U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates
(LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. State Department under the Biden administration is training taxpayer-funded school teachers to “inoculate” them against conservative ideas, according to a report by the Media Research Center (MRC).
Part one of the report, published on January 9, concerns a series of State Department seminars coordinated by the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab, using curriculum developed by the university’s German counterpart, the University of Würzburg, from June 2021 to April 2022.
The virtual sessions, broadcast from Würzburg, taught American educators a distinctly European conception of “media literacy,” which included promoting “media bias” rating firm Ad Fontes Media, which MRC has previously reported to have a strong bias in favor of left-wing media, and NewsGuard, a web browser extension that supposedly identifies untrustworthy websites, but which LifeSiteNews has caught in the past attaching false and biased “fact checks” to valid stories.
The seminars promoted the Data Detox Kit “misinformation”-spotting curriculum, which identifies “anti-vaccination” views and “climate change denialism” as “conspiracy theories” and discourages use of the term “fake news,” as well as notorious left-wing “fact-checking” outlets Snopes and PolitiFact.
They also promoted the “Glass Room” curriculum, which teaches about the “problem of scaling freedom of expression,” frames it as a problem that individuals leave Facebook and YouTube for social platforms where content is less regulated, laments that “allow[ing] content to flow freely and far” creates a “path for misinformation,” and even perpetuates actual misinformation, including denial of the long-since acknowledged “lab leak” theory of COVID-19’s origins and false accusations that former President Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 presidential election.
Both curricula were developed by Tactical Tech, a German non-government organization that receives funding from the European Union and Sweden and is connected to numerous groups funded by far-left donor George Soros.
Arguably the most alarming session, however, was also the one not available for review on the Rhode Island Lab’s website. It was hosted by Italian Association of Media Education vice president Maria Ranieri on behalf of MEET (“Media Education for Equity & Tolerance”) Tolerance, a European group dedicated to “digital activism” for various left-wing causes.
According to MRC, MEET Tolerance promotes curricula aimed at turning children into activists for “intercultural values and social justice through [their] own media productions and practices.” Distressingly, the group uses material developed by socialist German politician Konstantin von Notz, an advocate for an international censorship law against so-called “hate speech” who has been known to use children in his social media campaigns. In 2019, von Notz promoted an internet censorship plan to strengthen harsh fines on social networks that did not remove whatever speech the government deemed “hateful.”
“Through the Rhode Island Lab, the State Department trained American educators on German socialist strategies for bringing indoctrination into the classroom, ‘inoculating’ students against conservative ideas, turning students into leftist political activists, and putting the Ad Fontes and NewsGuard censorship tools into classrooms,” MRC’s Tim Kilcullen writes. “In a forthcoming follow-up report, the Media Research Center (MRC) will detail how, having honed its strategy, the Rhode Island Lab secured finances from the Department of Homeland Security to bring the theories discussed during the State Department seminars into action.”
For years, conservatives and other dissenters from left-wing orthodoxy have criticized the world’s largest online information and communications platforms, including Google, Facebook, and (until ownership changed hands in late 2022) Twitter, for using their vast influence to slant the news, sources, ideas, and arguments their users see and share through their services. One of their chief rationales for doing so was to prevent “misinformation” from influencing elections, which critics denounce as merely a pretext to sway elections in their favor.
The most dangerous aspect to the issue is the extent to which the government actively encourages private companies to censor disfavored speech, something in which emails, public statements, congressional investigation, and leaked documents have implicated the Biden administration.
Critics accuse such government action of effectively transforming private businesses’ decisions over the use of their own platform into acts of government censorship illegal under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This year, the U.S. Supreme Court is slated to take up the matter in Murthy v. Missouri.
U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates