Trump stops funding NED, biggest financier of Rappler, Vera Files

US PRESIDENT Trump has stopped government funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), one of America’s potent soft-power agitprop weapons for meddling in countries’ elections so that political leaders that refuse to follow Washington’s bidding are deposed.

One of NED’s most notorious — and consequential — accomplishments has been through its agitation and propaganda activities in Ukraine that led to the rise to power of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who pushed for his country’s membership with the military alliance, North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Calculating it was being encircled by the West to be eventually conquered, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

In the Philippines, NED gave five media outfits — notably Rappler — listed in the accompanying table tens of millions of pesos from 2009 to 2021. I am not sure if these were reported to government authorities as these are foreign funding in a media outlet, which is prohibited by the Constitution.

I got this data from the NED’s website. However, it stopped disclosing such information in 2022. My emails to these media outfits asking them if they had received further funding after 2021 were unanswered.

These five publications were united in the same views they propagated in their articles: that 1) the US was the champion of democracy worldwide and the Philippines’ unwavering ally and protector; 2) that China was the new imperialist nation out to annex the Philippines; and 3) Duterte was an enemy of human rights and democracy. In the 2022 elections, the five media outfits were campaigning for Vice President Leni Robredo to be president. (See my column “US-funded media firms here campaigning for Robredo,” March 25, 2022).

Coronel

In a 2019 article in Philippine Star and several other US publications, Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) founding head Sheila Coronel wrote that “foreign funding isn’t the problem, as it gives a publication independence.”

I’m sure peace-loving Ukrainians and people from Venezuela, Haiti, and even Hong Kong, where NED has operated to create chaotic political conditions, won’t agree with that naïve thinking.

Rappler and PCIJ were at the forefront of the vehement propaganda campaign against former president Rodrigo Duterte. Rappler’s huge accomplishment was manipulating police reports to exaggerate the number of casualties in Duterte’s war against drugs.

The official police report was that from July 2016 when Duterte started his war on illegal drugs to September 2017, 2,555 “drug personalities” were killed. There were an additional 4,525 killed but did not appear to be due to the drug war.

Rappler, however, ignored this distinction by adding the 2,555 drug personalities killed to the 4,525 killed for any other reason, to come up with the figure of 7,080 it declared were the casualties in the drug war. This is obviously an error since this would mean 472 people killed monthly in the drug war, when murders for any reason in the country is just 666 per month.

Anti-Duterte

Anti-Duterte groups used Rappler’s false template to further exaggerate the figure to as high as 27,000, which had been first made by an obscure radio commentator citing claims by “human rights” groups, he didn’t identify.

In a 2017 article in the US publication Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, titled melodramatically “A Presidency Bathed in Blood,” PCIJ head Coronel wrote: “The drug war, which Duterte officially launched on his first day in office, has claimed the lives of as many as 9,000 suspected drug dealers and users.”

When I asked her where she got that 9,000 number, she casually replied: “Numerous news reports quote that figure.” I checked as much as I could these numerous news reports”; none of these were such, and were merely unfounded “estimates” by biased human rights groups, especially Human Rights Watch Philippines headed by Lefts.

The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency has stuck — even after Duterte’s presidency and under the Marcos Jr. administration — to its report in 2018 that there were only 6,235 killed in this antidrug campaign. Those who claim more, mainly NGOs, have never presented proof that there were 9,000, according to “numerous news reports.” Such claims of a “presidency bathed in blood” were really part of the fierce US propaganda campaign to have Duterte ousted, because he brought the Philippines close to China, and away from US puppetry. Coronel has never gone back to her country.

For an institution that claims to be a champion of democracy, the ending of NED’s funding was cheered by the respected website anti-war com, which published the following article on Feb. 12:

“The Trump administration has frozen funding to the National Endowment for Democracy, a US-funded organization that meddles in elections and pushes regime change around the world in the name of ‘promoting democracy.'”

According to The Free Press (FP), an order from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to the US Treasury Department that blocked the disbursement of funds to the NED has crippled the organization’s activities.

“It’s been a bloodbath,” a NED staffer told the FP. “We have not been able to meet payroll and pay basic overhead expenses.”

The NED, which was founded during the Cold War in 1983, received $315 million from the US government for the 2025 fiscal year, according to the report.

In 1991, Allen Weinstein, a co-founder of NED, acknowledged to The Washington Post that a lot of what the organization did was done “covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius listed some examples of the NED’s “overt” action that was previously done by the CIA, including “providing money and moral support for pro-democracy groups, training resistance fighters, working to subvert communist rule.”

The NED has been targeted by Musk, who asked his followers in a recent post on X to list “all the evil things that NED has done.” Jim Bovard, a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute, replied with an article about how he has been critical of the organization for 40 years.

In a 2009 article for the Future Freedom Foundation, Bovard said the NED is “based on the notion that its meddling in foreign elections is automatically pro-democracy because the US government is the incarnation of democracy. NED has always operated on the principle that ‘what’s good for the US government is good for democracy.'”

In a 2006 piece for The American Conservative, Bovard detailed NED’s efforts to push for regime change in Latin America. “In 2001, NED quadrupled its aid to Venezuelan opponents of elected president Hugo Chavez, and NED heavily funded some organizations involved in a bloody military coup that temporarily removed Chavez from power in April 2002. After Chavez retook control, NED and the State Department responded by pouring even more money into groups seeking his ouster,” he wrote.

Bovard continued, “The International Republican Institute, one of the largest NED grant recipients, played a key role both in the Chavez coup and also in the overthrow of Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In February 2004, an array of NED-aided groups and individuals helped spur an uprising that left 100 people dead and toppled Aristide.”

As that Shakespearean saying very aptly put it, “In the end truth will out.”

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Trump stops funding NED, biggest financier of Rappler, Vera Files
Source: Breaking News PH