Dear DOGE – Why Is The U.S. Government Funding “Media Literacy” Informers And Indoctrination?
DHS, Defense, and State are all involved. I know, I took the trainings. Do Secretaries Noem, Hegseth, and Rubio know?
Does the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) know that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is funding “media literacy” programs to teach students and the community to snitch on each other under the guise of fighting “disinformation”? Does Kristie Noem, the recently confirmed Secretary of DHS, know? Other funders of such programs include the Department of Defense and Department of State. Do Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio know about this?
If they had read my prior writings and seen my prior media apperances on the DHS program, they would know.
Courageous RI
I laid it all out one year ago in my February 19, 2024, post at Legal Insurrection, DHS Is Training Teachers To Develop Student ‘Disinformation’ Informers – I Know, I Took The Training:
I’m a Providence, Rhode Island, high school teacher. You may remember me from when I blew the whistle in July 2021 on how a new Critical Race Curriculum was creating racial hostility in the Middle School where I taught at the time, and the subsequent retaliation and harassment.
I’m blowing the whistle again, this time as to Department of Homeland Security funding for training of teachers on combatting so-called “disinformation” as part of supposed “media literacy” programming through the University of Rhode Island, called Courageous RI. The training is not what it purports to be. It’s all about training teachers to teach students to become “disinformation” informers. I know. I took the training.
Starting in September 2023, I attended a twelve week online training through “Courageous Rhode Island” at the University of Rhode Island, funded by a DHS grant of over $700,000. The program is for K-12 teachers and is promoted as “media literacy.” But it’s so much more than media literacy, and the impact of the training turned to teacher interaction with students and how students could be utilized as reporting sources.
I’m about to tell you what I witnessed and what this taxpayer-funded “disinformation” training is all about. What follows are a lot of details. But the bottom line is that the is a direct track from media literacy theory to DHS goals and objectives to URI training to teachers to students, and back again up the chain in a feedback loop. It’s dangerous to our society, and shows how something claimed to protect freedom has the potential to damage freedom.
What follows is background on media literacy and “disinformation” ideology, how it is a DHS focus, and some of what I experienced in the course. It’s long, but necessary.
K-12 Media Literacy programs for teachers and librarians are springing-up across the nation. These programs use millions of dollars in taxpayer funded grants and awards from DHS, The CARES Act, State funds, and (NGOs) non-government organizations with leftwing political affiliations. The goals of media literacy training are to advance radical leftist propaganda like anti-American sentiment, pro-gender-cult sentiment, pro-United Nations politics; and to create a student- informer network.
Every single parent in America needs to be very concerned. Why? Because media literacy aims to create an army of child activists and snitches. Media literacy aims to create a network of radical leftist teachers while indoctrinating children with ambiguous made-up authoritarian language and curricula to control what children think and what children believe to be true about their American/Western heritage.
Embedded in the K-12 media literacy curriculum materials are lessons that dismiss human biology and geography; there are lessons that teach children United Nations political vocabulary, anti fracking sentiment, climate change ideology and more. There are lessons that break down the family, erase gender and subtly promote communism over capitalism. Most alarming is that media literacy training programs are funded by federal agencies and state agencies that allocate millions of taxpayer funds to media literacy programs across the nation.
I know, I’ve taken the training. Twice.
Connecting Media Literacy
In addition to the Courageous RI 12-week course I previously wrote about, recently I participated in a teacher/librarian media literacy training, and frankly I was shocked by the content and by the massive amounts of taxpayer funds allotted to media literacy teacher training cohorts.
Otherwise known as Project Look Sharp, ML3 Initiative, or Connecting Media Literacy Across Rhode Island, this training and the many other similar programs are popping up around the country. They provide teachers and students with government funded resources, curriculum, grants and more. These media literacy cohorts believe students can be politically manipulated by the media to commit acts of “violent extremism” and therefore these programs seek to use teachers to detect and re-educate students who may be “extremists” and express dangerous thoughts and actions.
Connecting Media Literacy across Rhode Island’s program differed from Courageous Rhode Island. This program focused on K-12 media literacy lesson-plans and “media decoding” strategies that aimed to identify student bias or alleged prejudice against leftist ideology. Teachers and librarians in this training were given classroom strategies to identify and redirect students whose opinions reflected conservative values. Oddly, we were given strange made-up vocabulary to use like “danger clucking”, “conflict entrepreneur”, “divergent thinkers”, misinformation and disinformation and more. While Courageous RI focused on a broader student network, this media literacy program focused on the classroom as a leftist indoctrination camp.
