Leftist media not as private as they claim

The last forty-eight hours have seen some astonishing revelations about the relationship between leftist media and government. Astonishing, that is, not only for its content but for the revelations having happened at all. Conservatives and patriots have long suspected an incestuous relationship between leftist media and government. But they thought this reflected the ideological corruption of the nation’s journalism schools. We now learn that elements of the permanent bureaucracy – the Deep State – had long since formed unofficial public-private partnerships with leftist media. In short, your tax dollars were funding not only these media but also a prize collection of censorship vigilance committees.

First revelations of leftist media funding

Yesterday CNAV revealed the first leftist media organ that received indirect government funding: Politico. This funding did not come from anything so obvious as direct subsidies or grants. It came from subscriptions – extremely high-end subscriptions costing upward of $10,000 per year. The first reports suggested Politico received over $8 million in such fees per year. Mr. Isaac Saul, of the site “Read Tangle,” put out a furious denial and “clarification”:

Alright I swear this is the last time I am going to try to explain this but nobody can read govt docs so here goes!

1. Politico did NOT get “$8 million in a year” from USAID. It got $8 million from 2016 to fiscal year 2025 from ALL government agencies and departments.

2. USAID spent a grand total of $44,000 on Politico Pro subscriptions over two years. That is it. It was for a subscription to their trade pub E&E.

3. All of this information is freely available on http://USAspending.gov, the source website everyone is getting these numbers from.

4. Politico Pro is not = Politico dot com, the website you are all familiar with. It is a premium subscription service that has dashboards, tools, legislative tracking, etc. In many cases it costs north of $10,000/year per subscription.

5. If you are sharing claims counter to these, you are spreading disinformation because you don’t know how to read a government database.

E&E stands for Energy and Environment. But lo and behold, Mr. Saul deleted the above from his X account while CNAV was preparing its article. At three minutes of noon (EST), Saul sheepishly shared this:

Heads up: As I said in this thread, it looks like it was $8 million from all government agencies in FY2024 – and $34m over the last decade to Politico Pro subs.

I genuinely can’t tell if I made a filter error or the website gave me an incorrect number because of how finicky it’s being (presumably overloaded with all the traffic), but I’ve checked it several times this morning and that is the number it keeps showing. Seems this number was also incorrect in several news articles – so either everyone made the same filter mistake or the website was being inconsistent yesterday.

All of this, again, is a reminder that people just posting screenshots and doing random search queries (like “New York”) are very prone to error!

Heads up: As I said in this thread, it looks like it was $8 million from all government agencies in FY2024 – and $34m over the last decade to Politico Pro subs.

I genuinely can’t tell if I made a filter error or the website gave me an incorrect number because of how finicky… https://t.co/OHYcpEXjKH— Isaac Saul (@Ike_Saul) February 6, 2025

Ah, ha. So Politico did so get $8 million in a single fiscal year, only not from USAID alone. Saul still does not recognize the full implications of what he just shared. Which is that the rot goes much further than USAID. (More on them below.) More to the point, someone’s lying. Either it’s Mr. Saul or it’s those who run USA Spending.

Ten minutes later he left this even more sheepish statement:

I guess I tweeted one too many times about the POLITICO story, but deleted these 5 points because this should say “$34 million from 2016 to fiscal year 2025 from ALL government agencies and departments.”

Not going to spread more bad info when criticizing bad info being spread.

I guess I tweeted one too many times about the POLITICO story, but deleted these 5 points because this should say “$34 million from 2016 to fiscal year 2025 from ALL government agencies and departments.”

Not going to spread more bad info when criticizing bad info being spread. https://t.co/WtClld1IlY pic.twitter.com/1mbilu18uV— Isaac Saul (@Ike_Saul) February 6, 2025

Well, CNAV should certainly hope not! Mr. Saul should apologize for accusing some people of “spreading disinformation.”

More than half an hour later, he reminded everyone that The Dispatch also corrected their own statements. Here is their article. They, too, had to correct themselves and admit that Politico received $8.2 million in the immediate previous twelve months. Furthermore, they didn’t see the implications about other agencies buying premium subscriptions from Politico, either.

Politico isn’t the only leftist media outlet

Matt Walsh at The Daily Wire made two statements to put the above into perspective. First, even the earlier, tame figures on Politico’s rake-off represented an ill-gotten gain by Politico, and improper influence buying by the government. (Walsh didn’t follow Ike Saul’s damaging admissions as closely as CNAV has done.)Second, Politico isn’t the only one. The Associated Press has also been selling premium subscriptions to government bureaucrats (and admitted it while making light of it).

I looked at these contracts and I have my own fun fact. This is occurring because agencies (not just USAID) are buying subscriptions to Politico’s Pro editorial product, not because Politico is getting grants or other federal funding.

This is true of every media outlet with a subscription model.

This is true of every media outlet with a subscription model. pic.twitter.com/KjCV3U7HIH— Byron Tau (@ByronTau) February 5, 2025

As Walsh pointed out, Mr. Tau comes close to libel, because The Daily Wire does not sell premium, five-figure subscriptions to the government. But The New York Times does.

The US Government gave the New York Times tens of millions of dollars over just the past 5 years despite paying relatively little money to the NYT in the years preceding 2021. For instance, in August 2024, the US government awarded $4.1 million to the NYT.

The bulk of the funds came from the US Department of Health and Human Services at $26.90m, followed by the National Science Foundation at $19.15m.

