DHS Awarded $1.5M to American University Lab Aiming to ‘Psychologically Inoculate’ Kindergarteners

SUMMARY

• The Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) is a “counter-extremism” research institute housed at American University, founded by Professors Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Brian Hughes
• In its own words, PERIL was conceived as a political indoctrination project; to “develop an empirically-tested, nationally-scalable intervention to prevent youth from radicalizing to white supremacist extremism”
• According to PERIL’s research, signs of “white supremacist extremism” include concerns about the ongoing trend of demographic replacement in western countries, as well as “scientific racism.”
• Although PERIL claims to be non-partisan, Hughes has called Trumpism a “more insidious threat” to democracy than “revolutionary extremism,” while Miller-Idriss has called the policies of the current administration “fascist.”
• PERIL was funded with approximately $1,534,104 from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Biden Administration.
• Part of those funds was allocated to DUCC, an effort to deploy “psychological inoculation” methods to indoctrinate K-5 elementary school children.
• PERIL has been financially supported by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization with a long history of promoting political censorship, and which has also developed “digital literacy” curricula for use in schools.

The funding of online censorship programs under the guise of “countering disinformation” was prolific during the Biden Administration. Of the myriad of organizations that were bankrolled by federal funds, one of the most overtly partisan is the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab (PERIL), housed at American University.

Research compiled by the Foundation for Freedom Online show that not only was PERIL funded with over $1.5 million in American taxpayer dollars, it was done in full knowledge of the overt partisanship of the organization, which has targeted mainstream conservative concerns such as demographic replacement and vaccine injuries, and whose co-founder, Brian Hughes, has described “Trumpism” as a “greater threat to democracy than revolutionary extremism.”

PERIL co-founder Cynthia Miller-Idriss presenting a White House summit against “hate-fueled violence” in 2022

In 2022, the Biden-era Department of Homeland Security granted  $749,828 to PERIL’s Violent Extremism Education and Resilience (VEER) program to create a media production company to create short-form videos to “inoculate” targets against extremism.

The short-form videos would reportedly serve as an “inexpensive strategy for communicating,” which could be easily adapted to animated, acted video, and even memes to stop the spread of extremism.

PERIL in 2022 said it had been working with Google Jigsaw, the U.K. Cabinet, the Harvard School of Public Health, and others on video-based inoculation, which were often tested out as a 30 second videos. Work on the grants has been already underway in Vermont, Texas, Michigan, Washington State, with other requests in several states and local communities.

“Psychologically Inoculating” Elementary School Kids And Kindergarteners

The Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) has laid out how the Google Jigsaw has planned on using the concept of “pre-bunking,” “psychological inoculation” to serve as a “vaccine against misinformation.” This public-health style approach to suppressing disfavored narratives has evolved into a central operational tactic of the censorship industry, with research institutes like the University of Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab devoting almost exclusive attention to it.

PERIL is following the same inoculation approach, attempting to develop “cognitive vaccines” for schoolkids as young as the 5th grade.

DHS also awarded PERIL a grant to create Developing & Using Critical Comprehension (DUCC), an approach to K-5 digital literacy, which is approved by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and other groups.

While such “media literacy” programs have become common in secondary education, this is the first time FFO has documented a “counter-disinformation” organization attempting to use pre-bunking indoctrination strategies in elementary schools and kindergartens.

While some of DUCC’s curriculum is common-sense advice, like encouraging kids to tell an adult if they encounter frightening content online, its overall goal is still viewpoint indoctrination — as PERIL’s own website says, its purpose is to “develop an empirically-tested, nationally-scalable intervention to prevent youth from radicalizing to white supremacist extremism.”

In its “about” page, the team behind DUCC said the curriculum was developed in consultation with child psychologists as well as “digital literacy experts.” PERIL boasted of its close connections to the Biden White House, and noted that DUCC is already active in hundreds of schools.

In terms of PERIL’s goal to create a “nationally-scalable intervention” to prevent the development of “white supremacist extremism,” (which, as we’ll see, includes several mainstream conservative beliefs per PERIL’s definition), DUCC represents its most important capacity-building work. It grants them a foothold in American schools, and an opportunity to test the effectiveness of its efforts to shape the online behavior – and political viewpoints – of schoolkids.