The list of taxpayer funded sources include additional federal agencies, such as The Department of Defense, and Department of State. Do Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio know about this?
There are additional non-federal sources, such as The Institute of Museum and Library Services, The New York State Department of Education, New York State BOCES, and funds from Ithaca City Schools grant money to“Project Looksharp Media Literacy” the remaining funding sources are from NGOs.
It will come as no surprise that media literacy does not contribute to improved academic outcomes, but rather it seeks to establish a K-12 surveillance culture that singles out conservative voices in K-12 education.
Yet, training modules like Connecting Media Literacy Across Rhode Island created by Project Look Sharp in Ithaca New York, and other programs across the nation continue to receive tax dollars to advance media literacy in K-12 schools.
These teacher training modules should be looked at closely by DOGE and DHS, as they do not serve American children in any way. In fact, media literacy is filled with anti-American propaganda!
After surveying two media literacy trainings here in Rhode Island and curating hundreds of pages of resources and videos, the picture is clear. Our children are being groomed to embrace ideals set forth by the United Nations and to abandon the Constitution and freedom in exchange for a “collectivist mindset” and Cultural Marxism. Hard to believe, and yet this is in fact what is happening across the nation.
Going back as far as 2021 when I sounded the alarm on a harmful, divisive curriculum that concerned me while teaching in the Providence School system, I now see that media literacy is equally divisive and filled with the same propaganda I witnessed back then. After four years, I am realizing the full extent of K-12 indoctrination.
The very lessons your children are exposed to in media literacy lessons are astounding. The lesson plans reflect anti-Christian, anti-Western, pro-Collectivism, and in the name of “DEI inclusion”, there is forced LGBTQ gender language compliance, anti-male, anti-female, anti-family content, and more alarming leftist propaganda provided by the United Nations!
From the onset, I was honest and transparent with the facilitators. I questioned the contention that media literacy is a necessary teaching and learning platform, I truly wanted to understand their rationale. Needless to say, I was quickly singled out and not allowed to co-mingle with my colleagues. In fact, I was isolated in private break-out rooms with all three facilitators who tried to challenge my professional point-of-view that media literacy is a government funded leftist propaganda and surveillance K-12 propaganda machine.
You can see for yourself how political the lesson plans are when you go to the public platform Project Look Sharp. The lessons are free, and can be accessed publicly through Ithaca College Media Literacy curriculum platform resource page. Here is just one example of hundreds that will show the subtle manner in which media literacy lessons reflect leftist ideology and are intended on indoctrinating children to radicalism and anti-Western ideals.
My hope is that with President Trump’s Executive Orders related to K-12 education and with oversight from DOGE, we can reverse course and restore K-12 classrooms to politically neutral zones where all children are respected as free independent thinkers and not enslaved by Marxist ideology and activist teachers.
Conclusion – Stop Funding “Media Literacy” Training
“Media Literacy” has become the gateway drug to manipulating society in the name of fighting supposed disinformation. We don’t need it. The federal government should not be funding it.
Dear @DOGE, Why Is Federal Government Funding “Media Literacy”?
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Comments
I know our host has deep ties to RI so I’ll try not to be too offensive but each time I visit the Ocean State I fear for the continued existence of mankind. If you know, you know.
I think it’s way past time to stop the pigs feeding at the trough, otherwise known as grant writing. Stop it altogether until we get a handle on what’s going on.
And it goes without saying that the Department of Education building in DC should be rented out to Spirit Halloween. Get rid of it completely.
My estimate for how much of the federal government you could eliminate entirely without anyone noticing (at least in a negative sense) is 80%. I use as an example Musk’s experience at X.
I had estimated at least 50% reduction, think what an 80% would mean huge savings and rapid reduction in deficit.
Regarding this all out assault on our children, those implicated must be dealt with harshly.
Thank you for this article, Ms. Bessinger!
My reaction: anger and disgust!
The government should not be funding “voter education”, “voter information” or GOTV efforts either. The vast majority ends up campaigning for he left
100% correct.
