Buried within spending provisions that passed in 2022 is a little-known program that has come to light and is raising eyebrows.
According to reports, journalists who get “harassed” online can seek taxpayer-funded counseling and other services as part of a program that seeks to fight “misinformation.” No, I’m not making that up. Your hard-earned tax dollars are going to soothe the souls of aggrieved journalists who get trolled online so they can return to doing the regime’s bidding.
The Biden administration has approved $5.7 million in grant funding to George Washington University to create a program that will provide psychological care to journalists who believe they are the targets of “misinformation-driven harassment campaigns.”
The program, called Expert Voices Together, is described in the government grant database as “a socio-technical system that provides real-time support to experts experiencing online harassment.” The project’s goal is to provide journalists, and eventually other “experts,” with means of “monitoring and reporting” alleged abuse, as well as “personalized assistance with digital safety” and access to “mental health care specialists” as a form of “trauma-informed care.”
Expert Voices Together, the program in question, has received millions of dollars in grant funding from the Biden administration. It is completely Orwellian in nature. The federal government has no role in “monitoring and reporting” online “harassment” of journalists, which is just another way of saying people are using their free speech rights to push back on said journalists.
That all of this is being done under the guise of fighting “misinformation” is even worse. Think about the conflict of interest here. Journalists receive free counseling services from the in-power administration, and we are all supposed to think that doesn’t then indebt those journalists? That they’ll just go about doing their jobs in a completely unbiased fashion, something they weren’t even doing before?
The NSF characterizes providing journalists with mental health counseling as part of an effort to address the “rapid spread of misinformation” because “harassment undermines confidence in pivotal sources of knowledge and reduces expert participation in the information ecosystem.” The grant is part of a broader NSF initiative to bolster “trust and authenticity in communications systems.”
In other words, plumbers, managers, construction workers, and pilots, among many other working Americans, are having to pay for Taylor Lorenz types to get psychological care so they can then feel empowered to keep pushing the regime’s narratives. That’s insane. What if a Republican set up a taxpayer-funded day spa for conservative pundits to ensure they continue to operate at peak efficiency? How would that kind of misuse of public funds go over?
This just goes to show that much of the corruption within the federal government is buried deep in omnibus spending packages that are so large that no one actually knows what’s being funded. And Republican congressional members and presidents have signed onto them repeatedly. We aren’t sending our best.
