Executive Summary
The MRC Censorship Investigation Project has uncovered the Biden administration’s latest effort to silence Americans. Utilizing FOIA, state public records laws and other investigative tools, MRC has learned that the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have funded a censorship effort that trains teachers to “inoculate” students against conservative ideas and American ideals. It also trains educators to turn children into activists and to use censorship tools in classrooms across the nation.
This report details 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. These seminars commenced in June of 2021 and concluded in April of 2022. Part 2 of this report will detail how the Department of Homeland Security took over the administration of this endeavor and expanded it nationwide.
The State Department trained educators on how to “inoculate” students against ideas not approved by the left. Over 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”). These seminars provided tools to train teachers on how to censor speech. Examples include 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.
The State Department seminars detailed how to put censorship tools Ad Fontes and NewsGuard into American classrooms. The Media Research Center has already detailed how both Ad Fontes and NewsGuard partner with Big Tech to divert people away from conservative media and to media that promote a left-wing agenda. The State Department pushed curricula that included how to use NewsGuard’s “plug-in” (a computer program that displays the hopelessly biased rating NewsGuard gives each media site) and how to incorporate Ad Fontes’s rigged “Media Bias Chart” into lesson plans. The NewsGuard portion of the curricula was funded, in part, by activist billionaires George and Alexander Soros.
- A separate MRC study showed NewsGuard ranks leftist media 26 percentage points higher, on average, than right-leaning media.
- An MRC study found that Ad Fontes favors leftist media by a two to one margin.
A session of the State Department seminars centered on how to train children as political activists. The curriculum pushed in this session included lessons promoting street protests for leftist causes and detailed instructions on how to turn school children into “media producers” who advocate against free speech. Educators were told to reward children with prizes for promoting censorship via social media posts on platforms like Instagram.
The State Department 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: 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.
Part 2 of this report will detail the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to bring this effort to scale and roll it out nationwide.
How the Biden Administration Pushed German Censorship to American Teachers
The Biden regime, through a year-long series of State Department seminars, has quietly incubated this censorship project through one organization: the University of Rhode Island Media Education Lab (the “Rhode Island Lab”). The Rhode Island Lab has spent two decades pushing a specific strain of “media literacy,” a rebranding of censorship for a Gen Z audience. With the Biden administration’s backing, the Rhode Island Lab has been able to supercharge its efforts, rolling out its programs nationwide to a vast and incestuous network of connected organizations for the administration to direct.
I. The State Department trained educators on how to inoculate students against ideas not approved by the left.
One would think that the United States Embassy to Germany would be focused on advancing the interests of the United States in Germany. Under the Biden administration, though, it was the reverse. 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.
The series of seminars, which consisted of eleven segments and stretched from June of 2021 to April of 2022, were hosted virtually out of Würzburg, Germany. Over 700 educators were trained at the seminar, with a select eighteen American teachers paired with European instructors to create model “lesson plans” for use in United States classrooms.
The seminars were jointly conducted by two universities and financed by the American taxpayer. On the German side was the University of Würzburg’s Media Education & Educational Technology Lab, a German government entity. On the American side was Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab (the “Rhode Island Lab”).
Part of the University of Rhode Island, the Rhode Island Lab has spent two decades pushing a specific strain of “media literacy,” a glossy rebranding of censorship for a Gen Z audience. Despite being part of the public (and thus taxpayer-funded) University of Rhode Island, the Rhode Island Lab had a long history of far-left activism even before it applied for (and received) the State Department’s $30,000 grant for a series of seminars. Among the myriad examples of the Rhode Island Lab’s activism are:
- In 2017, the Rhode Island Lab unveiled an entire lesson plan — titled “Teaching Conspiracies” — to attack the idea that Google had manipulated search results to favor former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, disparaging a video documenting the bias as coming from “a noted conspiracy theorist” who “was making money from the entertainment value of an anti-Hillary message.” In actuality, studies found Google did manipulate their algorithms to interfere in the 2016 election, and it has only escalated its misconduct in recent years.
- In 2020, the Rhode Island Lab proudly promoted a warning from a Washington Informer report in which the Rhode Island Lab founder was quoted. The article equated “[then-President Donald J.] Trump supporters” to the “Klu Klux Klan” and suggested they would engage in “voter intimidation efforts in proximity to polling stations, especially in urban areas with an expected high turnout of Biden voters.” When no such voter intimidation occurred, the Rhode Island Lab still continued to tout the story.
- Also in 2020, the Rhode Island Lab promoted an article wherein the Rhode Island Lab founder boasted that “Trump is the ‘poster child’ of bad information” and that “he doesn’t value evidence.” She offered no evidence for this assertion.
- In 2021, the Rhode Island Lab held a seminar for educators on “how to teach students about the limits of freedom of expression” and how “to limit the harms of dangerous speech.” Promos for the seminar explained “domestic terrorism” was “clearly inspired” by former President Trump and featured tasteless artwork depicting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as a LEGO set for children.
- In September of last year, the Rhode Island Lab attempted to organize an event to confront the “white supremacy” of “digital blackface,” a term for when non-black internet users feature images of black people in their avatars, icons or GIFs on their social media or video game accounts.
All the details of this shocking report are available at NewsBusters, by clicking here.