With all of these insane expenditures that DOGE is bringing to light the left’s (and judiciary’s) attempted response is something about the Executive overstepping its bounds – as if the Executive is not charged with making sure that money appropriated and allocated by Congress is being correctly spent – but I have not seen even one iota of evidence that showed where any of these specific expenditures were actually addressed by Congress.
Who is it who actually thinks up funding for these various programs? Is there literal verbiage in Congressional bills detailing them or are most of these programs thought up by the agencies, themselves, in some sort of response to loosely worded Congressional appropriations for the agency rather than the actual projects? Did Congress ever specifically create funding for Mozambiquian rubbers or did Congress just give USAID a chunk of money and some touchy-feely wording about spending it in some manner? I have not seen even one bit of evidence pointing to actual legislative language where these laughable projects are addressed. It appears to me that almost all of these projects are the brainchildren of the agencies, themselves, and not really addressed by Congress … but I would like to see some examples.
I’ve tried looking some of these up on usaspending.gov but I can’t seem to find any of these specifics.
I believe it was the author that stated: “Our children are being groomed to embrace ideals set forth by the United Nations and to abandon the Constitution and freedom in exchange for a “collectivist mindset” and Cultural Marxism.”
The people who actually think up funding these various programs are the graduates of the previous K-12 “Media Literacy” programs.
The zips are in the wire. We’ve been overrun.
The government should stop funding any extraneous programs that are outside the mission of any department or agency. Funding for the defense Department as an example. Money only goes for troops, training, bullets, fuel, vehicles, airplanes, ships, etc.. You get the picture. No more crap that has nothing to do with power projection, killing and breaking things in furtherance of US policy. Same for the whole government.
It might be easy to be brave when you have truths on your side but Ramona Bessinger is well above and beyond bravery.
Her insights and willingness to enter the dragon’s den to come out whole just boggles the mind and should give us the pause that tests our own resolve.
Not all heros wear capes.
There are a lot of bad faith actors on the far left. They typically try to disguise what the real focus of their programs are. They love to use kids to forward their propaganda because it worked for Mao in the Cultural Revolution and for Pol Pot in Cambodia.
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
Vladimir Lenin
It’s obvious from articles like this how deep the leftist rot is and how widespread its tentacles are. DOGE has only scratched the surface of the leftist looting of Americans.
We had a hard convo with our middle school daughter for snitching on another kid who brought vapes to school.
She has a good heart and said she snitched because they were told tobacco and all that was bad and that it was for the other kid’s betterment.
It’s a fine line and we laid it out.
If it’s not yours or someone else’s immediate physical safety, something bad around sex (ie groomer/rape/predeator), or your immediate well being, you tell us. We’ll interpret if it falls into the category of the “school’s bee’s wax”
I was hooligan in my youth… and very much ascribe to the us-vs-them view of the teacher student relationship.
In the 1950’s, the Soviet Union had a program where kids were to let their teacher or another government employee when the kids heard their parents talking against the government.
In other words, snitch on your parents, relatives, neighbors. There were a lot of places to report on your family members.
I was in elementary school at the time – I prayed I’d never be put in that situation. This is Communism at its sneakiest. Just like Walz and……
Snitches. Just like the neighbor kids in 1984. Who eventually turned their dad in.
This is the opposite of education. Coercing compliance to a hive-mind groupthink? Houston, we have a problem.
This might have already been cancelled.
In addition to the two featured in the headline, >80 contracts like this were terminated.
https://www.breitbart.com/education/2025/02/17/education-department-slashes-600-million-divisive-teacher-training-grants/
If the particular one you were subjected to was NOT cancelled yet, DOGE has set up a tip line, here:
DOGE@mail.house.gov.
Article discussing the tip line, with a link to it, here:
https://blakemoore.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-blake-moore-to-co-chair-the-doge-caucus
“Critical, rational, moral thought:
the victim of the modern liberal movement.”
I think we should stop calling stuff like this “liberal.” IIRC, Hillary said they changed the name from “progressive” to “liberal” because the former had taken on a negative connotation. “Progressive” is the better term and it goes back at least to Woodrow Wilson.
IIRC, it was an outgrown of the Fabians, same end. A gradual revolution of socialism, to muzzle the industrialists who screwed up the Aristocracy’s control over society. All about Control. Add in the influence of Marcuse and his merry band of Marxists.
The New Red Guard
Mao would be so proud.