1984: USA Launches Disinfo Ministry of Truth

[grarpamp]

Oh God It's Going To Get So Much Worse

https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/oh-god-its-going-to-get-so-much-worse-b7ef6a0290ed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfTGWjDZDQQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Board
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-bidens-disinformation-board-likened-orwells-ministry-truth-1702190
https://twitter.com/townhallcom/status/1519765066396143616
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Jankowicz
https://nypost.com/2022/04/28/bidens-disinformation-czar-is-latest-assault-on-free-speech/
https://twitter.com/wiczipedia/status/1362153807879303171
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/biden-administration-completely-kills
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1519710402518597633
https://www.mintpressnews.com/online-censorship-ukraine-russa-google-facebook-twitter/280304/
https://twitter.com/johnpilger/status/1518569341851037696
https://twitter.com/PenicilinPan/status/1520210743995826177
https://news.antiwar.com/2022/04/25/after-kyiv-visit-lloyd-austin-says-us-goal-is-for-russia-to-be-weakened/
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/25/ywzn-a25.html
https://news.antiwar.com/2022/04/20/pentagon-chief-austin-speaks-with-chinese-counterpart-for-first-time/
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-us-empires-ultimate-target-is
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/how-much-are-we-prepared-to-sacrifice

Rightists have spent the last couple of days freaking out and invoking
Orwell’s 1984 in response to something their political enemies are
doing in America, and for once it’s for a pretty good reason.

The Department of Homeland Security has secretly set up a
“Disinformation Governance Board”, only informing the public about its
plans for the institution after it had already been established.

The disinformation board, which critics have understandably been
calling a “Ministry of Truth”, purportedly exists to fight
disinformation coming out of Russia as well as misleading messages
about the US-Mexico border. We may be certain that the emphasis in the
board’s establishment has been on the Russia angle, however.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in her patented “You’re such a
crazy idiot for questioning me about the White House” manner,
dismissed alarmed questions about what specific functions this strange
new DHS entity was going to be performing and what its authority will
look like.

    “It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent
disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in
a range of communities,” Psaki said.

    “I’m not sure who opposes that effort.”

    PSAKI: "It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent
disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in
a range of communities. I'm not sure who opposes that effort."
pic.twitter.com/Z4xOv46RLT
    — Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 28, 2022

The answer to the question of “who opposes that effort” is of course
“anyone with functioning gray matter between their ears.” No
government entity has any business appointing itself the authority to
sort information from disinformation on behalf of the public, because
government entities are not impartial and omniscient deities who can
be entrusted to serve the public as objective arbiters of absolute
reality. They would with absolute certainty wind up drawing
distinctions between information, misinformation and disinformation in
whatever way serves their interests, regardless of what’s true,
exactly as any authoritarian regime would do.

I mean, is anyone honestly more afraid of Russian disinformation than
they are of their own government appointing itself the authority to
decide what counts as disinformation?

This important point has gotten a bit lost in the shuffle due to the
utterly hypnotic ridiculousness of the person who has been appointed
to run the Disinformation Governance Board. Nina Jankowicz, a
carefully groomed swamp creature who has worked in Kyiv as a
communications advisor to the Ukrainian government as part of a
Fulbright fellowship, is being widely criticized by pundits and social
media users for her virulent Russiagating and whatever the hell this
is:

    You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation 💁🏻‍♀️
https://t.co/eGV9lpctYn pic.twitter.com/WVQFA2bPmq
    — Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) February 17, 2021

Because of this person’s embarrassing cartoonishness, a lot more
commentary lately has been going into discussing the fact that the
Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth is run by a kooky
liberal than the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has a
fucking Ministry of Truth.

Which is really to miss the forest for the trees, in my opinion. Would
it really be any better if the “Disinformation Governance Board” was
run by a chill dude you wouldn’t mind having a beer with? Especially
when we know the ideological leanings of this department are going to
bounce back and forth between elections and will always act in service
of US empire narrative control regardless of who is in office? I don’t
think so.

