I spent my career working with the media. If there is one thing I learned, it was not to trust them, ever. The story below just proves my point.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk, has uncovered stunningly wasteful and offensive spending by the federal government and has been trying to cut that off, even clawing back funding at times.
But a new statement from Musk, on social media, is pushing the outrage to a whole new level, pointing out that the government paid $9 million in a contract for “Active Social Engineering Defense (ASED) Large Scale Social Deception (LSD).”
It is the Liberty Daily that promptly raised questions about the massive expenditure and its reason:
“Many of the proposed Community Notes cite references to programs coordinated by Reuters that focus on fighting ‘disinformation’ and inappropriate social engineering. But just because they claim their motives are positive doesn’t change the fact that they’ve participated in spreading disinformation in the name of ‘stopping’ disinformation. This has been demonstrated clearly by the push to promote ineffective and dangerous COVID jabs. Conspicuously, the contract was for 2018 (before COVID) through 2022 (peak injection time). Why did they have a program set up to fight COVID disinformation before COVID was known to exist? Why were they tasked with social engineering and ‘large scale social deception’ by DARPA? What will DOGE and the Trump administration do about this?”
Musk had referenced a posting from Mario Nawful, who said, “DOGE investigations reveal mysterious Defense Department payments to Reuters for ‘large scale social deception’ project between 2018-2022. While DARPA claims it was for cyber defense, questions swirl about why a news agency received millions for ‘social engineering.’ The revelation comes as other media outlets face scrutiny over federal funding. Source: USASpendingGov,”
Delusions of Adequacy 