All right, students — today we will have a snap quiz on Current Events Below the Radar! Put down your books and no Googling, people. I have only one question for you …

Kidding! Just one question with one part, and it’s even a multiple-choice. What is … “Course Correct”?

• A. An inner-city project to boost education and the nuclear family
• B. A new Treasury program to stabilize banking capitalization
• C. A new device on Joe Biden’s car
• D. A government-funded program to build confidence in government by quashing debate on social media and in news reporting in the name of stamping out “skepticism”

Oh, let’s not always see the same hands …

National Science Foundation funding, awarded through a pair of grants from 2021 and 2022, has amounted to more than $5.7 million for the development of this tool, which, according to the grant abstracts, is intended to aid reporters, public health organizations, election administration officials, and others to address so-called misinformation on topics such as U.S. elections and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

This $5.7 million in grant money is on top of nearly another $200,000 awarded in 2020 through a Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act-funded NSF grant for a project focused in part on mental health that Course Correct is said to have grown out of.

According to the abstract of the 2021 grant, Course Correct’s developers, a group of five professors from various institutions nationwide, are using techniques related to machine learning and natural language processing to identify social media posts pertaining to electoral skepticism and vaccine hesitancy, identify people likely to be exposed to misinformation in the future, and flag at-risk online communities for intervention.

Gee … a government-funded program to end skepticism of government? What could go wrong?

Color me skeptical about this rationalization, too:

“Democracy and public health in the United States rely on trust in institutions,” the professors wrote in the grant abstract. “Skepticism regarding the integrity of U.S. elections and hesitancy related to COVID-19 vaccines are two consequences of a decline in confidence in basic political processes and core medical institutions.”

No, those are two consequences of government performance and behavior. It’s true that democracy relies on trust in its institutions, but that trust has to be earned — with accountability and transparency, and above all simplicity. That requires a skeptical public to question policies and actions, and to have robust debates about the direction of those institutions and their reach into our lives.

Attempts to quash debate and skepticism are the antithesis of liberty and democracy. A democracy relies on an informed and engaged electorate, willing and able to debate public matters large and small openly and freely. If the government starts building limits on topics of debate, and then erects fascist mechanisms in concert with corporate entities to prevent people from voicing skepticism about their policies and performance, it’s no longer a democracy, and those institutions have become worthless.

Put simply: the US government has no business interfering in debate, period. It certainly has no business building systems that infiltrate information-sharing systems to control criticism of its performance.

Jonathan Turley agrees, and points out the damage done by these efforts:

The grant abstract echoes the earlier work in warning that social media serves “as a major source of delegitimizing information about elections and vaccines, with networks of users actively sowing doubts about election integrity and vaccine efficacy, fueling the spread of misinformation.”

Of course, many of the scientists and groups who were previously suspended for disinformation in these areas were ultimately vindicated. The mask mandate and other pandemic measures like the closing of schools are now cited as fueling emotional and developmental problems in children. The closing of schools and businesses was challenged by some critics as unnecessary. Many of those critics were also censored. It now appears that they may have been right. Many countries did not close schools and did not experience increases in Covid. However, we are now facing alarming drops in testing scores and alarming rises in medical illness among the young.

The point is only that there were countervailing indicators on mask efficacy and a basis to question the mandates. Yet, there was no real debate because of the censorship supported by many Democratic leaders in social media. To question such mandates was declared a public health threat. The head of the World Health Organization even supported censorship to combat what he called an “infodemic.”

So what constitutes “misinformation” in Course Correct? The researchers either couldn’t or wouldn’t say, Turley notes:

As in these prior grants, it is not clear what Course Correct specifically defines “verifiably accurate information.” When pressed by by the conservative site The College Fix, researchers reportedly failed to supply an answer. What constitutes “misinformation” depends on the views of the programmers. Yet, these systems are sold as somehow transcending bias and using science to protect us from our own bad ideas or biases.

That will be an easy question to answer in practical terms. The Golden Rule applies: whoever has the gold makes the rules. The government that funds Course Correct will dictate what constitutes “misinformation,” and you can bet that it will be defined as “whatever paints us in a bad light.” The algorithms will be engineered for that purpose — as we have already seen over the last couple of years on social-media platforms already. And when the algorithms don’t cover it, the minders will impose limits on their own, such as we saw in the coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop in the 2020 election and beyond.

We’ve come a long way from “dissent is patriotic” to “skepticism must be stamped out.” And that journey has been hastened by the politicized interests in Big Tech and the mainstream media, which have joyfully led us down the primrose path to fascist speech control.

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