Arizona State University (ASU) recently received some negative exposure on one of the most popular and influential podcasting platforms in the world, the Joe Rogan Experience.
Famed podcaster Joe Rogan interviewed Mike Benz, a former State Department official who founded and currently runs the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) as its executive director, in December. FFO says its aim is to protect Americans from internet censorship through “educational reports, legal assistance, and public policy analysis.”
Benz claimed ASU, which he called the “John McCain University,” was a prime example of institutions designed to advance the government’s domestic censorship efforts. Specifically, Benz discussed at length ASU’s disinformation program, the Center on Narrative Disinformation and Strategic Influence (NDSI), within the university’s Global Security Initiative (GSI).
Benz also mentioned the background of ASU President Michael Crow: his ongoing, 25-year chairmanship of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm for proprietary investments in early stage technology companies.
“Technically this is Arizona State University, but you’ll see that it is an intelligence program. […] Its job is to assist the intelligence community with this work,” said Benz. “This is a multimillion-dollar censorship center, currently still up and running at Arizona State University, funded by us.”
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxqP8_EtIeeln9n4PixLe9eDSiFfpe_Y0L?si=UtfCH6I2etYdjqt8
Benz offered some numbers off the cuff, claiming ASU received a $1.6 million grant from the Pentagon for censorship work, $300,000 in grants from the State Department, almost $500,000 in additional government grants from an adjacent statecraft intelligence entity.
One ongoing project funded by over $1 million from the Defense Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the Semantic Information Defender (SID), a project assessing the national security risks of AI language models like ChatGPT.
Another main project of NDSI is the Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program, funded by DARPA to create technologies that can detect, attribute and characterize disinformation characterized as national security and other threats.
Federal spending data indicates that ASU was granted $1.2 million from the Defense Department for social media research to combat disinformation and foreign influence; $300,000 from the National Science Foundation for combatting disinformation and racial bias, particularly Asian Americans; $82,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for tracing community-based knowledge on TikTok to resist algorithmic governance to combat disinformation; $78,000 from the State Department for mapping and analyzing public awareness of disinformation threats through an intelligence dashboard and proposing actionable policy recommendations; and $76,000 from the National Science Foundation to study disinformation and content moderation in local communities online.
Total outlays from these grants, per federal data, only amounts to about $262,000. The only outlays occurred from the two National Science Foundation awards of $300,000 and $76,000.
Benz said NSDI’s insidiousness derives from the “dirty tricks” of its language. He noted that the program doesn’t claim that something specific is wrong, but rather that any acts which serve to diminish public faith and confidence in news media, government, and science ultimately qualify as attacks on democracy.
Benz claimed the program was “effectively, the ghost of John McCain, the founder of the CIA side of the GOP after Reagan reoriented the [intelligence community] around the NGO complex.”
70 percent of GSI funding comes from the Defense Department, Homeland Security, and the Intelligence Community, and 26 percent comes from other government resources. The GSI has over $210 million in research expenditures since 2015.
After reading this article, I feel like I need an encyclopedia’s worth of background information to understand the intricacies of the subject.
One thing stood out: “any acts which serve to diminish public faith and confidence in news media, government, and science ultimately qualify as attacks on democracy.” The news media, government, and scientific establishments have become so dishonest and corrupt that they have largely destroyed public faith in themselves. Therefore they are attacking democracy. What is to be done about it?
This is NOT the ASU I attended in ’70-’74
While the ASU DEI wardens of the feared university thought police are paid more than some faculty and have more power that departmental chairs you will continue to have this cesspool of intellectual inbreeding and hostility towards mainstream America.
Arizona legislature must eliminate DEI from public colleges and universities and promote those are achievers or start cutting funding especially at the Arizona Board of Regents level.
ASU receives a lot of government money for all these left wing agendas. I think the government should stop handing out grant money and if something is important , the colleges can find their own way to study and fund it. I’m really over our hard earned money being handed to a bunch of left wing loons.
There are existing laws that prevent government dollars, federal or state, for partisan purposes. These are partisan programs, cut the dollars off and investigate. Easy, with the will to do it and Sunlight on the programs.
Unless all the left-wing loons are removed from government, the government will not stop handing out grant money or any money to any leftist-oriented person or entity. And it only takes one leftist loon.
And unless they are held to account they’ll for violating the aforementioned laws and regulations they’ll simply come back and do it again when their party regains power.
did Hobbs graduate… and was it from ASWhoo
Rogan is neither famed or influential. He an uninspiring idiot.
Yet you felt the need to comment?
haaa he’s the one with the press.. which is the problem
reed your post reads like you went to ASU no facts just name calling
No matter what you think of Rogan, he’s not the point. Government censorship is the point and it needs to be exposed – and stopped.
Joe Rogan usually makes number one or number two for all podcast rankings, and even interviewed President Trump, Elon Musk and JD Vance in the last election. That is famed and influential to most people.