CV NEWS FEED // The Biden administration reportedly worked with a German government agency to train hundreds of American school teachers to turn their students against conservative media.
The Media Research Council’s (MRC) Censorship Investigation Project uncovered the secret collaboration through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and analyzing public records.
MRC Legal Associate Tim Kilcullen reported Tuesday that both the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security funded the effort.
“The Biden administration is actively trying to keep Americans from learning about conservative ideas,” said MRC founder Brent Bozell in a video statement.
Bozell indicated that “what is particularly shocking here” is that the censorship program “was funded by [American] tax dollars.”
In his report, Kilcullen explained that “[o]ver 700 educators participated in a year-long series of State Department seminars hosted by the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab (the ‘Rhode Island Lab’).”
He wrote that the seminars introduced the teachers to various “censorship tools.” These included “video games designed to entice children to embrace leftist narratives and to compel them to use tech platforms that collude with the government to surveil and censor.”
“Educators were told to reward children with prizes for promoting censorship via social media posts on platforms like Instagram,” Kilcullen noted.
“One session of the State Department’s seminars centered on how to train children as political activists,” Bozell pointed out:
This curriculum included lessons on promoting street protests for leftist causes, and detailed instructions on how to turn schoolchildren into media producers who advocate against free speech.
He said a portion of the curriculum was “funded in part by leftist billionaires George and Alexander Soros.”
“This should tell you everything you need to know,” Bozell remarked.
>> HOUSE REPORT: GOV’T AGENCIES CENSORED CONSERVATIVES IN 2020 <<
Per Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak: “The State Department sessions were used by its activist organizers to promote products from their for-profit ‘partner,’ Ad Fontes, as well as NewsGuard.”
In his report, Kilcullen described both so-called “media watchdog” companies as “censorship tools.”
Rosiak further noted that The Daily Wire “is suing the State Department for promoting the [NewsGuard], which has been used to economically punish domestic media outlets with disfavored political opinions.
The Daily Wire journalist also explained that the seminars’ host, the Rhode Island Lab,
has for years served as a center of liberal censorship efforts. It held a seminar for teachers on “how to teach students about the limits of freedom of expression.” It tried to confront the “white supremacy” of “digital blackface,” or when white people use images featuring black people.
In addition, Kilcullen stated that the “seminars were co-hosted by a German government institution and focused on bringing German indoctrination strategies into American classrooms.”
“It is noteworthy that Germany was chosen to co-host the seminars,” he continued:
[The] nation’s government has been the most aggressive European Union power censoring online speech and restricting individual expression. The Rhode Island Lab’s partner in Germany was the University of Würzburg, a controversial state entity with a long history of censorship; the curricula was often developed with German government funds and was crafted, in part, by a vice chairman of the country’s socialist ruling party.
“One would think that the United States Embassy to Germany would be focused on advancing the interests of the United States in Germany,” Kilcullen wrote later in his report.
“Under the Biden administration, though, it was the reverse,” he went on:
The U.S. embassy set up a “year-long, cross-national professional learning community,” dubbed the “Medialogue on Propaganda,” in order to export German socialist ideas of censorship to American educators.
Bozell concluded: “Everyone committed to America’s most sacred freedom, the freedom of speech, ought to be very concerned that the federal government of the United States is actively working to erase it.”
Read the MRC’s full report here.
