RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/ministry-of-truthiness

The Biden administration has set up a Disinformation Governance Board, its mission to expose, intercept, and otherwise chivy any form of untruthiness that might threaten the national security of the United States, especially if it comes from Russia. I haven’t laughed so hard since Jen Psaki, one of the nation’s top sources of disinformation, said she would continue to front another top source of disinformation, the White House press office, while under contract to join a third source of disinformation, MSNBC.

The good news is that this “Ministry of Truth” will be run by the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS is the DMV of federal agencies. Its multitentacled powers of snooping and scanning are matched only by the moronic incompetence of its staff. The DHS couldn’t spot disinformation if it came singing the “Song of the Volga Boatmen” and was wrapped in a $3 bill. That’s why it’s brought in an academic expert, Nina Jankowicz, to determine what is true and what is white supremacy or shilling for Russia or whichever thoughtcrime opposes the Democratic narrative of the day.

Misinformation is incomplete or mistaken. Disinformation is, as the Russians say, “active measures.” The full truth is deliberately edited and misrepresented. Carefully curated untruths are woven into fragments of fact to create a plausible atmosphere of truthiness. You can be misinformed from innocence or its cousin at the DHS, ignorance. But disinformation is intentional. It’s “information warfare,” part of a political program.

Jankowicz knows all about disinformation. As our very own Jerry Dunleavy reported, Jankowicz has obfuscated the nature of the anti-Trump “Russian collusion” dossier compiled by the ex-British spook Christopher Steele. Jankowicz was not misinformed when she reminded Sen. Lindsey Graham that the dossier “began as a Republican opposition research project,” but he was disinformed. It’s also true that Adolf Hitler began as a painter, but it would be disinformation to leave it there.

And that is exactly where Jankowicz leaves it. For some reason, she shows little interest in the full story of what even a mid-level DHS employee might conclude was Watergate on steroids: a scheme to hobble a presidential candidate that actually got beyond the slush fund and burglary stage and was cheered all the way by almost all of the media, the Washington Post included. All she has said is: “Your party funded the dossier first.”

Jankowicz also repeatedly dismissed the veracity of the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which the Justice Department concluded are real. “We should view it as a Trump campaign product,” Jankowicz told the Associated Press in October 2020, raising doubt as to “whether the laptop actually belongs to Hunter Biden.” She has not criticized Twitter’s or Facebook’s suppression of the New York Post’s laptop story in the weeks before the 2020 elections.

Fortunately, we have Psaki’s word that the Disinformation Governance Board will be “nonpartisan” and “apolitical” — just like the complex of nongovernmental organizations that give Jankowicz her professional credentials. She has worked at the National Democratic Institute, a National Endowment for Democracy spinoff. Its current chairman is Derek Mitchell, a former official in the Clinton and Obama administrations, and its funders include the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. That’s more spin than a campus laundromat.

Jankowicz works at the Wilson Center, which receives about a third of its budget from the federal government and lives rent-free in the Ronald Reagan Building. Her Wilson Center webpage tells us that she “advised the Ukrainian government on strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Fellowship,” not quite as coy as her fellow Ukrainian consultant Hunter Biden but getting there. And truly the Ukrainians have communicated strategically on the critical social media front.

These are the institutions of “democracy promotion” and “regime change” abroad. As the American empire falls, the Democrats are turning the arsenal of democracy on their domestic enemies. Threats to democracy include “ Republicans and other disinformers ,” anyone who mocks the absurd authoritarian vanity of the Democrats, and Elon Musk, whose desire to make Twitter a freer place Jankowicz called an attack on “marginalized communities all around the world.”

“People are dying because of misinformation,” said former President Barack Obama, the Socrates of Martha’s Vineyard. Actually, they’re dying because they can’t afford Obamacare. Obama tells us that we must burn the village of free speech in order to save it. The Disinformation Governance Board’s task is to recommend whose house burns first — to identify, the DHS said, “how disinformation influences the threat environment” and how federal agencies should monitor people with the wrong opinions.

The Disinformation Governance Board will stamp false coinage with the imprimatur of the federal government. That will flatter the prejudices of Democrats, further confirm Republicans’ conviction that the state is the enemy, and render all of us more susceptible to disinformation. The beatings will continue until morale improves.