In the Flesh: Project 2025's Propaganda Plan
My fourth installment critically analyzes Mandate for Leadership's Media Agencies chapter focusing on the U.S. Agency for Global Media
Hello, fellow bluestockings,
Kari Lake testified today to the House Foreign Affairs Committee about the U.S. Agency for Global media. Because of this, I am resharing my Project 2025 post published in early 2024.
Today and over the next few weeks I am focusing on Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership’s Media Agencies chapter that centers its attention on the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Originally I planned to address this chapter in two separate posts, but the more I read, researched and analyzed the chapter, I discovered I would need at least four separate posts. Below is my broad analysis of Project 2025’s nefarious plans for the USAGM.
My Overall Take on Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media
Loaded with projection, this chapter serves as one more example of a failed administration with a failed coup organizing its way toward exterminating the United States’ constitutional democratic republic. One of the best ways to achieve this is through government-funded media. The proposed takeover of the USAGM will allow The Heritage Foundation, MAGA, inmate number P01135809 and any conservative elected U.S. President to distribute false and dangerous American propaganda around the world. For a dictatorship to occur and succeed, propaganda is essential. Like violence, propaganda was among the first weapons Benito Mussolini used in Fascist Italy before and after his dictatorship.
This section’s author Mora Namdar, real name Morvared Namdarkhan, currently serves as a senior fellow in Middle East Studies at the conservative non-profit thinktank American Foreign Policy Council and founded Namdar Law PLLC. She earned her law degree from American University where she also earned a Master’s in international relations and affairs. From Southern Methodist University, she earned two bachelor’s degrees: international relations and affairs and political science and government.
Namdarkhan failed upward to become the acting Assistant Secretary of State for two months after serving as a Senior Policy Advisor in the State Department under inmate number P01135809. Before working for the State Department, she served as the acting vice president of legal compliance and risk for the USAGM — the same agency she argues should be dismantled and restructured or outright defunded and eliminated if the USAGM does not bend to the will of Project 2025 and a new conservative President.
Her first job in inmate number P01135809’s administration was as Special Advisor on National Security and Policy for Voice of America (VOA). The alarming stories I cite below about Namdarkhan’s work for USAGM and VOA demonstrate her need for power at the expense of the United States and the rule of law. Back in 2020 when inmate number P01135809 served as President, The New York Times editorial board wrote after the U.S. Senate confirmed conservative documentary filmmaker Michael Pack as USAGM’s CEO:
The specter of turning V.O.A. into a propaganda tool of the White House should be frightening to all Americans, regardless of political leanings. America’s image abroad has already been battered under this administration, making an independent global broadcaster all the more essential as a voice of the integrity and fairness that are still at the core of American values.
That specter incarnated when Namdarkhan worked for VOA and USAGM when Pack took charge.
While serving under Pack, Namdarkahn and other inmate number P01135809 lackeys harassed and targeted USAGM executives and suspended six of them. NPR’s David Folkenflik says in his article “A Report Clears Federal Officials Who Were Suspended By A Trump Appointee over VOA”:
[In l]ate [July 2020], a top Pack aide told the agency's chief risk officer to compile a "risk profile" of several of the senior executives.
USAGM acting vice president for legal compliance and risk, Morvared Namdarkhan, "told [USAGM’s top risk officer] to include any negative information he had heard about the individuals, regardless of whether he could verify the information," according to the inspector general's report on [USAGM Chief Strategy Officer Shawn] Powers' suspension. "Ms. Namdarkhan told him to add even rumors that he 'heard in the halls'."
According to Folkenflik, Namdarkhan and Pack along with other USAGM aides retaliated against six USAGM executives “[who raised] red flags about actions taken by then-President Donald Trump's appointee at the parent agency of the Voice of America.” One of those executives was USAGM General Counsel David Klingerman. Klingerman reported to the Justice Department that “[Namdarkhan] questioned Open Technology Fund employees without their lawyer present - an act that [he] suspected might be illegal.”
In Folkenflick’s lede, the State Department’s inspector general exonerated Klingerman and the five other government employees suspended during inmate number P01135809’s tenure.
In his article, Folkenflik further states:
David Seide, an attorney with the non-profit Government Accountability Project who represented USAGM Chief Financial Officer Grant Turner, says the investigation's findings were unsurprising.
"What is shocking are [the inspector general's] discovery of the many more ways Pack and his political appointees – while running USAGM for a mere six months – managed to break the law, abuse authority, endanger public health and safety and grossly mismanage the agency," Seide said in a statement.
Knowing this should make American voters at home and abroad who lean independent or Democratic vigilant.
