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“This isn’t a Biden story. It’s not a Trump story either. This is a national security state story.”

This week Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang at The Intercept broke a huge story: Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation. Ken joins Useful Idiots to share how he uncovered the bombshell revelation, what it tells us about our powerful security state, and his predictions for the dark future of information censorship.

The story, which reveals collusion between tech companies and the US government, massive CIA incompetence, and Orwellian levels of surveillance, is not a partisan issue, Klippenstein argues. It’s an issue of national security.

And yet looking at the headlines from corporate media following The Intercept’s publishing, there was immediate political spin.

The Washington Post told its readers that only conservatives would “go after DHS counter-disinformation work,” which means good Democrats should celebrate speech censorship. Meanwhile, as Ken writes in his story, Republicans claim we’ve defeated disinformation by taking down Biden’s disinformation governance board, ignoring that the same DHS tactics happened under Trump.

“It’s crammed into this partisan framework,” he explains, “that doesn’t reflect the reality that when someone’s in power they tend not to care about free speech.”

And the scariest part, Ken tells us, “this is not formalized in statute. There's no law saying ‘we're going to create the disinformation team.’ They can do this administratively without sign off from Congress. And they probably have beyond what I'm able to report because I'm only able to get details that my sources have access to. We don't know what else might exist.”

It’s a huge story that, as with most issues you see on Useful Idiots, is dangerously underreported. Subscribe to hear the full interview with Ken Klippenstein as he shares the government secrets we know about and what still remains covered up.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.

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