From LifeSiteNews
By Frank Wright
A new report suggests the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is using covert methods to suppress ‘conservative media’ in the United States. The NED, essentially a CIA cutout, also recently hired pro-Ukraine former U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland.
A new report from Redacted’s married couple Clayton and Natali Morris asks some serious questions about a CIA operation now headed by the “queen of regime change, Victoria Nuland” which they say is “censoring the news given to Americans.”
Their report touches on the long tradition of the CIA and its cutouts in funding popular culture, news, art, and entertainment as a “propaganda weapon” – which is used abroad, and at home in the West.
A shadowy agency known as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has now been shown to be exempt from explaining to Congress – or to anyone – precisely what it spends its $315 million annual budget on doing.
As Natali Morris explains, you have very good reason to care what the NED is doing – with your money.
“They do these secret things – government regime change – and they don’t tell us about it. And it’s funded through the State Department,” she said.
The NED was set up under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to advance “The Democracy Program” abroad. So what’s the problem with changing regimes so they become more “democratic”?
As the New York Times reported in 1997, “The National Endowment for Democracy [was] created … to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades.”
The NYT report documents dozens of overseas operations in “enemy” nations such as China and across the former Soviet Union – but also in those of allies such as Italy, Portugal, France, and Northern Ireland.
Its “Democracy Program” seeks to program democracies in the West. Declassified reported in 2022 that over six years the NED had given over £2.6 million – over $3 million – to fund “pro-democracy” outlets in the U.K. This included the “intelligence group” Bellingcat.
In May 2023, Elon Musk spoke out about the shadowy group when he “accused Bellingcat of running psychological operations against the US public.” That is because they do, as Aaron Mate explained in this piece for The GrayZone.
“In a leaked email exchange, UK media personality Paul Mason gushed over Bellingcat’s role in receiving what he called ‘a steady stream of intel from Western agencies,’ thus allowing it to provide ‘intel service input by proxy,’” he wrote.
This is one example of how an NED-funded operation can seem “independent” – and function as a mouthpiece for Deep State propaganda.
NED funding extends beyond financing war propaganda for American consumption. It also includes the international U.K.-based newswire Reuters – as Declassified pointed out.
“Another UK recipient of NED funding is the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the corporate foundation of the global news company,” the report said.
What is more, due to a change in U.S. law, the NED is now legally permitted to target Americans at home. As Declassified further explained in its 2022 report, “John Kiriakou, a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, told Declassified that recent changes in the law have widened the potential targets of US information operations.”
Kiriakou, who “served in the agency’s core Directorate of Operations,” continued, “In 2011, the US Congress changed the law that forbade the Executive Branch from [propagandizing] the American people or nationals of the other ‘Five Eyes’ countries – the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.”
Changes in U.S. law have meant that regime change operations have come home.
As Clayton and Natali Morris suggest, “The cultural Cold War has never gone away. It’s just shifted from target to target.” This was the conclusion of Frances Stonor Saunders in her book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. Her book “presents … the shocking evidence that the CIA infiltrated every niche of the cultural sphere during the postwar years.”
This may seem a conspiracy theory too far. Yet it is not merely demonstrated by Saunders’ abundance of proof that “some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West became instruments of the American government” during the Cold War. There is an actual blueprint for doing exactly this, and it was published by the U.S. government itself over 70 years ago.
The CIA was created in 1947. One year later its power was mobilized in a new strategy published by George Kennan. Called “Organized Political Warfare”, this was a blueprint for the use of every mode of cultural production to be mustered in the promotion and defense of liberal democracy.
What this means is much of our culture since then has been funded by the CIA – and by its cutout, the NED – and is basically Deep State propaganda.
As Saunders’ book shows, “The CIA’s front organizations and the philanthropic foundations that channeled its money also organized conferences, mounted exhibitions, arranged concerts, and flew symphony orchestras around the world.”
U.S. and Western thought leaders, artists, critics, writers, and political theorists were “willingly or unwittingly” promoted by the CIA and its cutouts – like the NED.
“Many of the period’s foremost intellectuals and artists appear in the book: [leading liberal] Isaiah Berlin, [art critic] Clement Greenberg, [proto-neocon] Sidney Hook, [writer] Arthur Koestler, [political theorist and “godfather of neoconservatism”] Irving Kristol .. .George Orwell, [“artist”] Jackson Pollock, [British atheist] Bertrand Russell, [French atheist] Jean-Paul Sartre, [regime court historian] Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and [homosexualist poet] Stephen Spender, among others.”
Pollock’s awful “art,” along with that of Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, has always been inexplicable from the viewpoint of beauty, craft, and meaning. That is because modern art was used as a “CIA weapon,” as “former CIA officials” admitted in this 1995 report from the U.K.’s Independent.
Saunders maintains, of course, that the manufacture of cultural propaganda did not end with the Cold War.
“The NED is the umbilical cord of gold that leads directly back to Washington,” she explained to Declassified.
“And by this I’m not only referring to official US government programs, but to the vast network of clandestine players that plan and enact its information warfare operations.”
The scandal reported by Redacted is that these covert methods, funded by U.S. taxpayers, are being used today on U.S. citizens themselves. Through its sponsorship of the Global Disinformation Index, the NED used arms-length cutouts to suppress criticism of “COVID-19” measures, labeling them and protests against abortion and alleged voter fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election as “misinformation.” Redacted shows evidence that “conservative media” in the U.S. generally is also being suppressed – thanks to NED-funded efforts.
What is more, the NED has secured a “sensitive” classification on its activities, and so neither has to report them to the public, nor disclose them at all.
As Natali Morris points out in her report on the NED and its covert propaganda war on Americans, “They just hired the queen of regime change, Victoria Nuland. They hired her in September – which means they’re hardly trying to hide that they’re evil.”
Nuland was formerly under-secretary of State, in a department which has oversight of both the CIA and its proxies such as the NED. She infamously appointed the regime-changed new government of Ukraine in a 2014 phone call to then U.S. Ambassador Christopher Pyatt.
She is married to arch-neocon Robert Kagan, whose brother Donald teaches at West Point, and whose sister-in-law Kimberly Kagan runs the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). The ISW, itself a common source for U.S. and U.K. war news, is, according to Responsible Statecraft, “Funded by important military contractors in America’s military industrial complex such as General Dynamics, DynCorps International, and CACI International, ISW is also a creation of the ‘Kagan industrial complex.’”
The leading agency of the CIA specializing in domestic “regime change” operations is now led by the woman who led regime change operations abroad.
The warning of Mike Benz, who worked in the last Trump State Department, also featured in Redacted’s report.
“Victoria Nuland is now at the CIA’s #1 cutout. The prime mover in the censorship industry: the NED.”
Natali Morris cited a November 18 report from Benz’s Foundation for Freedom Online which showed the NED does not publish any information on how it spends its annual $300 million federal budget.
As the report concluded, “[The NED] expects to operate in the dark and never be subject to transparency requirements ever again.”
Given its track record, its founding purpose and its current chief, Clayton and Natali Morris make a convincing case for ending the NED, hoping the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will consider doing so.
“They [the NED] are trying to censor information to the American people in order to enact regime change in places that they want. So these are just the projects we know about. What about the projects that we don’t?”
It is time the American people were told the truth, say the Morrises.