Like the previous three chapters I have critically analyzed, Namdarkhan utilizes shoddy scholarship to fit her chapter’s argument. More importantly though is that Namdarkhan, to use the metaphor one of my friends used when her two bosses tag-teamed in harassing her before they fired her, is Ariel to Pack’s Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The craven Pack has again used her to do his bidding for conjuring his illegal and unethical machinations. Her section in this chapter acts as Pack’s mouthpiece to finish the USAGM’s defunding and abolishment if USAGM journalists and staff refuse to spread propaganda overseas.
Most disturbing is the fact that Morvared Namdarkahn has maladjusted her given name to ”Mora Namdar,” providing more evidence of someone who may feel the need to reject their ethnicity to assimilate into whiteness and become adjacent to white men in power like Pack and inmate number P01135809. As a woman, Namdarkahn most likely believes she will benefit from power herself though that has never happened for women overall, especially Black, Indigenous, Mexican, Latinx, Asian and Middle Eastern women87. The Dobbs case overturning Roe V. Wade is one such example.
Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media
Instead of presenting the opening paragraph that provides the section’s mission statement and objective, I begin with its buried lede:
As we see in the section’s last sentence, Namdarkahn uses Project 2025’s military language when she calls the USAGM “one of the greatest tools in America’s arsenal to tell America’s story and promote freedom and democracy around the world.” However, as we have read and seen over the past few years, state governments, right-wing organizations and politicians have no desire to tell America’s true story. For Namdarkan to argue that this should be the USAGM’s role should alarm us — a lot.
Her author’s note acknowledges Pack contributing to her chapter’s “preparation.” On May 21, 2023, Folkenflik’s article “Federal Inquiry Details Abuses of Power by Trump’s CEO over Voice of America” includes a 145-page redacted report that details how Pack “through a government agency to tr[ied] to force its newsrooms and workforce to show fealty to the White House.”
The note also mentions Victoria Cotes, the former national security advisor for inmate number P01135809 and former USAGM advisor Frank Wuco, an Islamophobic conspiracy-pushing former conservative radio who claimed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was a Nazi “whose botox had worn off” and former President Barack Obama was not an American but a Kenyan. The other whistleblowers she mentions are not named, but we can glean from the prior cited evidence those whistleblowers were yes-men like Namdarkhan during inmate number P01135809’s administration.
In addition, when Pack headed the USAGM, CNN’s Jennifer Hansler noted in her article “Former Talk Radio Host Who Pushed Conspiracy Theories Hired by US Global Media Agency” that Pack terminated an editor for Radio Free Asia and did not extend visas for VOA journalists.
Swinging back to the section’s beginning, its mission statement and overview hides the darkness laid out in its conclusion and commits projection.
Reading through this section, it is clear Pack, Coates, Wuco and Namdarkhan along with the unnamed whistleblowers are taking marching orders from The Heritage Foundation and inmate number P01135809.
One division, however, that will escape Project 2025 and inmate number P01135809’s vengeance is “[Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty]’s Hungarian-language service, Szabad Európa because it] falls outside the intended scope of RFE/RL’s charter by targeting a democratically elected, pro-American European and NATO ally.”
No problem except that Hungary’s prime minister is the autocrat Viktor Orbán.
While appearing at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) in 2022, Orbán’s reception eclipsed the one for current Texas Governor Greg Abbott whose Rio Grande floating razor-wire river barriers have harmed and killed migrants. Despite the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit’s December 2023 ruling that the deadly and illegal barriers be removed, those barriers remain.
The Associated Press’s Paul Weber was one of the reporters who covered Orbán’s CPAC appearance. Among his observations were
[t]he exuberant cheers and standing ovations . . . for the far-right prime minister, who has been criticized for undermining his own country’s democratic institutions, [that] demonstrated the growing embrace between Orbán and Republicans in the U.S.
[Orbán] mocked the media in this country and in Europe. And in a speech he titled “How We Fight,” Orbán told the crowd gathered in a Dallas convention ballroom to focus now on the 2024 election, saying they had “two years to get ready,” though he endorsed no candidate or party.
“Victory will never be found by taking the path of least resistance,” he said during one of the keynote slots of the three-day CPAC event. “We must take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels. We must find friends and allies in one another.”
Referring to liberals, he said: “They hate me and slander me and my country, as they hate you and slander you for the America you stand for.”
After first reading Weber’s article, I couldn’t help but recall this scene from Revenge of the Sith
Voice of America though won’t be as lucky as RFE/RL’s Szabad Európa to escape what Project 2025, inmate number P01135809 or another conservative President has planned for it.
Next week: Critical Analysis of Mandate for Leadership’s chapter on Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media — Voice of America.
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