Bloomberg via Getty Images
Wow: The Biden administration blew more than $126 million in 2021 alone on grants to “study” the spread of “misinformation” — much of which in fact was healthy skepticism of government-sponsored falsehoods.
As we’ve warned before, the entire “anti-disinformation” project boils down to progressive elites redefining their own viewpoints as objective truth — and repressing contrary views, including outright satire and even actual true facts that might lead people to the “wrong” conclusions.
The hypocrisy is particularly ripe, after Democrats such as Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Andrew Cuomo (and their allied media) spent much of 2020 casting doubt on Operation Warp Speed, which developed the COVID vaccines in record time to allow the nation to fully reopen, and even said they “wouldn’t trust any Trump vaccine.”
Only to turn around (once Biden-Harris took power and claimed moral ownership of the jabs) and make false claims about the vaccines’ effectiveness — insisting, for example, that the vaxxed couldn’t spread the bug and even denying that natural immunity (from having fought it off) was as good as getting jabbed.
Not to mention all manner of utterly baseless claims about the effectiveness of masking.
Or that “Saint” Tony Fauci eventually admitted that the whole “six feet of social distancing” rule was made up out of thin air.
Yet the Bidenites arrogantly sent out their grants for academics to study the spread of “misinformation” to the contrary on all these fronts.
Including $2.3 million to the University of Pennsylvania to probe “COVID-19 misinformation exposure on social media among black and rural communities” to allow “precision public health messaging” on “health behaviors such as vaccination, mask wearing, and social distancing.”
That is: Help figure out how to get people to believe stuff that (America now knows) wasn’t actually true, or even based on any kind of science at all.
All while the same “we know better” crowd was also suppressing any suggestion that COVID might’ve leaked from that Chinese lab — a theory that is now backed by the government’s best experts.
Trust undermined
The result of all this has been to undermine popular trust in all public-health pronouncements, even those based on well-established science.
Every individual involved in pushing these “misinformation” efforts needs to be named, shamed and blacklisted from any future government service.
They claimed to be keeping people healthy, but wound up trying to quash or even crush anyone who disagreed with their party line.
In retrospect, many of the dissenters have proved correct, even as the “misinformation experts” are just licking their wounds and trying to figure out how they can be more successful the next time their friends are in power.