RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-implies-obama-devised-ministry-of-truth-disinformation-governance-board/

Former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard implied that former President Barack Obama devised the formation of President Biden’s recently announced Disinformation Governance Board, which critics have likened to the “Ministry of Truth” from George Orwell’s 1984.

“Biden is just a front man,” Gabbard tweeted Sunday. “Obama, April 21: social media censors ‘don’t go far enough,’ so the government needs to step in to do the job. Six days later, Homeland Security rolls out the ‘Ministry of Truth’ (aka Disinformation Governance Board).”

Gabbard’s tweet was in reference to Obama’s speech at Stanford University last week, where he declared that tech companies have an obligation to more strictly police disinformation and called for the government to facilitate that.

“Now the good news is that almost all the big tech platforms now acknowledge some responsibility for content on their platforms, and they’re investing in large team of people to monitor it,” Obama said during the speech. “Given the sheer volume of content, this strategy can feel like a game of Whack-A-Mole.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/02/bidens-loan-forgiveness-fraud/

His popularity flagging, President Joe Biden is using the oldest trick in the book to return voters to the Democrats’ fold: Don’t earn their future votes, buy them. And that’s exactly what Biden is doing with his $1 trillion plan to “forgive” student loans.

Biden had already allowed students to “postpone” paying their loans during the pandemic “emergency,” even those who have jobs and could make the payments.

So why now forgive the loans? The truth is, one of the biggest recent declines in Biden’s support comes among Americans of college age and slightly older, the very group most likely to have a pile of student loans.

What better, or more cynical, way to revive their flagging political support than to bribe them with a “free” education?

Hard-left Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley called Biden’s plan “a tremendous victory.” In fact, it is yet another betrayal of working Americans who will now be paying taxes to support rich kids’ higher education.

That’s not hyperbole. If anything, it’s understatement. As a devastating University of Chicago study conclusively shows, wealthy families disproportionately benefit from loan forgiveness programs.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/disinformation-for-dummies-governance-board-orwell-1984-mayorkas-homeland-security-11651431969?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

We realize public schools don’t teach the classics any more, but has no one in the Biden Administration read George Orwell ? Apparently not, because that’s the only explanation for its creation of a new Disinformation Governance Board.

We have to admit that when we first read about it, we thought the news was itself disinformation from the Administration’s political enemies. Surely, no one in this age of polarization and public mistrust of institutions would think it’s wise to set up a government shop with the job of telling Americans what is true.

We were wrong. No less an authority than Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, broke the news about the board last week in an appearance before Congress. He said the purpose of this new corner of the bureaucracy will be to warn Americans about falsehoods coming from foreign adversaries such as Russia, China and cartels that smuggle migrants into the United States.

“It works to ensure that the way in which we address threats, the connectivity between threats and acts of violence are addressed without infringing on free speech—protecting civil rights and civil liberties, the right of privacy,” Mr. Mayorkas told CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/30/the-great-american-free-speech-panic/

The American elites have come up with all kinds of convoluted reasons as to why it’s good and proper for Silicon Valley to wield its unprecedented power against those they disagree with. But those reasons keep changing in revealing ways. Before this week the argument was that Twitter can set whatever speech policies it likes because it’s a business and anyone who doesn’t like it can go elsewhere. Now they’ve suddenly changed their tune. And for all their deeply felt concern about misinformation the elites have turned a blind eye in recent years to how their war on misinformation has produced its own kind of misinformation – such as the hasty branding of the Hunter Biden story or the Covid lab-leak theory as bonkers conspiracy theories, only for it to turn out later that there was actually something to them.

This has become a vicious circle. Some of the genuinely mad movements unleashed in recent years – from QAnon to Stop the Steal to Covid anti-vax guff – are actually a demonstration of a well-worn argument against censorship. Namely, that censoring bad ideas doesn’t make them go away and can give them a glamour they do not deserve. Censorship has a way of making people think they’re on to something. Combine this with a mainstream media that now routinely prizes The Narrative over the facts – calling BLM riots ‘mostly peaceful’ and Kyle Rittenhouse a ‘white supremacist’ – and you’ve got a toxic mix. The crisis of trust in the mainstream has sent many looking for answers at the margins. And the more that do, the more censorship is meted out.

But then again this was never really about misinformation, was it? This is about America’s ruling class becoming deeply sceptical about one of America’s founding values, and deeply sceptical about their fellow citizens. So-called liberal elites simply do not believe that ordinary people can be trusted to sort truth from illusion and are now convinced that some higher power must vet their reading material for them. They believe that the answer to bad speech is not more speech, but ruthless corporate censorship. They have convinced themselves that free speech is a threat to civilisation, rather than the core of civilisation.