A Providence, Rhode Island whistleblower is back. Ramona Bessinger exposed the Critical Race Theory curriculum in her district along with the mistreatment, retaliation, and harassment that came from exposing it. This time, the whistle blows for DHS-backed ‘media literacy’ training.
Related: The New Civic Listening Corps is a Government Funded Society-Wide Network of Snitches
The training is not what it purports to be. It’s all about training teachers to teach students to become “disinformation” informers.
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.
The overview is long and detailed, so if you are looking to get into the weeds, Legal Insurrection has plenty of that here. Summarized, the program is in-depth and very partisan.
According to one of the Courageous RI facilitators during the course, “disinformation” oversight is justified and comes in the form of classroom lesson plans and classroom activities intended to reduce media influence over children who may become future “domestic terrorists.” During the training, Courageous RI facilitators were hyper-focused on Donald Trump as their media literacy poster child. A great deal of classroom content centered around Trump and his alleged influence over individuals and “violent extremism,” Specifically January 6th. Violence from the left was largely ignored.
The Courageous RI facilitators often pointed to Trump as the root cause of all social media and media disinformation; they blamed Trump for influencing “MAGA Republicans” to commit violence and more. During the weekly online training sessions, I asked for evidence to support their claims that violent extremism and disinformation existed in K-12 schools. I was quickly dismissed or directed to chat conversations where conservative voices were singled out and suppressed.
I reached out to contacts in the New Hampshire Department of Education, and they have heard of this but have not seen it crop up in New Hampshire. I did some searching and could not find anything either, but it’s out there, so some universities could snag a DHS grant and then try to implement the “Media Literacy” training in the Granite State.
Those outside New Hampshire should do their own looking. Look for Courageous [state initials], Media Literacy, DHS+Media Literacy, or any combination of those. Be creative. Homeland is using campus-driven “training” to create a cadre of public educators who then use public schools to churn out little Stasi informants.
Not that this is new – the DHS deliberately funding it, however, is a thing. You’d expect them to use some CIA front group pretending to be an NGO, and maybe they are doing that, too.
Please loop us in if you find anything, no matter in which state you live.
