Beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, the mainstream media began to lean left, but it was subtle and still hewed to American constitutional and cultural norms. The lean became overt with Nixon’s presidency and accelerated in extremism during Reagan’s and both Bushes’ administrations. With Trump, though, the media shifted from bias to outright dishonesty and censorship. We had the Russia Hoax, the Ukraine Hoax, and, perhaps most deleteriously, the “Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation” Hoax. Worse is to come, though, and you’re paying for it: The Biden administration is using taxpayer dollars to fund an AI system that will assist the media in targeting conservatives. This is criminally unconstitutional.

The New York Post writes that Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, has released a report about the fact that the National Sciences Foundation is giving out money to prominent hard-left academic institutions under the heading of a program entitled “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.”

That’s an Orwellian title that’s remarkably opaque. Behind it, though, lurks something known as “Track F,” a title that’s even more obfuscatory. What Track F does is work to create an AI system to identify people who have fallen prey to “misinformation” and creates tools to reeducate these misguided souls. The targets are those with “vulnerabilities to disinformation methods.”

A 1916/1917 political cartoon about Teddy Roosevelt (a progressive) calling for censorship in the lead-up to WWI. Library of Congress.

For starts, the government shouldn’t be involved in identifying “information” versus “misinformation.” We’ve seen in the last seven years that this has nothing to do with straight facts—as in “X says President Biden wore a green suit. This is incorrect. He wore a red suit.” Instead, the leftist version of “facts” is to say that any opinions with which leftists disagree are incorrect facts that must not only be challenged but must also be silenced.

But it’s worse than the government funding an AI program to identify what we all know are actually opinions. It turns out that the AI program’s creators are designing the systems to garget very specific opinions. Per the New York Post:

At MIT, one researcher told NSF officials “broad swaths of the public cannot effectively sort truth from fiction online.”

The researcher specifically called out “military veterans, older adults, military families” and those in “rural and indigenous communities” as particularly vulnerable to believing misinformation.

At the University of Michigan, one researcher who received millions suggested one possible outcome of the research was outsourcing content “moderation” decisions from social media platforms to government officials.

“Our misinformation service helps policy makers at platforms who want to… push responsibility for difficult judgments to someone outside the company… by externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship,” a researcher at the University of Michigan’ said in a pitch to the NSF.

Another researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison who received funding said the team, “was specifically focused on… skepticism regarding the integrity of U.S. elections and hesitancy related to COVID-19 vaccines.”

The researchers point to certain groups like those that read “the Bible or the Constitution” as subject to misinformation.

“Because interviewees distrusted both journalists and academics, they drew on this practice to fact check how media outlets reported the news” — when in actuality they weren’t fully informing themselves, the researcher said in a message.

A researcher at University of Washington which received funding to create a similar tool under another program — the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program — wrote to an NSF official that countering disinformation is “inherently political” and is ultimately “censorship.”

In many ways, what’s happening isn’t really new. For years, Facebook and pre-Musk Twitter censored opinions with which leftists disagreed. Facebook is still doing this. What’s new is that the government is openly funding a program to make this happen, and that the people involved in the program are equally open about the fact that their censorship targets are conservatives.

That the leftists in academia are doing what they’re doing is because the existing mainstream media have created people who live in perfect silos of leftist misinformation. Thus, if you look back at all the supposed “misinformation” that conservatives, veterans, and other non-Democrats believe, we see that they were the ones whom the facts ultimately supported. As just a small sample, Trump did not conspire with the Russians in 2016, condition U.S. aid to Ukraine on investigating Biden, praise Neo-Nazis, or exhort his supporters to engage in a coup against the Capitol. Additionally, COVID almost certainly did begin in a Wuhan lab, and Hunter Biden’s laptop was not Russian disinformation. In other words, the misinformation wasn’t coming from the people who are being targeted through these government-funded AI programs.

It was bad enough when the media misreported and squashed information (as it’s still doing—witness MSNBC censoring Trump’s Iowa victory speech) or when social media, through which most people share and get information, did the same. It’s disastrous—and deeply, criminally unconstitutional—when the government funds sophisticated AI censorship programs that will do indirectly what the government cannot do directly.