The real issue at hand is the fact that this new institution will
almost certainly play a role in bridging the ever-narrowing gap
between government censorship and Silicon Valley censorship. The
creation of the DHS disinformation board is a far more shocking and
frightening development than last year’s scandalous revelation that
the White House was advising social media platforms about accounts it
determined were circulating censorship-worthy Covid misinformation,
which was itself a drastic leap in the direction toward direct
government censorship from what had previously been considered normal.

    White House fact-sheet says part of the mammoth $33 billion
spending package it's requesting for Ukraine will be to "support
independent media." Because nothing screams "independent" like being
directly funded by the US Government as part of its "information
warfare" initiative pic.twitter.com/O3JshV1Mg9
    — Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 28, 2022

We should probably talk more about how as soon as people accepted that
it was fine for government, media and Silicon Valley institutions to
work together to censor misinformation and rally public support around
an Official Narrative about a virus, the ruling power establishment
immediately took that as license to do that with a war and a foreign
government as well.

Like, immediately immediately. We went from a massive narrative
control campaign about a virus, which people accepted because they
wanted to contain a deadly pandemic, straight into a massive narrative
control campaign about Russia and Ukraine. Without skipping a beat.
Like openly manipulating everyone’s understanding of world events is
just what we do now. Now we’re seeing increasingly brazen censorship
of political dissent about a fucking war that could easily end up
getting us all killed in a nuclear holocaust, and a portion of the
Biden administration’s whopping $33 billion Ukraine package is going
toward funding “independent media” (read: war propaganda).

We should probably talk more about this. We should probably talk more
about how insane it is that all mainstream western institutions
immediately accepted it as a given that World War II levels of
censorship and propaganda must be implemented over a faraway war that
our governments are not even officially a part of.

It started as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, without any public
discussion whatsoever. Like the groundwork had already been laid and
everyone had already agreed that that’s what would happen. The public
had no say in whether we want to be propagandized and censored to help
the US win some kind of weird infowar to ensure its continued unipolar
domination of the planet. It just happened.

No reason was given to the public as to why this must occur, and there
was no public debate as to whether it should. This was by design,
because propaganda only works when you don’t know it’s happening to
you.

The choice was made for us that information is too important to be
left in the hands of the people. It became set in stone that we are to
be a propaganda-based society rather than a truth-based society. No
discussion was offered, and no debate was allowed.

    In the middle of an election campaign, Defence Minister Peter
Dutton tells Australians to "prepare for war". He compared China with
Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Australia has no enemies, none, zero. But
it speaks for its master in Washington. Read
on:https://t.co/dSRhu5b23i
    — John Pilger (@johnpilger) April 25, 2022

And as bad as it is, it’s on track to get much, much worse. They’re
already setting up “disinformation” regulation in the government which
presides over Silicon Valley, the proxy war between the US and Ukraine
is escalating by the day, and aggressions are ramping up against China
over both the Solomon Islands and Taiwan. If you think imperial
narrative management is intense now, wait until the US empire’s
struggle to secure global hegemony really gets going.

Do you consent to this? Do you? It’s something you kind of have to
take a position on, because its implications have a direct effect on
our lives as individuals and on our trajectory as a society. How much
are we willing to sacrifice to help the US win an infowar against
Russia?

The question of whether we should abandon all hope of ever becoming a
truth-based society and committing instead to winning propaganda wars
for a globe-spanning empire is perhaps the most consequential decision
we’ve ever had to make as a species. Which is why we weren’t given a
choice. It’s just been foisted upon us.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. By taking our
control of information out of our hands without asking our permission
and determining for us that we are to be a propaganda-based
civilization for the foreseeable future, they have stolen something
sacred from us. Something they had no right to take.

Nothing about the state of the world tells us that the people who run
things are doing a good job. Nothing about our current situation
suggests they should be given more control, rather than having control
taken away from them and given to the people. We are going in exactly
the wrong direction.