Given the vast, seemingly ever-expanding landscape of federal government payoffs and overreach uncovered by DOGE – redistribution of wealth such as FEMA sending $59 million of our earnings to New York City to house migrants while we try to pay for heat and electricity – another scandal, or series of them, seemed inevitable.
And, yes, we have another! But this connects to years of central government power to silence us, to shut down our voices, to smother our freedom of speech and overpower our ability to speak the truth.
As the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) reports, government records show that the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2023 earmarked $2.6 million to fund a "war on disinformation.”
In other words, to fund another speech-strangling tentacle of Leviathan.
This news comes atop numerous reports by MRCTV, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others, about everything from the 2016 Portman-Murphy Countering Foreign Propaganda Act that Obama signed as part of the toweringly offensive National Defense Authorization Act of that year (a statute that allowed the feds to shovel $150 million into government-favored propaganda projects over two years – something Trump ended, but was resurrected for two more years when Biden took office) to the fed-funded Global Engagement Center (GEC), to the left-biased so-called “fact-checker” called NewsGuard, to Stanford’s Virality Project.
And who can forget the high-profile domain of “Singing Censor” Nina Jankowicz, the so-called “Disinformation Governance Board”? That would be the federal “we take your money to demonize and silence you” Ministry of Truth, which did not really shut down in 2022 when she departed, but was “redirected,” and placed under the hands of charmer Michael Chertoff.
Each year since Portman-Murphy, federal goons have made new attempts to stifle our ability to speak, and now, we discover another multi-million-dollar handout to add to the fun.
Oh, and – shocker! – the money that thus far FEMA has spent? It’s gone to a pretty well-heeled subsidiary of a politically-connected corporation, the Mitt-Romney-founded Bain Capital.
Among the FFO discoveries:
“The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) awarded a $2.6 million contract for 'dis-, mis, and mal-information analysis' to Guidehouse Inc, a subsidiary of Bain Capital, in September 2024.”
That would be Guidehouse, which has deep ties to government contracting, having led the company to secure over $900 million in federal contracts in 2023 alone, with clients like the Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Interior.
Writes FFO:
“Guidehouse’s anti-disinformation services included contacting social media platforms on behalf of their clients to meet their ‘counter-disinformation’ needs, and cited former intelligence community veterans – including a former CIA chief of staff – as its in-house experts.”
Yes, that would be Rodney Snyder, a former Chief-of-Station for the CIA in the Middle East… working with the company FEMA hired to silence you.
Classy.
Oh, but he’s not the only spook-tied Guidehouse goon, and there’s a great deal more in this FEMA censorship circle.
Reports FFO:
“The company (Guidehouse) also maintained a ‘proprietary database’ of dis-, mis- and malinformation, as well as internal ‘risk’ ratings for websites.
In 2024, a Guidehouse contractor working for the U.S. Department of State attended an exclusive invite-only gala hosted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the British nonprofit that wants to 'Kill Musk’s Twitter.'”
MRCTV readers will recall our coverage of the CCDH, and its ties to the leftist U.S. organization (and John Podesta creation) the Center for American Progress.
FFO reports that the FEMA funds have not all been spent, and:
“According to Guidehouse, its counter-disinformation services, including its database of disinformation, have since been discontinued.”
And Guidehouse evidently has tried to scrub evidence of its government-funded censorship efforts.
But, writes FFO:
“A link to a 2021 Guidehouse report advertising its counter-disinformation services now returns a 404 page. But Guidehouse has not been able to remove all traces of its report from the web – it remains accessible through online archives.
We also know, through online archives, that Guidehouse’s page advertising its anti-misinformation and anti-disinformation capabilities also advertised the expertise of two of its (now former) employees, Jason Dury and Rodney Snyder.”
We’ve been able to look at Snyder’s CIA ties, but what of Dury?
“Dury, according to his bio, worked in U.S. intelligence for 25 years, while Snyder was a station chief in the Middle East and chief of staff to two CIA directors. His bio also states he ‘helped stand up the National Counterterrorism Center.'”
That would be the federal spy gang started in 2004 and known by the letters NCTC, which supposedly facilitates info-sharing across agencies like the CIA, FBI, and Department of Defense. The NCTC also maintains a central database of terrorism-related information and produces assessments to guide “counterterrorism” operations.
Related: Biden's Facebook Censorship Call Relies On Leftist 'Dark Money' Group
What better skills to employ against average Americans, trying to exercise their freedom of speech?
The FFO team adds:
“This is another example of a long-running theme in FFO’s research: the close involvement of current and former members of the U.S. security and foreign policy state in the counter-disinformation industry.”
That’s “disinformation” as defined by agents of the state, then “reported” to social media and the dinosaur press.
“In its 2021 report, Guidehouse reveals that it ‘engages’ social media platforms on behalf of clients in order to report mis- and disinformation. This kind of ‘switchboarding’ activity – using a private company to relay content moderation requests to tech platforms – has been a major source of controversy for DHS in the past.”
It seems as if the government propagandists and censors just can’t grasp why that kind of behavior – taking our money to silence us or to fund the dissemination of ideas we find objectionable – might be upsetting.
This is particularly galling in a nation that purportedly has a U.S. Constitution to safeguard against this kind of cloak-and-dagger silencing machine.
And FFO closes with this, a special treat for MRCTV readers who are aware of the long battle we have fought with the federally subsidized NewsGuard.
“Similarly to the media blacklisting company NewsGuard, Guidehouse also identified websites that it considers ‘higher risk’ for spreading mis- and disinformation. Guidehouse did not publicly reveal which websites are on that list — but, presumably, its clients in the U.S. government had access to it.”
These kinds of tactics used to be associated with the Soviet Union. Did you know you were paying for them, here, in the U.S.?
We only are a month into the new Administration, and revelations such as this and many more have come before us.
If this is just the start, imagine how deep and wide this censorship complex might be.