While the Department of Homeland Security has allowed as many as 10 million immigrants to flood the southern border, the domestic surveillance state has prioritized something as a more important matter. According to documents unearthed by the Media Research Center, DHS paid $700,000 from a counterterrorism program to a self-described propaganda network to attack conservatives.
The source of the funding was the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program, which was created under President Barack Obama to target al Qaeda, put on hold, and then clandestinely revived by then-acting DHS head Kevin McAleenan and Miles Taylor, the infamous and insufferable “Anonymous” resistance within the Trump administration, with funding that “circumvented” the White House budgeting process. The beneficiary of the grant under President Joe Biden is the (already taxpayer-funded) University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab.
“Propaganda can also be used for socially beneficial purposes,” the application read as it outlined its own counterpropaganda model. “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 university’s Media Education Lab would then work with a partner activist organization to write blog posts equating “MAGA supporters” to antisemite Louis Farrakhan and blaming former President Donald Trump for creating a “darker, scarier, angrier, less hopeful country,” offer cash incentives to children to post social media demands for increase “media literacy,” and expand anti-conservative seminars established by the State Department. These seminars, known as Courageous RI, are based on a manifesto that claims “political extremism, rage, and anti-government theories … can lead to targeted violence and domestic terrorism.”
DHS has flirted with skirting the spirit and substance of our civil liberties since its inception, but at least DHS once pretended it was targeting foreign nationals tied to 9/11 associates and literal violence. Under Biden, DHS is evidently more concerned with using counterterrorism funds to censor constitutionally protected speech from our own citizens than monitoring the incoming surge of actual aliens on our terrorist watch list.
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But crucially, while it was only under Biden’s purview that such a grant was approved, the middle managers of the administrative state managed to work around Trump’s authority to reinstate a program at neither the behest of Congress nor the president. Beyond the obvious legal issues of counterterrorist funds being used to censor American citizens, there’s the sheer scope of the federal bureaucracy and the uncomfortable fact that Trump either lacked the attention or the ability to stop unelected civil servants from going rogue.
Congress seems unlikely to rein in the administrative state, and even Republican presidents seem unable to make executive employees answerable to the chief executive. The MRC’s discovery constitutes Exhibit A for why it may very well be up to the Supreme Court to cordon off the federal bureaucracy’s reign of terror when it challenges the Chevron doctrine at last.