DUCC’s lessons grow more prescriptive as it advances into the K4 and K5 years, with one lessons advising teachers to tell kids to trust only “verified experts” on social media platforms.

A DUCC lesson more indicative of its creator’s bias is its “Save the Turtles” exercise, which purports to teach kids about how to evaluate different points of view – seemingly an exercise in viewpoint diversity. The exercise features three cartoon animals debating the pros and cons of banning plastic straws to protect the environment and mitigate climate change, inviting students to evaluate the points of view.

Yet none of the debaters question the premise that man-made climate change is real — the central point of dispute in real life environmental debates of the past two decades. Thus, an exercise seemingly designed to help kids evaluate a diverse set of viewpoints may in fact lead them to believe that the only viewpoints that exist are different flavors of liberalism.

SPLC Connection

PERIL is closely enmeshed within a larger network of left-wing foundations and donors. It has received many significant donations from many foundations and organizations that have pushed anti-extremism and anti-misinformation research, including:

Suppressing Mainstream Narratives

Miller-Idriss and Hughes and other scholars have written papers to develop a codebook of online anti-vaccine rhetoric to combat coronavirus-era vaccine misinformation. The study aimed to catalogue commonly-used terms by skeptics of vaccines and COVID-19 policies, with the eventual list including the following terms:

• “Vaccine injury”
• “Corrupt elites”
• “Health freedom”
• “Do your own research”

“The identification of these narratives and rhetorics may assist in developing effective public health messaging campaigns,” noted the study.

In March 2026, PERIL partnered with Bedrock, a coalition of 67 national organizations aimed at preventing violence against Arab Americans, Jewish-Americans, and LGBTQ+ Americans, etc. The partnership was created as federal funding for these sort of programming has diminished.

PERIL also created the Building Resilience, Confronting Risk for Parents and Caregivers that aims to help parents stop paths to extremism for children. The project was made possible with a donation by the Piper Fund, a group that works on racial, gender, racial, and “queer justice.” Donors to the group include the Rockefeller Fund and Open Society Foundations.

The “warning signs” identified by PERIL include:

• Fear of “White Genocide”
• Fear of the “Great Replacement”: a slogan describing the trend of European populations becoming minority groups, including in their own homelands
• Belief or necessity of violent insurrections
• Belief in necessity of violence to suppress Black Lives Matter
• Sharing concepts of “scientific racism,” a partisan term used by the left to describe fields such as population genetics, which studies the differences of ethnic groups
• Blaming immigrants for societal shortcomings
• Those that look forward to societal collapse

The Community Advisory, Resource, and Education (CARE) program was created with assisting communities to prevent targeted violence and was created after a two-year pilot program with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Trumpism a ‘More Insidious Threat’ Than Revolutionary Extremism

PERIL’s mission to stop extremism goes beyond its programs; Miller-Idriss and Hughes regularly write columns, papers, and provide congressional testimony, many of which reveal their partisan sympathies — ranging from left-wing feminism to political anti-Trumpism.

In testimony to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs in 2021, Miller-Idriss called to have the Soldier for Life Transition Assistance Program (TAP) incorporate inoculation support to “equip veterans with the skills to recognize potential outreach and propaganda from extremist groups who wish to exploit them.”

Hughes said of Trumpism:

“Trumpism and other forms of identitarian, ethnocentric populism have arguably posed a greater, more insidious threat to the credibility of democracy world-wide and the prospects for a sustainable world order than revolutionary extremism (which could have been efficiently put down by a display of state power).”

Miller-Idriss has wrote in her new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism that the recent rise in violent extremism are partially explained by a reassertion of “patriarchy” and that all forms of hate-fueled violence are linked to misogyny and gender-based ideology.

When the Trump administration moved to fight back against foreign think-tanks that advocate for censorship, such as the Censorship for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Miller-Idriss compared this to fascism.

“Shameful. I cite CCDH’s work constantly. Imran Ahmed is a leading voice raising the alarm on online harms, algorithms, and accountability. This is fascism, censorship & authoritarian overreach,” she wrote on Bluesky.

FFO Staff