From DC with Hate: How CISA Weaponized COVID Against Americans

Three years ago, The Stream published my piece “The Spies Who Hate Us,” which examined how our government weaponized the federal law enforcement and intelligence communities to treat those it disliked — conservatives in general, and Donald Trump in particular — as not just pariahs but potential traitors.

Last December, Creative Destruction Media ran an article with the same title, revealing the entity which effectively served as Mordor’s Nazgûl: the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. The key information about this official skullduggery comes from a 499-page document released under court order, “Covid-19 Countering Foreign Influence Task Force Reporting and Analysis” (linked within the CDM piece). CDM did a fine job of shining light on this problematic agency, and I have taken their analysis even further by combing through the entire tome. Here’s what I found.

CISA Unilaterally Expanded Its Mandate

CISA was created during the first Trump administration to fend off cyberattacks on America. But during the pandemic, some of its 3,600 employees, no doubt directed by leadership, decided it was their job to police what fellow citizens thought and said about the disease.

These same CISA folks also appointed themselves as custodians of what constitutes “election falsehoods.” To both ends, but particularly regarding COVID, CISA began issuing guidance to the rest of the feds on misinformation (data that’s incorrect) and disinformation (statements or “data” meant to mislead or deceive) allegedly being promulgated on social media.

In fact, last week explosive news emerged showing that CISA’s “disinformation” crew was itself at the heart of the fraudulent 2020 election results, and several key leaders within the Election Security Group were placed on administrative leave. (Look for a deeper dive on this on The Stream in the days ahead, showing exactly how it was done.)

Its “Analysts” Relied on Solely Leftist Media & Globalist Sources

The rub, of course, is that — to paraphrase a former president — “it depends on what your definition of those words are.” How did CISA’s “analysts” decide that pandemic postings on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., were incorrect or intentionally deceptive?

According to the document in question, they relied on 82 media outlets, think tanks, and online monitoring sites for definitions. The problem is that exactly half of those, 41, were overtly left-wing ones. The most cited media? Axios, CNN, The Daily Beast, Politico, Media Matters, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

Of the remaining 41, most were left-leaning, as well — and decidedly globalist. The most quoted of these were the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research lab and the European Union’s EU v. Disinfo site. CISA also appealed to the World Health Organization, Pew, several American and British universities, and a host of Silicon Valley-sympathetic tech publications and sites, such as Wired.

Only one source was right of center: The Edmonton Journal, adduced a grand total of once. Nothing at all was culled from Fox News, The Federalist, The Washington Times, the American Enterprise Institute, The Stream or any sources that represent the views of at least half of Americans.

Garbage In = Garbage Out

As people used to say about computers, “GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.” Looking only through a leftist prism, here is what CISA determined:

• Any speculation that COVID came from a Chinese lab was deemed “dangerous disinformation”
• Any skepticism about the vaccines or masks was misinformation at best — and more likely, disinformation
• Natural immunity from prior infection was not mentioned ONCE in the 499 pages
• “Racial and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists” [REMVEs] (“Far-right/neo-Nazi/white supremacist”) were allegedly planning to exploit the pandemic
• These same groups would “likely” engage in domestic terrorism — although CISA admits “we have no knowledge” of such
• There was ONE mention of “far-left” groups that might engage in violence; the dozens of other groups mentioned are all “far-right.” Fake tweets attributed to Antifa were decried — but not Antifa itself
• QAnon was mentioned dozens of times, both for COVID mis/disinfo and alleged plans to disrupt the 2020 election
• Ditto for the “Boogaloo” movement, a “far-right, extremist” militia
• The pandemic would likely lead to more “Islamophobia” worldwide
• Biolabs in Ukraine were noted — but the idea that they were being used for weapons research was “Russian disinformation”

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Here are some of the most telling specific quotes from this CISA document:

