MRC’s Wildly Biased Attack On Media Literacy Program Continues By Smearing Germans

We’ve detailed how the Media Research Center’s portrayal of a media literacy program the federal government has assembled is nothing more than the usual right-wing talking points that attack any effort to fight hate and misinformation as “censorship” — and we’ve only gone halfway through the report. Writer Tim Kilcullen moved on from attacking Ad Fontes and its CEO Vanessa Otero earlier in the report to fearmongering about Germans:

III. The State Department seminars were co-hosted by a German government institution and focused on bringing German indoctrination strategies into American classrooms. 

Aside from the American Otero, much of the seminars’ speakers were European. Conducted out of Germany by a German government institution, the State Department event focused on importing German socialism and German censorship into American classrooms.  

Kilcullen didn’t explain what, exactly, those “German indoctrination strategies” are — it appears that he’s trying to allude to liking the whole program to Nazi tactics. He went on to whine that the program makes use of actual fact-checkers that the MRC has repeatedly smeared for fact-checking his fellow right-wingers:

In addition to pushing NewsGuard, the “Kit” also instructs students to use Politifact and Snopes. Politifact and Snopes both purport to fact check other news sources, but are themselves infamous purveyors of misinformation. For example, both outlets aggressively attacked the New York Post’s October 2020 exposé on Hunter Biden’s corrupt business dealings, the former casting doubt on the reporting and the latter baselessly reciting false claims that the well-researched story from a century-old news publication was Russian disinformation. Though the fact checkers’ reports were themselves lacking key information and detail about the Hunter Biden bombshell reports — details even far-left outlets like CNN and The Washington Post now concede — fact checks provided cover for Big Tech platforms like Meta and Twitter (now X) to censor the story until after the election.

As we’ve pointed out whenever the MRC brings this up, the New York Post — a pro-Trump right-wing rag — offered no independent verification of the provenance of Hunter’s laptop when its story came out, making it reasonable to dismiss it as an October surprise based on Russian disinformation, not surprising given Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Kilcullen went on to attack the German group Tactical Tech and its “Glass Room” curriculum that teachers about the issues in “scaling freedom of expression”:

The Glass Room’s own interactives profligate misinformation — albeit misinformation that favors the agenda of Biden and his far-left European allies. “The Glass Room” penalized students who said that the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated with a lab leak from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, insisting this “has not been backed up with evidence.” In reality, evidence as early as March of 2020 indicated the virus originated from the Institute, and Biden’s own Department of Energy has now confirmed a Wuhan lab leak as COVID-19’s most likely origin. 

The Glass Room also promoted an article reciting the unfounded conspiracy theory that Trump’s 2016 election victory was the result of “Russian hackers.” This is not the only place where the Rhode Island Lab baselessly suggested Trump had nefarious connections to Russia: it also distributed propaganda financed by the European Union and the Belgian Evans Foundation, which promoted a video implying Trump was working with or for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Hobbs herself has tweeted videos suggesting Trump was “supporting Putin [sic] interests over the United States;” she added it was further evidence of (entirely unsubstantiated) “Trump-Russia” ties. 

Kilcullen’s “March of 2020” evidence comes from the right-wing Breitbart, so there’s little reason to trust it, and in fact, there’s still no actual direct evidence proving a lab leak.

Kilcullen went on to rant that that another segment of the program “train[s] children as political activists,” as if that’s a bad thing:

Several pieces of MEET Tolerance’s curriculum described how to use “children as media producers,” where children would be “[a]dvocating intercultural values and social justice through [their] own media productions and practices.”  

Most explicit was a curriculum developed by socialist German politician Konstantin von Notz. A vice chairman of the ruling Alliance 90/Greens Party, Von Notz is Deputy Chairman of the Bundestag’s Control Panel, the parliamentary organization overseeing the entirety of the nation’s intelligence agencies. Von Notz’s “No Hate Speech Movement” induced children to use predetermined and coordinated media hashtags and posts to create a seemingly grassroots push for an international censorship law, arguing “freedom of expression” should not protect “haters” motivated by “right wing extremism.” The movement for censorship even offered free red badges, “No Hate” balloons, and “No Hate” stickers to be distributed to children, encouraging the students to photograph themselves wearing the distributed apparel and then post the images on Meta’s Instagram.