The US Government gave the New York Times tens of millions of dollars over just the past 5 years despite paying relatively little money to the NYT in the years preceding 2021. For instance, in August 2024, the US government awarded $4.1 million to the NYT.

The bulk of the funds… pic.twitter.com/XWvv3CplI8— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) February 5, 2025

And what have those publications done to keep all that revenue flowing? Put out propaganda favorable to the Deep State, that’s what. Walsh cites the Hunter Biden Laptop suppression, and the tired canard that the Trump campaign was racist. Other users cited suppression of information that could have saved lives during the coronavirus pandemic. Worse, this kind of propaganda came out in the last years of the First Trump administration. As CNAV said yesterday, this makes those bureaucrats more dangerous than ancient Rome’s Praetorian Guard – who made or broke Emperors.

In fact, the Columbia Journalism Review now avows that USAID directly funded 6,000 “approved” journalists, at home and abroad. Price: $268 million, dwarfing the rake-in for Politico. Or rather, they were going to fund those journalists – except that Trump froze all spending from USAID and other agencies.

Funding the Censorship Industrial Complex

“Monsters!” screamed the CJR headline – talking about Trump and Musk. But that’s not the worst of it. USAID directly funded the infamous Stanford Internet Observatory. Jacob Engels at The Gateway Pundit shared details, including a boastful report on how SIO “took down” Parler in 2021.

The Stanford Information Observatory, which received money from the National Science Foundation that is in partnership and funded by USAID, admits to coordinated takedown of social media platform Parler in unearthed document.

USAID Funded Stanford Taked… by Jacob Engels

Engels gives this pithy summary:

The report lists Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Dinesh D’Souza, Dan Bongino, Laura Loomer, Senator Ted Cruz, Mark Levin, former Congressman and Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes, and Eric Trump and the Trump team as main culprits of spreading disinformation on Parler. Publications the Babylon Bee, PragerU, The Gateway Pundit, Daily Caller, One America News Network are also mentioned for amplifying so-called “disinformation”.

The SIO report also boasts of its censorship of Jair Bolsonario, then President of Brazil, and his son Flávio. This makes USAID guilty of foreign election interference. That in turn has caused many to repeat the assumption that USAID fronts for the CIA.

Jim Hoft, editor-in-chief of TGP, believes worse: that USAID is running its own operation. He named the following semi-private censorship operations: NewsGuard, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and Restless Development. That last had some eighty donors in 2020, including USAID and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This gives one more reason the Democrats fear Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., taking over as its Secretary. As regular readers will remember, RFK has been one of their prime censorship targets. In fact Children’s Health Defense, which he founded, is a plaintiff in a pending lawsuit against the government.

The lowdown on USAID funding of censorship comes from a long-form X post by “Bad Kitty Unleashed.”

Breaking! The Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) partnered with Restless Development (youth collective) to counter Covid Disinformation. And the best part? Restless Development is funded by the US government along the Obama Foundation, Gates, Clinton’s, and other… pic.twitter.com/GwYYFoRkru— Bad Kitty Unleashed (@pepesgrandma) January 19, 2025

USAID funded more than leftist media. They funded a George Soros-connected group with $260 million in taxpayers’ money. That money has funded activities in Georgia and Ukraine, including President Biden getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to protect his son.

What’s happening now

Besides everything else, USAID directly influenced the 2019 impeachment of President Trump, over a mischaracterized telephone call. Mark Moyar, a recent whistleblower, shared with Jesse Watters how the agency held Mao-like “struggle sessions” to keep senior staff on the same page. During the interview, Moyar described one such session:

EXCLUSIVE: USAID whistleblower, Mark Moyar, reveals how the government agency made him do a PRIVILEGE WALK instead of rooting out corruption. They ordered him to take on the identity of a Scandinavian woman and talk about his privileges.

EXCLUSIVE: USAID whistleblower, Mark Moyar, reveals how the government agency made him do a PRIVELEGE WALK instead of rooting out corruption. They ordered him to take on the identity of a Scandinavian woman and talk about his privileges. pic.twitter.com/lnzodxXGQu— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) February 6, 2025

Moyar also warned reform-minded people to watch out for “rebranding.” For example:

So in the first Trump administration, the priorities were to support national interests as they are now. Another thing was countering terrorism and promoting self-reliance. So I went to a country, just to give one example, they had a Feminist Women’s Book Club that had been started under the Obama administration and then they now said this is a counter-terror program because feminist women are key fighters in the battle against terrorism.

That kind of lie will not likely impress anyone anymore. Secretary of State Rubio has taken USAID over, and placed all Washington-based staff on leave. Last night he announced that only 294 of 14,000 employees will remain. All overseas personnel not on that list must return home within thirty days.

President Trump summed up the situation on Truth Social last night (edited for spelling):

LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A “PAYOFF” FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS. THE LEFT WING “RAG,” KNOWN AS “POLITICO,” SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000. Did the New York Times receive money??? Who else did??? THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY! THE DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE. TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!

President Trump didn’t limit his outrage to USAID. The General Services Administration has similar leftist media premium subscription contracts. Trump has ordered GSA to “cancel every single media contract.”

The government has thus done two things that should outrage all Americans. First, they bought premium services (often of dubious quality) from leftist media outlets. Second, they funded (or engineered the founding of) semi-private groups that carried out censorship on the government’s behalf. Furthermore, this activity occurred during the first Trump administration – so these bureaucrats were meddling in at least one election. (Two, if you count the 2018 Midterms.) Trying to make or break Presidents is tantamount to treason, and Trump should punish it as such.