Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida on Friday pointed out how the Biden administration continues its Orwellian campaign to target conservatives, especially those who are Christian or live in rural areas.
The Fort Walton Beach Republican, in an email to constituents, spotlighted a hearing earlier this week by the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Gaetz noted that the hearing focused on how the Biden administration used taxpayer-funded research and artificial intelligence to run a propaganda campaign against Americans “who express their values and beliefs online,” especially those whose web activity indicated that “the Bible and the Constitution are sacred to them.”
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“The government is funding predictive analytics to go after Americans who don’t think like the so-called expert class,” Gaetz said in the email.
At issue was a program run by the National Science Foundation.
As the Tampa Free Press reported earlier this week, in September 2021, the NSF initially awarded 12 university and nonprofit research teams with grants of $750,000 each for something called the “Convergence Accelerator” program. Under the program, six of the teams were selected to move to a second stage of the project, which actually involved creating tip lines for people to report “misinformation.”
The funding came from an overall pot of roughly $39 million spent so far by the NSF on such initiatives under President Joe Biden.
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At the hearing, Gaetz highlighted one $750,000 grant to MIT to create mechanisms for “effective interventions” to “educate” Americans about misinformation. According to a report, MIT’s researchers “believed that conservatives, minorities, and veterans were uniquely incapable of assessing the veracity of content online.”
“The very grants that are being issued by the NSF would deem those people in a separate and diminished class,” Gaetz said during the hearing.
He reiterated that the MIT project specifically and condescendingly claimed that people in rural areas, members of military families, and followers of the Bible and the Constitution were “uniquely susceptible” to misinformation.
Gaetz argued that the MIT project and others like it were akin to the 2002 Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report,” wherein the government used computer systems to “predict” crime before it happened and went after people beforehand.
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“It’s not that military families and rural Americans and people who love the Bible and Constitution are dumber or uniquely susceptible to anything,” said Gaetz.
“It’s just they don’t think like the expert class and the National Science Foundation wants them to think, so they try to program what they see so they can control how they behave — and that is the true weaponization this committee will stand against.”
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