Von Notz’s censorship efforts in Germany have been horrifyingly effective. He helped lead a successful government effort to ban the nation’s top opposition party from accessing public financing, a near-necessity for winning elections in a nation with draconian limits on independent campaign funding. He proudly championed a new internet censorship package in 2019 expanding Germany’s anti-hate speech regulatory regime, which imposes crippling fines on Big Tech companies that do not proactively remove user speech the government could find “hateful.” Shortly after leaders of Germany’s opposition criticized the law as a “Direct Attack on Freedom of Speech” and a return to the country’s “Stasi Methods,” Von Notz and his allies placed them under surveillance.  

Note that Kilcullen refers to the affected political party only as the “opposition.” In fact, it was the Alternative for Germany group, a party so far-right that it took part in a meeting with neo-Nazis to formulate a plan to deport millions of German residents that they consider to be “unassimilated.” Kilcullen didn’t explain why fighting hate speech is such a terrible thing.

After waging personal attacks on several of the seminar attendees, Kilcullen concluded:

Through the Rhode Island Lab, the State Department trained American educators on German socialist strategies for bringing indoctrination into the classroom, “inoculating” students against conservative ideas, turning students into leftist political activists, and putting the Ad Fontes and NewsGuard censorship tools into classrooms. The State Department provided a perfect demonstration of the Rhode Island Lab’s ability and the resources it could bring to the table. In a forthcoming follow-up report, the Media Research Center (MRC) will detail how, having honed its strategy, the Rhode Island Lab secured finances from the Department of Homeland Security to bring the theories discussed during the State Department seminars into action.

We’ll get to that follow-up report soon. But first, the MRC had to promote this one inside its right-wing media bubble. First up was a post by Luis Cornelio serving as a stenographer for his boss:

MRC President and Founder Brent Bozell rebuked President Joe Biden’s State Department following MRC Free Speech America’s exposé on the government’s plot to brainwash children into becoming leftist activists through taxpayer-funded programs.

Bozell drew attention to “Orwellian” MRC findings revealing that the scandal-plagued Department of State used taxpayer money to finance a German censorship effort that trained teachers to “inoculate” U.S. students against conservative ideas. “This is brainwashing at the youngest of an age to believe that conservatives are not to be trusted,” Bozell told WMAL radio

[…]

A fired-up Bozell pointed out that this entire scheme is being bought and paid for at the expense of Americans’ tax dollars. “This is all using American tax money. The first question we ask ourselves is: What in the world is it any business of the United States State Department to be doing this?” asked Bozell. 

A seemingly shocked O’Connor responded to the MRC Free Speech America findings with grave concern, particularly as the taxpayer-funded plan drew parallels to the staunch propaganda operations that had plagued Nazi Germany. 

Specifically, O’Connor said, “I sort of expect this behavior from Germany because I know my history and there was a whole Hitler Youth thing that went on, and then there was propaganda going on there. But, you know, for an administration who likes to spend a lot of time calling their political opponents authoritarians and Nazis, for them to actually fund this through the State Department and then brainwash children and teachers about how evil conservatives are. I mean, that sounds kinda Hitler-y.”

That “Hitler-y” implication O-Connor picked up on is precisely why Kilcullen made a point of highlighting it. An anonymously written Jan. 11 post touted another friendly Bozell media appearance:

In a fiery appearance on The Erick Erickson Show, MRC President and Founder Brent Bozell harshly condemned the Biden administration’s weaponized government for pushing censorship and indoctrination into American schools.

Conversing with host Erick Erickson on Thursday’s episode of the show, Bozell highlighted a recent MRC report showing how the State Department teamed up with the German government to fund seminars where American educators were trained in German strategies on censorship and indoctrination. The U.S. State Department “teamed up with [Germany] to do a program designed to teach teachers how to teach children how to turn against conservatives,” Bozell declared. “It’s something that ought to frighten every American more and more.”

[…]

Erickson — an accomplished journalist, activist and former Macon City councilman — also confided in viewers of his longtime friendship with Bozell, remarking that “on the list of people I think most highly of on the planet, he is in the top five.” 

This time, Bozell injected the Nazi reference, declaring that “it’s an Aryan youth movement, but it’s being trained with Maoist indoctrination camps.” Erickson bought into it, adding that “the Nazis and the commies were kissing cousins.” In fact, the Nazi movement purged communists and socialists from the German civil service and put communist leaders in concentration camps, so they were in no way the “kissing cousins” Erickson wants you to believe they are.

It doesn’t enhance Bozell’s credibility to tout how his interviewer thinks “most highly” of him, since such hero worship pretty much guarantees Erickson will toss only the softest of softballs to his interviewee. Which, of course, is why Bozell limited himself to friendly softball interviews.