Happy Hour News
Indiana Jones say, “Always punch the Nazi”
This is the kind of story that frosts my cookies:
As you guys know, I don’t generally like to talk smack about Team Good. I don’t want to discourage anyone, and sometimes I slip and say something about AG Garland (and I’m still not sure he’s actually breathing), but that’s generally where it stops.
But this story, following the news yesterday that the White House is not going to name and shame the Nazis spreading their fascistic White Replacement nonsense really got my hackles up. (We do have hackles, right? So many questions.) It’s the very embodiment of that nonsense about going high when they go low, and they forgot to include the sniper rifles.
I jest, but not by much.
Now follow this if you can. 1) After announcing the formation of the Disinformation Governance Board, bad actors on the Right dubbed it 1984’s Ministry of Truth. 2) The White House told Nina Jankowicz —the expert person they put in charge of strategies to deal with dis/misinformation— to NOT respond to these accusations. 3) A mere three weeks after announcing this effort the Administration shut it all down without putting up a fight of any kind.
Nina Jankowicz has resigned.
Now then, I do not blame President Handsome Joe Biden for this debacle, it seems pretty low level. I do however think this has his Chief of Staff Ron Klaine’s Queensbury Rules fingerprints all over it, and given that this new Board was going to be under the DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas has probably just as much responsibility.
Whatever you think of this Board’s mission, you gotta know that this shitnado tells other experts in their given fields that they will be hung out to dry if they join this Administration. Not a good move.
As for the mission of the board itself, there was no way that this was ever going to be seen as anything other than a political operation, and if this were Team Evil proposing it during the 4th Reich, all of us would be up in their grill calling it the Ministry of Truth, too. It never belonged in the executive branch, it belongs at the DNC. The DNC needs to fight the right-wing disinformation machine. A governmental “advisory board” was stupid.
Either we want strategies to defeat disinformation or we don’t. But this was a needless defeat and a surrender without even putting up a fight. Republicans and Russians feel empowered and they have a notch on their barn doors. They killed an operation without even firing a shot.
Remember: Always Punch the Nazis. Always fight back.
UPDATE 1: Crooks and Liars has an excellent post up.
Mock Paper Scissors 
They are so remote from our actual concerns. It is like watching a tv show, where the Klingons have won. We have actual things that we worry about. We worry about water, we worry about food, we worry about our people. We are expecting a hot summer and we are concerned about our country burning here out west. We are worried about the hurricanes that will be coming .
We don’t even bother to worry about these DC Republicans, they are a known source of poison and danger. We worry about them.
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I worry about everything, including worrying about everything else.
Rgds,
TG
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“Damn that was quick!” said Anthony Scaramucci. I only emitted a groan, twice – first when I read about the response to its creation and again when I read about ending.
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I would point to Finland’s world-renowned national disinformation combatting program. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/fact-from-fiction-finlands-new-lessons-in-combating-fake-news
Which could NEVER EVER</b happen here for fucking obvious reasons.
Also too…they learned they could get away with it when Obama’s administration let the right wing mau-mau Lois Lerner and the IRS into letting them break the law with impunity.
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Don’t forget Shirley Sharrod and ACORN.
Sharrod was forced to resign for delivering a recorded speech about how she learned she had been biased, how she woke up to her own bias against white farmers, grew from it, and learned to apply rules fairly and equally no matter the grant requesters race. Of course, FOX (heh – wily fox) picked the “how I was before” part of the speech to smear her, but she still had to go. I never understood why.
She’s right up there with the IRS lady.
ACORN – no resignation there. They were just vilified and shut down for precisely following the rules for what they were doing. If someone wants to register to vote, the organization collecting the application is not allowed to judge – not even if they sign up as “Mickey Mouse”. Their rep explaining this was not able to save the place. Wasn’t it some Repub group in Georgia who was simply throwing out registration if the applicant applied as a Democrat? But ACORN was the bad guy.
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Also, gonna disagree with you here, but this is absolutely in the DHS’s wheelhouse, because this shit is a national security threat! Foreign actors are flooding the zone with lies designed to make the US do what THEY want. Did we learn nothing from 2016???
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BDR – this office was a policy operation, not a policing or fact-checking operation. It was to advise on dis/mis info.
Rgds,
TG
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I think somebody in the administration was thinking about something like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/06/sweden-fake-news-psychological-defence-agency/
The Swedish agency is set up SOLELY to combat foreign (cough, Russian, cough) disinformation campaigns created to destabilize the country and government, not any communication of any kind by Swedish citizens.
The Republican party can’t be overtly pro-Putin, but Putin is definitely pro-Republican. It would be a shame if most GQP talking points were exposed as either originating or being amplified by Russian organs by a definitive source in real time. Many tears would be shed. Delicious, refreshing tears
The administration needs to get their sh*t together, clearly define what needs to be done, firewall civil rights/liberties, and make this happen.
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