The Highwire with Del Bigtree - USAID’S CENSORSHIP CAMPAIGN REVEALED

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

A new document from America First Legal shows USAID’s role promoting censorship promotion strategies for NGOs, government, and the private sector against disfavored speech online.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

We have Aaron Siri, lead counsel of the informed consent action network coming up to really talk about the story of the week, which is governments trying to really gatekeep the online conversation, censor the online conversation and debate and discovery and information. And here at the high wire, we really leaned into that censorship, especially during the COVID response. Yeah. And, you know, we took hits. We took hits. We had our YouTube and Facebook taken away, Instagram, you had PayPal shut down. and basically Twitter was the only social media site that we still had. And we had to build our entire platform to stream the show from the website you're watching it from right now.

And even on Twitter, you know, it appeared that we had been throttled quite a bit during COVID. But we are happy to announce that we have just hit 200,000 followers on our Twitter account. All right. Dust is settled. COVID is over. And we're looking forward to really supercharging ourselves on this platform and any other platform that we are on. other platforms as well. So this is the conversation now. As governments are moving Ireland, Scotland, Canada, they're all moving to gatekeep speech and to censor really the online

platforms. And even it was reported France, they're trying to censor conversation and criticism about big pharma products. It's absolutely insane. We have a document that has come out from U.S. AID and U.S.AID is an agency for international development. They deal with America's foreign policy. They receive its funding from Congress, meaning the American people, us. And so we go to this headline here, and this document really starts to outline things and put things in perspective. This is a report by the Foundation for Freedom. It says U.S. AID internal documents reveal government plot to promote censorship initiatives. And you can see the cover image of this actual document that was America First Legal has received this through FOIA request.

So we're going to jump right into this document. It's called a disinfo primer. This was released in February of 2021. This is when it was put out, you know, I'll say behind the scenes because it was for internal use only. But it was right, it was the first month that the Biden administration took office. They put out these censorship directives through USAID. And so it goes on to really just in plain language, talk.

about the issues and listen to this it says the nature of how people access information is changing along with the information technology boom and the decline of traditional print media because traditional information systems are failing some opinion leaders are casting doubt on media which in turn impacts USAID programming and funding choices so right there is this traditional information systems are failing goes further it leads it says it leads to a loss of information integrity online news platforms have disrupted the traditional media landscape. That's us, Del. Government officials and journalists are not the sole

information gatekeepers anymore. That should be celebrated. That should not be put out by a government agency as a warning sign. So let's go out. And so obviously these are big issues for these stakeholders. And so they propose some solutions. And so one of the solutions is that they talk about cutting funding, but it says, but it goes on to say this. To users, these spaces, now it's talking about the alternative media, these spaces enable them to collaborate and validate their own claims and interpretations of the world that differ from mainstream sources. With this, individuals contribute their own research to the larger discussion, collectively reviewing and validating each other to create a populist expertise that justifies shapes and supports

their alternative beliefs. Well, in any normal world, crowdsourcing information, is a good thing. But this inversion, reading that, again, they're painting this as a terrible, terrible thing. And so there's this guy Thomas Payne writing these letters that is giving a different perspective than the British government. And no longer is the British government in control of the narrative in the United States of America. We must pass laws to make sure that this stuff. That's exactly what we're talking about here, right?

I mean, when we think about our founding fathers, they're passing letters to each other while their doors are being kicked in by British shoulders saying, I'm allowed to sleep here tonight. We own you. We control you. And it was only through the dissemination of a different narrative among the people that America exists today. Exactly. And so they present a lot of ideas on how to stop this. One of them is to cut people's funding. And this, you know, this has been known for a long time. They pull ads, but they actually just laid out in there. They said, thus, cutting this financial support found in the ad tech spaces would obstruct disinformation actors from spreading messaging online. Efforts have been made to inform advertisers of their risks, such as a threat to brand safety

by being placed next to objectable content through conducting research and assessments of online media content. Additionally, with this data, organizations hope to aim to redirect funding to higher quality news domains. So basically, mainstream media, the legacy media has lost, lost its viewers and its funding is going away. We need to redirect funding to them. Take that funding away from those people that are actually reporting and give it back to us. Then it talks about something called pre-bunking. And this is like the information version of pre-crime. It says as a measure to counter disinformation and make debunking more impactful, Donovan recommends pre-bunking,

which she defines as an offensive strategy that refers to anticipating what disinformation is likely to be repeated by politicians. So they're going after politicians. Pundance and provocateurs during key events and having already prepared a response based on past fact checks. we know fact checkers during COVID were so accurate. So it says pre-drunk, this is, this is the cool part. Pre-bunking is drawn from inoculation theory, which seeks to explain how an attitude or belief can be protected against persuasion and people can build up an immunity to miss or disinformation. I have nothing to say about that. I mean, it speaks for itself. Yeah. Jinks. So, so at the end of this

document it has kind of a just a catch-all image of everything they're talking about just a one-stop shop so if you want to put this up in your by the water cooler at your local government agency you can fight disinformation there and you can see here some of the stuff that's highlighted eliminate financial incentives eliminate ad networks that talks about that but to me the most chilling statement in this document is this agree policies on strategic silence so they're talking they're telling the media to not Not everyone don't talk about it. So when we, this is, this is one of the things we've seen. Hey, Adele, why aren't people, why isn't the media talking about vaccine injury?

