Chaos erupted Tuesday during a House Committee hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) sparred with a former Obama-era official.
Gaetz challenged Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brooking Institution, about the National Science Foundation (NSF) on the millions of dollars spent on grants to utilize technology to combat mis- and disinformation.
The Florida congressman questioned Eisen over the NSF’s decision to fund projects that potentially target individuals based on their cultural and constitutional beliefs, according to Gaetz.
Citing a grant to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Gaetz alleged it categorized the American people as more vulnerable to misinformation because they relied on personal convictions, such as the Bible and the Constitution, over the “expert class” in Washington, D.C.
The tense exchange is as follows:
“While you indicate that the Torah and the Constitution are your sacred texts, if Americans indicate online that the Bible and the Constitution are sacred to them, the very grants that are being issued by the NSF [National Science Foundation] would deem those people in a separate and diminished class,” Gaetz said.
“No, sir,” Eisen said.
“Oh indeed, it is precisely in the MIT —” Gaetz continued.
“I have the materials here. No, sir,” Eisen said.
“Mr. Gaetz, if we can talk about that material in context if we can have the full context of the committee’s investigation, the ranking member has said there are 29 depositions that this subcommittee has taken,” Eisen said.
“But Mr. Eisen, this isn’t about any of those. This is about the — when MIT wanted the grant that Ms. [Katelynn] Richardson was just talking about, they went and made a presentation by NSF and said, ‘Here’s why you want to pick MIT in order to do it,’ and it was to target military families, people in rural communities, people who believed in the Bible and the Constitution, and then guess what? With these AI [artificial intelligence] tools, if you stacked that up, maybe you’re a person in a rural community who loves both the Bible and the Constitution. Well, then you’re really susceptible to misinformation because the expert class thinks better,” Gaetz said.
“No sir,” Eisen said.
Gaetz compared the grants to the movie, “Minority Report,”— which is a film based on police officials using technology to arrest murderers before they even commit the crime.
The Republican suggested the futuristic movie is “coming to life before our very eyes.”
“That the government funding these predictive analytics go after Americans, and here’s what I think is actually true,” Gaetz said. “It’s not that military families and rural Americans and people who love the Bible and Constitution are dumber or are uniquely susceptible to anything. It’s just that they don’t think how the expert class and the National Science Foundation want them to think, and so they’re trying to program what they see so they can control how they behave, and that is the true weaponization that this committee will stand against.”