A recent article at the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) highlighted a recent Department of Justice funded grants program at Youngstown State University in Ohio, that targets groups that include conservative website The Gateway Pundit, a discussion board run by supporters of former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, Christians and a wide range of communities on Telegram and Reddit.
Foundation For Freedom Online (FFO) is a free speech watchdog dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet.
Mike Benz is the Executive Director at the Foundation for Freedom Online.
According to FFO, the Youngstown State University project funded by the Department of Justice, called “A Frame Analysis of Violence and Accelerationism in Cognitive Radicalization,” received over $440,000 in taxpayer funding from the DOJ for research that will incorporate an existing data project led by Youngstown State University professor Richard Lee Rogers, “Frames of Misinformation, Extremism, and Conspiracism” (FOMEC).
Contributors to the big-data focused project admit to collecting tens of millions of posts from Americans, which they group under a wide range of broad-brush labels including the “Christian Radical Right,” “QAnon,” “accelerationism,” and “extremism.”
According to FFO, the project has received $449,897 in DOJ Funding, part of a wider DOJ grants program on “Domestic Radicalization and Violent Extremism” that has paid out nearly $1.5 million in grants to the censorship industry.
The DOJ-funded project lumps The Gateway Pundit in with neo-Nazi groups.
Although Youngstown claims their research is focused on “extremists,” the project’s own publications show it is lumping mainstream conservatives in with open neo-Nazis. For example, the project’s most recent monthly report shows that a Ron Paul discussion board, as well as conservative news sites World Net Daily and the Gateway Pundit, are being monitored alongside neo-Nazi websites Stormfront and the Daily Stormer.
The FFO report continues, The Trump movement and religious groups are also targeted. One of the papers listed under the FOMEC project titled “COVID-19 Information Sources and Misinformation by Faith Community,” authored by Rogers himself, accuses Donald Trump of amplifying misinformation about COVID-19 and identified faith communities, especially White evangelicals, White nonevangelical Protestants and non-Hispanic Roman Catholics for spreading misinformation that originated with Trump. The DOJ funding a project that targets religious groups may pose problems for the agency, given that the DOJ’s FBI was recently exposed for targeting Catholics.
No prominent media outlet has been more censored for posting information from Hunter Biden’s laptop than The Gateway Pundit.
John Solomon of JustTheNews.com reported in October 2022 on an official US government “enemies list” maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. The US government uses the list to fund private organizations to harass, suppress, and suspend First Amendment rights to US citizens.
The Gateway Pundit topped the list with an impressive nearly doubling its closest competitor with a 46 “incidents” on election integrity next to 26 incidents by our friends at Breitbart.com.
This latest DOJ-funded report coincides with the Missouri-Louisiana vs. Biden free speech lawsuit that will be heard by the US Supreme Court on March 18, 2024.
Gateway Pundit is suing the federal government together with the Attorney Generals of Missouri and Louisiana, the Covid experts Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford and Dr. Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, authors of The Great Barrington Declaration, and two others for violation of the First Amendment rights.
On the 4th of July, 2023, Louisiana US District Judge Terry Doughty granted the Missouri-Louisiana plaintiffs’ request for an injunction against the Biden Regime’s censorship machine, stating that “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”
The case will be argued in front of the US Supreme Court in March.
There is no telling how many government funded censorship projects are being farmed out to universities and colleges at the present time. We suspect the funding is in the millions for the unconstitutional government-funded studies.
This story originally appeared on TheGateWayPundit