• “The online environment is cluttered with … harmful narratives … related to vaccines in general and the COVID-19 vaccine in particular” (p. 6)
• “President-elect Biden” will “shift away from chaos and toward coherence” which “should help to stem the flow of falsehoods,” about COVID vaccines — unlike President Trump, who “spend[s] his day warping [the vaccine narrative] on Twitter” (p. 9)
• Facebook and other social media sites need “misinformation experts,” not just medical ones (p. 10)
• “The Kremlin has pushed claims that Western [COVID] vaccines are experimental, unsafe, and will likely fail” (p. 17)
• Only 48% of black Americans and 66% of Latino ones say they would take a free vaccine, which hinders achieving “herd immunity” (p. 22)
• Trump supporters “inhabit anti-vaccine misinformation circles” (p. 25)
• Denying that COVID is a serious disease “is climate denial on fast forward” (p. 37)
• “Hoaxes and falsehoods” were “delivered to millions” in the 2016 election (p. 39)
• “Disinfo the reason for Trump’s election, Brexit, rejection of climate science, and anti-vaxxers” (p. 68)
• “COVID-19 Misinfo” consists of “89% rumors, 7.8% conspiracies, 3.5% stigma” (p. 104)
• Trump “sought to distract from the high number of American deaths by calling COVID-19 the ‘China Virus’” (p. 107)
• “Russia going to interfere in 2020 election as they [sic] did in 2016” (p.132)
• “House Democrats want Twitter, FB, Google reports on Disinformation” (p. 177)
• “Creeping authoritarianism” in US, UK, and EU “based on social media posts” (p. 224)
• If FB “stopped moderating its site, it would quickly become a hellish environment overrun with spam, bullying, crime, terrorist beheadings, neo-Nazi texts and images of child sexual abuse” (p. 255)
• “You don’t have to become an epidemiology expert — the medical professionals and journalists will do their jobs. You do have to make an effort to not spread rumors or falsehoods, or anything else that could make a public-health response harder for those around you” (pp. 471-72)
• The “principal threat actors”: Russia and domestic “Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists” [white ones only]” (pp. 496-97)

How Wrong Was CISA? Let Us Count the Ways

It turns out, of course, that almost all of CISA’s conclusions were wrong:

• The CIA under Joe Biden determined that COVID-19 likely came from the Wuhan lab in China.
• Several of the major vaccines were indeed harmful, causing myocarditis, and masks were well-nigh useless.
• Natural immunity, never mentioned, is at least as protective as any vaccine — as has been the case throughout human history.
• Regarding the claim that Biden would be more truthful than Trump about the pandemic (which CISA made while the latter was still serving his first term): once in office, Biden claimed that COVID vaccines would prevent infection and that those of us who didn’t get vaxxed were going to die en masse.
• There was no surge of “right wing/neo-Nazi/white supremacist/REMVE” violence, or even activity, in America. As I have written abouton The Stream multiple times, this claim is pure propaganda, and Islamic terrorism is by far the greater threat.

Why It Got So Bad

There were major problems with CISA.

• Its mandate was to prevent cyberattacks, not serve as the Dark Tower’s minions lording it over fellow citizens.
• What expertise do government drones in the cyber field have in judging medical issues and terrorism?
• Perhaps most fatally: “analysts” there relied on information from just one side of the ideological spectrum. As someone who’s done open-source analysis in my former job at U.S. Special Operations Command, I know that you have to utilize material from myriad sources — not just ones you agree with. CISA failed miserably in this regard, falling off the analytical horse on the left(ist) side, resulting in skewed assessments not just of the COVID pandemic, but which groups might resort to violence. And note: this was even before the Biden administration took power and began pressuring federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to gin up “extremism” and “white supremacy.”

CISA’s tendentious “analysis” supplied the Biden administration with rationales to pressure Facebook, Twitter, and other online platforms to censor free speech — much of which turned out to be true and accurate regarding COVID, over against the government’s smear campaign — and even to attack those questioning the official narrative. Afterward, in a tacit admission of guilt, CISA tried to bury what it had done.

End It, or at Least Seriously Mend It

What can the second Trump administration do to prevent CISA from pulling the same Orwellian stunt again, as it might very well attempt under a future Democrat president?

• Use the DOGE purge to eliminate CISA. This year, it had planned to expand to 6,500 employees and move to a 10-story, 620,000-square-foot facility. Ax that, and it immediately saves taxpayers $3 billion. Plus, its mission is redundant. Washington already has a Great Eye tasked with cyberprotection: the National Security Agency. Terminate CISA with extreme prejudice. This shouldn’t be hard, especially considering that President Trump himself created it during his first term.
• If Trump and Elon Musk deem CISA worth keeping, make sure it just counters cyber threats and doesn’t meddle in other areas — notably online free speech. CISA probably doesn’t need thousands of employees to do that, Elon. And in fact DOGE has already included CISA staff in its federal buy-out plan.
• Appoint a CISA director who doesn’t aspire to be the Mouth of Sauron, as the last one did. Currently, the position is vacant. How about former NSA Director General Michael Flynn? He was railroaded out of his position as National Security Advisor in the first Trump administration. He’d be perfect for the job.

Timothy Furnish has a PhD from Ohio State in Islamic, World & African history. He’s been an Arabic interrogator in the 101st Airborne, a US Special Operations Command analyst, an author and professor. He is the military/security affairs writer for The Stream.