A Government Disinformation Board? You Don't Say!
Just as the internet has been roiled by the news that Elon Musk is buying Twitter and plans to turn it into a free speech forum, the administration announced its nifty plan to stifle free speech. Of course, the creation of such an office is a tell that their ideas cannot withstand the sunlight of open debate. It’s also a distraction from the real issues a competent administration would be dealing with.
Under Biden and as a result of his misbegotten policies, the price of natural gas is up 192%, diesel 176%, regular gasoline 74%, and foodstuffs 59%. Supply chain problems are creating shortages of building supplies, fertilizer, food, medicines -- you name it. Massive government giveaways have gotten many people used to the notion that work is unnecessary, and employers are having difficulty staffing up.
While homeowners in many places may feel richer because the value of their homes has increased on paper, fewer homes are now within reach of buyers, and replacement housing for sellers – obviously -- will have risen as well. The stock market tumbled and, with it, a large chunk of many people’s savings as inflation eats up what’s left.
I’m not even going into Biden’s foreign policies, except to mention that the administration deliberately seems to be provoking a broader war in Europe and renewed hostilities in the Middle East along with a nuclear-armed Iran (after the calm created by the Trump Abrahamic Accords and his treatment of the Iranian mullahs). Oh, and let me not forget -- the utter lack of controlled immigration across the Southern border under Biden.
No, everything is hunky-dory in the world of Biden and Pelosi, so there’s now an opportunity to deal with less critical matters, like restricting free speech.
The Disinformation Governance Board, announced this week, is a mysterious creation with no known purpose or need and will be headed by a highly eccentric gal who has a weird history of denouncing as disinformation things that are true while insisting on things that are demonstrably false.
Secretary [of Homeland Security]Alejandro Mayorkas mentioned the creation of the board in multiple congressional hearings this week. In one, he linked it to efforts to combat misinformation from human smugglers. In another, he said it would be used to counter Russian cyber and election misinformation: “We have just established a mis- and disinformation governance board in the Department of Homeland Security to more effectively combat this threat, not only to election security but to our homeland security.”
To head this mysterious operation, Mayorkas has named Nina Jankowicz, here singing of her sex fantasy with a dead Harry Potter. Elsewhere she bizarrely sings about misinformation, coining her own lyrics to Mary Poppins' “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
And yet again -- here she is contending that mocking Kamala Harris is a “threat to democracy.”
Jankowicz was the author of a report examining the online mockery of Harris during the 2020 election and noted the Vice President received a majority of derogatory online posts against women.
In the article, Jankowicz outlined tech companies and government should work together using “creativity and technological prowess to make a pariah of online misogyny.”
Social media companies, she argued should “make the shift toward believing women” allowing them to identify and censor content. Jankowicz also called for tech companies to stop “a tacit pile-on instruction” from influential people with a lot of online followers.
Jankowicz said online mockery of women was a threat to democracy, warning that “gender disinformation” could prevent women from running for office.
In September 2021, Jankowicz testified about “gender misinformation” being a threat to democracy in the British House of Parliament.
She cited Harris as an example:
I think of the little girls who were so happy on inauguration day, seeing our first female Vice-President inaugurated and, for those of them who are online, looking at the responses to tweets or Vice-President Harris’s Instagram posts, where people call the Biden-Harris Administration “Joe and the ho”, or worse. There is much worse, alleging that Vice-President Harris slept her way to the top.
During her testimony, she argued that “gender misinformation” was also a “national security concern.”
All right. So, she’s a bit kooky, but can she tell truth from disinformation? I don’t think her record is any better on that.
She claimed there are many non-binary people who give birth. Actually, I think that is “gender disinformation,” not mockery of women officeholders. And calling mothers-to-be ”pregnant people” as she does, is not only false but does more to erase womanhood than criticizing Kamala Harris who deserves, as does every elected officeholder, to be judged on the merits -- or lack of them in, Kamala’s case.
Worse yet, Jankowicz’s record on discriminating between truth and falsehood is a failed one. She suggested the Hunter laptop had an “illicit provenance”:
As an expert on the origins of disinformation she's called the Biden laptop "alleged" and likely a part of a Kremlin influence operation. [snip] In the same Washington Post op-ed, she accused the 2016 Trump campaign of "voter suppression" against Black voters through "online microtargeting tools." Also in October 2020, Jankowicz wrote in The Atlantic that then-President Trump's notion of having his supporters monitor polling places was "thuggery."
A Democratic partisan with a weak grasp of reality seems a poor choice to head this mysterious new office, and Congresswoman Lauren Boebert has authored a bill to shut down this operation.
One wonders if the administration‘s personnel office is deliberately sabotaging Biden-Harris -- or is their target the U.S? The thought is not absurd or warrantless.
In the same week the administration announced Jankowicz, it picked Dominic Ng, Chairman of the East West Bank, to represent U.S. interests on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Business Advisory Council. Aside from being a big donor to Biden and the DNC, Ng has consistently defended some of Beijing’s most controversial policies, including its Belt and Road Initiative, which has increased its hold on Third World countries, its take on the origins of COVID, and incidentally was critical of two bills backed by the administration to make the U.S. more competitive with China.
Ng is as perfect a fit to represent our interests in Asia as Jankowicz is to defend free speech -- only if you want to harm our interests in dealing with China or diminish our constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.
Source: American Thinker
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