The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is prioritizing dystopian censorship programs over defending homeland security along the southern border.
On Wednesday, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas condemning the department’s $700,000 grant to an activist left-wing group. According to The Daily Wire, DHS deployed counterterrorism resources “to pay activists to write blog posts that criticized Donald Trump and other conservatives under the guise of ‘media literacy.’”
“Your Department has consistently weaponized the federal government to attack conservatives using taxpayer dollars, first by colluding with private social media companies to censor conservative viewpoints and now by funding private actors to create affirmative propaganda to ‘counter’ conservatives,” Hawley wrote Wednesday. “All these funds should be clawed back by the federal government immediately, and anyone involved in making this grant should be fired.”
Now DHS is paying – *paying* – leftist academics to create “counter-propaganda” on “immigration, racial justice” and COVID. This from the people who brought you the Disinformation Board. Another reason Mayorkas should be gone 👇 pic.twitter.com/TQGbRavh3S
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) January 17, 2024
The grant was awarded through the department’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) Program to the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab. The university’s application for federal funding suggested deploying “community-created counterpropaganda to raise public awareness” about supposed “disinformation.”
“There’s no doubt that propaganda is effective as a form of warfare, which is why terrorism has long been called ‘the propaganda of the deed,’” the application reads.
