‘network’ and, ultimately, paying children to advocate for ‘media literacy’ mandates ensnares the whole of the American public school system in its agenda.”

“With just two grants — first from the State Department, and now from the DHS — the Biden administration has been able to artificially create a perpetual ‘[p]ublic demand for media literacy in public education,’ supercharging a censorship industry devoted to an inherently anti-American philosophy hidden beneath the asinine monicker of ‘media literacy,’” it wrote.

The DHS grant led to an entity known as “Courageous RI,” helmed by U-RI professor and leftist activist Renee Hobbs, which said that its program would use the funds to manipulate the public and policymakers into demanding policies to crack down on “misinformation.”

It said “media literacy” training was especially needed in Rhode Island because “the Southern Poverty Law Center identified several active hate groups in the state,” and that some residents of the January 6 “insurrection that breached the Capitol Building” were from the state.

The anti-terrorism grant program was created under the Obama administration, and Miles Taylor, the DHS chief of staff under Donald Trump who gained notoriety for writing a New York Times op-ed admitting to undermining Trump from within, maneuvered to ensure that it lived on despite his boss’ wishes, according to a 2020 Politico article. By this year, the program was being used to explicitly liken people who believed that there is a “deep state” — the idea that unelected bureaucrats might behave like Miles — to Holocaust deniers.

The Rhode Island Lab used the DHS money to pay people $250 each to write blog posts about “misinformation, disinformation, media literacy… and more!” The articles pushed for Left-wing policies, even though federal grants cannot be used to fund lobbying. …

The DHS-funded entity served to bring together federal and state law enforcement officials, anti-speech activists, teachers, and Democrat advocacy groups.

Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore, a Democrat, made his department an official partner of Courageous RI, and assigned his staff to ghost-write the program’s “Manifesto.” The Manifesto said that “anti-government theories… can lead to targeted violence and domestic terrorism.” …

In such an important election year, the government should not be seeking to demonize the opposition and shape public perception. Share this article to warn people against propaganda and encourage them to prayer about it.

(Excerpt from The Daily Wire. Photo Credit: Department of Homeland Security)