George.Anthony wrote:
> bfh <redydog@rye.net> wrote:
>> To paraphrase someone in here: For those of you with short attention
>> spans, here is a summary of the C&P to follow.
>>
>> HawHawHaw!
>>
>> "Disinformation Governance Board"
>> HawHawHaw!
>>
>> I love it. I just bygod love it.
>> HawHawHaw!
>> -----------------------------------------------------------
>> Here comes the Department of Homeland Security — that heavily funded
>> guardian of our national borders, enforcer of the immigration laws,
>> preventer of terrorism, protector of U.S. coastal waters, keeper of
>> cybersecurity and coordinator of disaster preparedness — with yet
>> another sweeping assignment. On Wednesday, DHS Secretary Alejandro
>> Mayorkas announced at a House hearing the formation of a
>> Disinformation Governance Board, which will carry the agency’s fight
>> to a new front. The board will battle disinformation.
>>
>> What will the board do? Where will the war be waged? Information on
>> the Biden administration’s war on disinformation proved scarce. When
>> the Associated Press asked DHS for an interview for details, the
>> department stiffed them, according to the AP’s April 28 story. The
>> next afternoon, a reporter asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki
>> for more about the board at a presser, and she was pretty vacant, too.
>> “I really haven’t dug into this exactly. I mean, we, of course,
>> support this effort, but let me see if I can get more specifics.”
>>
>> The press did pry out of DHS the board’s goal to contest
>> disinformation crafted by Russia as well as the general disinformation
>> (authors unstated) that had deceived immigrants from Haiti and other
>> places that the U.S. southern border was open. Republicans like Sen.
>> Josh Hawley of Missouri and conservative media like the Washington
>> Times flipped out at the announcement, dusting off their Orwell and
>> combing out their fright-wigs to warn of an impending DHS crackdown on
>> not just free speech but free thinking. “This is dangerous and
>> un-American,” Hawley said in a statement. “The board should be
>> immediately dissolved.”
>>
>> The idea that the Biden administration would pulp the First Amendment
>> and institute an authoritarian regime through its agents at DHS is
>> immediately dismissible if only because it is one of the most
>> ineffectual departments in the president’s Cabinet. Had Biden given
>> the task to Agriculture or Commerce or another department with a
>> better GPA in governing, we should be afraid. But DHS couldn’t stamp
>> out disinformation or erect an American Reich if we reallocated to it
>> all of the arms we’re currently shipping to Ukraine. It’s peopled by a
>> confederacy of dunces and botch-artists, incapable of carrying out its
>> current mission. For instance, DHS shrugged off the Jan. 6 warning
>> signs, according to a Government Accountability Office report. It
>> failed to share intelligence about the wave of Haitian immigrants who
>> breached the border in 2021. (Based on its track record, DHS’ content
>> monitors will surely miss any treacherous disinformation the Russkies
>> ship our way.) The department is so riddled with “copycat” programs
>> that duplicate duties handled by other federal agencies, Dara Lind
>> argued in Vox, that it should be abolished, a view held by many. In
>> 2020, former Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wrote an op-ed regretting
>> having midwifed it with her Senate vote.
>>
>> But never mind DHS. Who among us thinks the government should add to
>> its work list the job of determining what is true and what is
>> disinformation? And who thinks the government is capable of telling
>> the truth? Our government produces lies and disinformation at
>> industrial scale and always has. It overclassifies vital information
>> to block its own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays
>> thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with facts.
>>
>> This is the government that lied about winning the war in Vietnam,
>> that said the Watergate affair was a “third-rate burglary,” that
>> fought a secret war in Nicaragua, that lied about a clandestine love
>> affair in the White House, that used faulty intelligence to force a
>> war in the Middle East. Even President Barack Obama shortchanged the
>> truth. Of 600 Obama statements PolitiFact checked during his
>> administration, a quarter of them fell into the “red zone” of being
>> false, mostly false, or “pants on fire” false. Not so long ago, 50
>> intelligence officials — each of them smarter and better informed than
>> any DHS brainiac — assured the nation that the Hunter Biden laptop
>> story bore “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information
>> operation.” How did that work out? The idea that Covid could have come
>> from a Chinese lab was similarly dismissed as disinformation; now it’s
>> considered a legitimate possibility by the Biden administration.
>> Meanwhile, we have documented proof from the Washington Post that even
>> Joe Biden can’t handle simple truths! (We don’t need to reassess the
>> Donald Trump presidency here, do we?)
>>
>> Making the federal government the official custodian of truth would be
>> like Brink’s giving a safe-cracker a job driving an armored car. On
>> top of that, who is going to accept DHS’ determinations? Not
>> reporters, who are accustomed to government lies. Not the man in the
>> street. Certainly not the so-called low-information voters the
>> government would like to diaper and stuff into an escape-proof
>> playpen. By conjuring the Disinformation Governance Board into
>> existence, the Biden administration will give itself a referee’s power
>> to declare some things completely out of bounds. Without stepping out
>> on the slippery slope, that would give Biden’s people the power to
>> find some things dangerous or objectionable. After branding something
>> disinformation, it’s only a short slide to suppressing the contested
>> information or replacing it with what Kellyanne Conway fancifully
>> called “alternative facts.”
>>
>> If Russian disinformation is a problem, it has been so for almost a
>> century. As Lawfare reported in 2017, the Russians started sending out
>> fake defectors in the 1930s to spread disinformation in the West.
>> After World War II, the Soviets shifted their focus to the United
>> States. Two years after the surrender of Nazi Germany, Soviet
>> leadership sought to influence public opinion by covertly funding
>> newspapers and radio stations around the world and establishing fronts
>> to nurture communism. It forged documents and attempted to plant them
>> in credible publications. In one disinformation campaign, it
>> promulgated the tall tale that AIDS was the product of an American
>> biological weapons experimentation. And so on.
>>
>> Somehow we survived the Soviet onslaught without a Disinformation
>> Governance Board to guide us. Not every particle of disinformation can
>> be blocked. Anybody who is good at inventing lies can produce
>> disinformation faster than anybody can shoot disinformation down. (See
>> this RAND report about the Russian “firehose“ of lies.) Instead of
>> installing a Truth Politburo at DHS, the government should leave the
>> job of policing disinformation to the competitive organs of the press,
>> which compete “to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of
>> the time, and instantly, by disclosing them to make them the common
>> property of the nation,” as Times of London editor J. T. Delane put it
>> in 1852.
>>
>> If DHS so badly needs a paperwork project, it can address a problem
>> closer to home: set up a bureau to study and eradicate U.S. government
>> disinformation.
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>> https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/29/dont-trust-the-government-00029103
>>
>
> It is interesting that they didn’t see a need for it until Musk bought
> Twitter. Now that their algorithms are about to be outed this “governance
> board” can claim false information.
>
At the end of the day going forward, I'm sure that it's literally just
a coincidence taken out of context, and due to the significance of the
passage of time, all will become clear as the messaging evolves in the
passage of time going forward - or backwards, when the truths
concealed in history will be efficaciously unearthed and revealed in
the passage of time.

Spin Socky, Jr.
Deputy Assistant White House Press Secretary in Training

--
bill
Theory don't mean squat if it don't work.