MRC’s Censorship Investigation Project uncovered yet another Biden administration scandal when it unearthed a program run through the State Department and Department of Homeland Security that “inoculates” students against conservative ideas and American ideals and trains educators to turn students into leftist activists.

Part 1 of our two-part exposé chronicled how the State Department began this censorship push through a year-long series of seminars coordinated by the University of Rhode Island and its German counterpart. Part 2 dealt with how the Department of Homeland Security took over the program and funded and expanded it nationwide.

Our reporting revealed that more than 700 teachers participated in a year-long series of 11 seminars held by the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab. These seminars trained teachers how to censor speech, how to use video games to entice children to embrace leftist narratives, and how to convince them to use only platforms that collude with government to surveil and censor non-aligned voices.

The State Department seminars showed teachers how to use censorship tools, including leftist “news-ratings agencies,” such as Ad Fontes and NewsGuard, to discredit conservative ideas and promote leftism. It even showed how to use NewsGuard’s “plug-in” — which displays NewsGuard’s rating of any site viewers access — and Ad Fontes’ leftist-biased Media Bias Chart in lesson plans.

Lessons on promoting political activism among children included instructions in street protesting, videos denying the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, and detailed instructions on how to turn schoolchildren into “media producers” who advocate against free speech. 

After a year of these seminars, the Department of Homeland Security began to fund the program through the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention operation, whose abuses MRC exposed in an earlier report.

PART 1 — MRC exposed how the State Department used taxpayer money to train teachers how to use censorship tools such as NewsGuard and Ad Fontes to steer students to left-leaning news outlets and away from contrary views from the right.

PART 2 — MRC showed how the Department of Homeland Security took over this program and continues to use taxpayer dollars to promote censorship of conservative views and demand school systems enact censorship programs.

Phase 1 of Homeland Security’s involvement with the program was launching a public awareness campaign featuring blog posts that attacked Trump, “MAGA supporters,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, free speech, and the Second Amendment.

“We are all living in a darker, scarier, angrier, less hopeful country thanks to Mr. Trump’s influence,” read one blog post paid for with taxpayer dollars. “Are we on the verge of civil war?”

“It’s tempting and entertaining to tune into the circuses of the Marjorie Taylor-Greenes, Louis Farrakhans and MAGA supporters,” read another taxpayer-funded post. “It turns out even Fox Media has limits on how much misogyny and racism it will tolerate from its stars — witness the canceling of Tucker Carlson’s show last week,” read another.

Another stated: “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.” Still another: “It won’t be easy, but we really have to reduce Trump’s influence.”

The second phase, which is ongoing, includes seminars to train teachers on how to divert students away from conservative ideas and media sources skeptical of the  administration’s agenda. These seminars have been closed to the public, and teachers who attend must first declare their political inclinations.

The third and perhaps most insidious phase, launched a year before the election, provides cash prizes for children who create social media posts to increase demand for ‘media literacy’ mandates, which is a euphemism for censorship.

For this astroturf campaign, the Biden administration has partnered with Media Literacy Now — a leftist lobbying group that shares revenue, leadership, and office space with Ad Fontes, which uses its media bias chart to disparage conservative media.

MRC’s Censorship Investigative Project found these programs through its innovative uses of the federal Freedom of Information Act and state open records laws to trace government spending.

Its reporting on another program through the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention program led to its entire $40 million budget being stripped in the House version of the DHS funding bill.