Why isn't this happening? Why aren't they talking about excess deaths? Right. Could it be strategic media silence? Could it be a, I mean, it's not a conspiracy. This is actually saying. This is what they're trying to do. And then, of course, educate the public about the threat of information disorder, they say.

And what might that look like? Well, perhaps it looks like this in this headline from NBC. disinformation poses an unprecedented threat in 2024 in the U.S. is less ready than ever. So they're going to try to scare you because, you know, alternative media or whatever you want to call it is actually gaining ground and legacy media is not. So therefore, this is the most unprecedented threat we're ever going to face. But the bigger picture on this whole thing is this came and was funded by USAID. And people may remember the name of that organization because It had a little bit to do with the COVID situation.

We just went through. Take a look at this. Ms. Powers. Did USAID fund coronavirus research in Wuhan, China? We did not fund gain of function research. That's not the question. The question is, did you fund coronavirus research in Wuhan, China? Before my time, there was the Predict program with which you're familiar, which ended in China in 2019.

This is a $200 million program. And the GAO has also identified that some of these. grants went directly to the Wuhan Institute of Irology, where there is a suspicion that the lab leak began that began the pandemic. Has USAID awarded funds to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in China? Not to my knowledge, but I'd have to give me. I think the answer is once again, yes. GAO has found that there have been sub-awards of NIH money as probably as well as USAID money that went to the academy of not just medical research,

military medical research in China. Now, part of the unknowns here is we can't get the records to look at this. So I've been asking for months and months for records. In September of last year, I wrote Ms. Powers, the USAID, a request asking for records from the Predict program. These are not classified. These are simply records of scientific research, and we want to read the grants to find out what they were doing and whether the research was dangerous or not. The response I got from your agency was USAID will not be providing any documents at this time.

They're just unwilling to give documents on scientific grant proposal. We're paying for it. They're asking for $745 million more in money and we get no response. Amazing. I just want to point out one of my favorite interviews this year was Rand Paul. If you didn't get a chance to see that just a couple of weeks ago, go check it out. And still in our store, you can go to our store and we are selling deception, in the book about the lab leak and in his hearings

with Tony Fauci. It's a fantastic book. We also have the Spanish language version now of I'm unvaccinated and it's okay. And then the indoctrinated brain, Dr. Michael Nell, super, super amazing. All that's available at our bookstore. So you know, do yourself a favor

and get deeper into these conferences. They're super just fascinating studies of something that is affecting our lives. and is going to go on to be, you know, affecting our lives in the days ahead and should be affecting how we decide to vote and what we're going to do about this, you know, assault on speech. And as you're about to, I'm sure, point out, USAID. So the very company that's invested in Wuhan is also investing in doing work to figure out ways how to censor those of us. They're going to point out what they're involved in. Yeah, exactly. And just to put it completely bluntly, this article does a really great job just to bring this to a close. Why did USAID fund the Wuhan lab? And you go into this article and it says this. Among the key revelations of this year's long investigation was the enormous sums of U.S. government funding spent on risky virus research around the world, but with a particular emphasis on China. The vast majority of this money was funneled through the New York-based NGO called Equal Health Alliance, led by British zoologist Peter Dazek.

and by far the largest portion of U.S. money channeled through EcoHealth, no less than $65 million, came from USAID. Not even the pandemic could put a stop to investment. As recently as 2021, well after EcoHealth Alliance, had been rebuked by the National Institutes of Health Health for improper practices regarding its funding of the Wuhan Lab, USAID, gave EcoHealth Alliance a further $4.67 million. But then it goes and says this. This was merely the latest in a long series of funding rounds.

EcoHealth received its first installment from USAID, in 2009. The money would come from a then-novel USAID program called PRED, we talked about in this show before, whose mission was to hunt out viruses that jump from animals to humans and can potentially cause a pandemic. So USAID appears to have been literally the wheelwork, which propelled that only DASIC's EcoHealth Alliance in virus hunting, but research at the Wuhan lab, and now they're known their role in directing the censorship of online conversation. It's a one-stop shop, and they're funding all of it. Wow. It's really amazing, and it is the issue of our time.

And I feel like in many ways we're looking at China and we're looking at Russia. Be careful of your enemies and let's get into Taiwan and, you know, all like focus on war around the world and other people's borders and other people's issues. Meanwhile, as we're looking out over the ocean behind us, you know, prisons are being built. and jails themselves being put up that surround our cities, surround our cars, surround our decision making, our tracking our phones, installing cameras everywhere we go, and behind it is organizations like this and our own government trying to get away

with controlling our ability to communicate.