If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. It started, as so many federal science fair projects do, with a grant and a vague idea. The University of California, Irvine secured a $683,000 pot of taxpayer gold to study how social media “misinformation” affects vaccine acceptance among black and latino communities. Their plan was to track the followers of so-called “vaccine-hesitant influencers” and feed the data into a visualization tool. That grant is now dead. Not because it failed, but because the broader disinformation-industrial complex is starting to crack under the weight of its own contradictions. The UC Irvine project was just one tile in a mosaic of more than 800 federally funded efforts, totaling over $1.4 billion since 2017. All of it was earmarked to combat misinformation, disinformation, and whatever the marketing department decided to call lies this week. More than 600 of these contracts were approved during the Biden administration, and it turns out people started noticing that the government was quietly inserting itself into the content moderation business. Enter Donald J. Trump, stage right, with his first-day executive order accusing the federal government of turning buzzwords like “malinformation” into permission slips for clamping down on speech. The Department of Justice was assigned to dig through the records and figure out just how far the thought policing went. The public got a good look after The Free Press decided to play matchmaker between obscure federal records and actual journalism. That triggered a glorious round of internal audits, panicked reviews, and in some cases, the rapid self-destruction of programs that suddenly couldn’t remember what they were for. NIH: From Health Science to Thought Control The National Institutes of Health got caught mid-sprint. In response to press inquiries, the NIH not only canceled the UC Irvine grant but also torched a $22.4 million payout to UnidosUS, a group whose mission had somehow morphed from Latino advocacy into online speech policing. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya hit the panic button, sending out an “URGENT” internal email ordering a review of all research touching the sacred trinity of mis-dis-mal information. An NIH spokesperson said the agency is now “taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned” with updated policy priorities. In plain English, they finally read the Constitution and realized they might be setting it on fire. The State Department’s Digital Hall Monitor Gets Benched Meanwhile, the State Department has been busy putting its own houseplants on leave. Secretary Marco Rubio, now running Foggy Bottom like it’s a Senate hearing, has suspended dozens of staffers from the Global Engagement Center. He says the agency crossed the line into censorship, which is a bold claim until you look at the receipts. The Center has spent years telling Americans what is or isn’t true, always with the urgency of a substitute teacher discovering TikTok. The department has begun attaching “no-cost amendments” to existing grants. That’s bureaucrat-speak for telling award recipients to sign a bunch of legal paperwork and swear they aren’t doing anything unconstitutional. A little late for that, but sure. The Pentagon: Same Game, New Label At the Pentagon, they’ve decided that the problem is just a branding issue. So the term “disinformation” has been retired in favor of the more patriotic-sounding “countering adversary propaganda and information operations.” A senior Defense Department official explained that the shift brings the program into alignment with the new White House directive. Which is the kind of sentence that usually ends with somebody testifying in front of Congress about data collection gone wrong. None of this seems to affect Peraton, a defense contractor that holds a $979 million contract to identify threats in coordination with US Central Command. Peraton did not respond to The Free Press’ requests for comment, possibly because they were too busy deciding whether your aunt’s Facebook post counts as hostile influence activity. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Trump Administration Targets $1.4B in Federal “Misinformation” Grants, Orders NIH and State Dept. Crackdown on Speech-Policing Programs Funded Under Biden appeared first on Reclaim The Net.