An “anti-terrorism” program run by the Biden Administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been ousted as using its federal funding to target conservative organizations and publications, including Breitbart News.
As Breitbart reports, the Media Research Center (MRC) uncovered documents detailing the political motivations of the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant program (TVTP), which was founded by DHS in 2011 for the initial purpose of fighting the Islamic terror group Al-Qaeda.
Under Biden, the grant program has expanded significantly in its scope, and has awarded 80 different grants, amounting to $39,611,999. Of the 80 grants, 52 percent went to public institutions while the remaining 48 percent were given to private organizations. The grant program now includes several “media literacy and online critical thinking initiatives,” one of which is a training program at the University of Dayton which explicitly accused Fox News, the NRA, Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation, and the Republican Party itself of radicalizing Americans into neo-Nazis.
The university’s program created a graphic of a pyramid split into four different levels, which the university claims is a display of increasing “radicalization” into conservative values and traditional beliefs. The bottom tier features Fox, the NRA, Heritage, and the GOP, while the next tier up includes TPUSA, PragerU, Breitbart, and the Make America Great Again movement. The top two tiers then feature a variety of neo-Nazi imagery, including the white supremacist website Daily Stormer and the think tank National Policy Institute, run by the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.
A seminar on the subject at the University of Dayton even compared President Donald Trump to Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, and also accused Florida Governor Ron DeSantis of wanting to start a “second Holocaust.” One of the speakers featured by the DHS-funded seminar series is Michael Loedenthal, a self-proclaimed leader of the far-left anarcho-communist terrorist group Antifa.
“A lot of things we’re doing are illegal” Loedenthal admitted in a speech as he was discussing his own group’s violent activities. “A lot of it involves breaking the law.”
In response to the revelations, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) vowed in an interview with Breitbart to cut funding to such government grants and other organizations that have targeted conservatives in such a manner.
“I think America is going to be shocked by how much government was doing…using these government agencies with these private companies to… censor what people can see,” said McCarthy. “You’re going to find not only are we going to hold them accountable, we’re going to be able to use that basis to know legislatively what can we do that they can never do this again.”