RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Joe Biden’s reelection ad campaign contains a boatload of misinformation and disinformation. Will the censors shut it down? Will the media alert their readers and viewers to the falsehoods? We all know the answers to those questions.

The political left is obsessed with shutting down any speech that doesn’t agree with its narrative. And it has successes to show for it. The Twitter files are the preeminent example. There exists a censorship-industrial complex, “a state-sponsored system targeting ‘disinformation,’” says journalist Matt Taibbi, who had access to the Twitter files, that strike “at the essence of the right to free speech.”

Hardly two years ago, and just a little more than a year into one of the worst administrations in U.S. history, the Biden White House created a Disinformation Governance Board. Its mission was to do the “critical work across several administrations” of addressing “disinformation that threatens the security of our country,” which meant punishing speech the Democrats don’t want the public to hear.

It didn’t last long. In less than four months it was dissolved. Turns out that people didn’t trust it. Many instinctively knew that it’s real mission was to censor political opponents and the free expression of private citizens who don’t hold the “correct” opinions and beliefs.

It would have also been good cover for the Democrats’ incessant lying, recently manifesting itself in the Biden campaign ads. Following is some of the inflammatory, and intentionally misleading, content from those ads, followed by the facts.

“If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath. … It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”

Trump said those words. It’s true. But he wasn’t threatening violence if he loses. Listen to the entire passage, not just a couple of sentences cherry picked by dishonest apparatchiks, and it’s clear he’s talking about the U.S. auto industry being harmed by foreign competition. While we don’t agree with Trump’s proposal to place tariffs on imports, honesty about what he said is still important.

“It is filled with losers” – Trump, referring to the American military cemetery near Paris, in an ad that says “Donald Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about service to his country. This is what he thinks of those who served our country.”

The only person who “heard” this comment was the Atlantic editor in chief, who later admitted he could be wrong. What’s more, “at least 15 Trump administration officials who were with Trump on that trip have now disputed the Atlantic report,” says PJ Media. It’s true that Trump didn’t make the visit in question on Memorial Day in 2017. The trip was canceled due to poor weather conditions, not because he thought the dead were losers.

In that same ad we hear Trump saying “You also had people that were very fine people on both sides.”

The implication is that Trump called white supremacists “very fine people.” Trump said he was not referring to racists or neo-Nazis. People can choose to doubt his explanation if they wish. But to do so they’d have to ignore that he said one day earlier that “we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” and also released a statement that said “KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups … are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

“This time he’s running again, threatening to be a dictator.”

Those are the words of fake tough guy Robert DeNiro in an ad that ends with Biden saying “I approve this message,” as is required by law. We admit that DeNiro can read a script about as well as the next guy in Hollywood, but the truth about the “dictator” comment is as much fiction as “Taxi Driver.” Trump quipped “I’m gonna be a dictator for one day. We’re gonna do two things: the border, we’re gonna make it so tight, you’re not gonna come in unless you come in legally, and the second is energy, we’re gonna drill baby drill. And then I’m not gonna be a dictator anymore.” No dictator gives up his grip after just one day, so it’s obvious Trump was being cheeky. And Trump doesn’t need to be a dictator to close the border nor craft energy policy that would result in increased drilling. He could do both by merely reversing Biden’s executive orders. Unfortunately, Trump gave the Democrats an opportunity to be the duplicitous sneaks they have long been.

“To drinking bleach … we knew Trump was out of control when he was president.”

These are some of the first words from the DeNiro-narrated ad. But Trump never said that. The fact-checkers, always more foe than friend of Republicans, rated Biden’s previous claim that Trump said “if you drank bleach you may be okay” as mostly false. Though he certainly wasn’t as clear as he should have been, when Trump mentioned bleach, he was talking about its usefulness as a disinfectant on surfaces.

Liars are going to lie, and there are no liars like Joe Biden’s Democratic Party of 2024. It’s as if the Disinformation Governance Board were still in business and was dishing out lies rather than exposing them. But then that is exactly what it was designed to do.