1984: USA Launches Disinfo Ministry of Truth

[grarpamp]

Homeland Security's "Disinformation Board" Is Even More Pernicious Than It Seems
by Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/homeland-securitys-disinformation
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/15/facebook-and-twitter-cross-a-line-far-more-dangerous-than-what-they-censor/
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1514304553784643590
https://rumble.com/vl29vn-online-censorship-and-the-washington-posts-propaganda-tactics.html
https://www.rcfp.org/overclassification-bigger-problem-leak-hunting/
https://bookanalysis.com/1984/ministry-of-truth/

The most egregious and blatant official disinformation campaign in the
U.S. took place three weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
That was when dozens of former intelligence officials purported to
believe that authentic emails regarding Joe Biden's activities in
China and Ukraine, reported by The New York Post, were "Russian
disinformation.” That quasi-official proclamation enabled liberal
corporate media outlets to uncritically mock and then ignore those
emails as “Russian disinformation,” and pressured Big Tech platforms
such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the reporting at exactly the
time Americans were preparing to decide who would be the next U.S.
president.
Official government portrait of Nina Jankowicz, appointed to serve as
Executive Director of the new “Disinformation Board” to be housed
within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (posted by Jankowicz
to Twitter)

The letter from these former intelligence officials was orchestrated
by trained career liars — disinformation agents — such as former CIA
Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper. Yet that letter was nonetheless crucial to discredit
and ultimately suppress the New York Post's incriminating reporting on
Biden. It provided a quasi-official imprimatur — something that could
be depicted as an authoritative decree — that these authentic emails
were, in fact, fraudulent.

After all, if all of these noble and heroic intelligence operatives
who spent their lives studying Russian disinformation were insisting
that the Biden emails had all of the "hallmarks" of Kremlin treachery,
who possessed the credibility to dispute their expert assessment? This
clip from the media leader in spreading this CIA pre-election lie —
CNN — features their national security analyst James Clapper, and it
illustrates how vital this pretense of officialdom was in their
deceitful disinformation campaign:

This same strategic motive — to vest accusations of “disinformation”
with the veneer of expertise — is what has fostered a new, very
well-financed industry heralding itself as composed of
“anti-disinformation" scholars. Knowing that Americans are inculcated
from childhood to believe that censorship is nefarious — that it is
the hallmark of tyranny — those who wish to censor need to find some
ennobling rationale to justify it and disguise what it is.

They have thus created a litany of neutral-sounding groups with benign
names — The Atlantic Council, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue,
various "fact-checking” outfits controlled by corporate media outlets
— that claim to employ “anti-disinformation experts” to identify and
combat fake news. Just as media corporations re-branded their partisan
pundits as "fact-checkers" -- to masquerade their opinions as
elevated, apolitical authoritative, decrees of expertise -- the term
"disinformation expert" is designed to disguise ideological views on
behalf of state and corporate power centers as Official Truth.

Yet when one subjects these groups to even minimal investigative
scrutiny, one finds that they are anything but apolitical and neutral.
They are often funded by the same small handful of liberal
billionaires (such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar), actual
security state agencies of the U.S., the UK or the EU, and/or Big Tech
monopolies such as Google and Facebook.

Indeed, the concept of “anti-disinformation expert” is itself
completely fraudulent. This is not a real expertise but rather a
concocted title bestowed on propagandists to make them appear more
scholarly and apolitical than they are. But the function of this
well-funded industry is the same as the one served by the pre-election
letter from “dozens of former intelligence officials": to discredit
dissent and justify its censorship by infusing its condemnation with
the pretense of institutional authority. The targeted views are not
merely wrong; they have been adjudged by official, credentialed
experts to constitute "disinformation.”

This scam is the critical context for understanding why the Biden
Administration casually announced last week the creation of what it is
calling a "Disinformation Board” inside the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS). There is no conceivable circumstance in which a
domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power
to decree truth and falsity. Operatives in the U.S. Security State are
not devoted to combatting disinformation. The opposite is true: they
are trained, career liars tasked with concocting and spreading
disinformation. As Politico's Jack Schafer wrote:

    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….Making the federal government the official
custodian of truth would be like Brink’s giving a safe-cracker a job
driving an armored car.

The purpose of Homeland Security agents is to propagandize and
deceive, not enlighten and inform. The level of historical ignorance
and stupidity required to believe that U.S. Security State operatives
are earnestly devoted to exposing and decreeing truth — as CNN's Brian
Stelter evidently believes, given that he praised this new government
program as “common sense” — is off the charts. As Jameel Jaffer,
formerly of the ACLU and now with the Columbia’s Knight First
Amendment Institute put it, most troubling is “the fact that the board
is housed at DHS, an especially opaque agency that has run roughshod
over civil liberties in the past.”

Typically, any attempt to apply George Orwell's warning novel 1984 to
U.S. politics is reflexively dismissed as hyperbolic: a free and
democratic country like the United States could not possibly fall prey
to the dystopian repression Orwell depicts. Yet it is quite difficult
to distinguish this “Disinformation Board” from Ingsoc's Ministry of
Truth. The protagonist of Orwell's novel, Winston Smith, worked in the
Ministry of Truth and described at length how its primary function was
to create official versions of truth and falsity, which always adhered
to the government's needs of the moment and were subject to radical
change as those interests evolved.

That the Board will be run by such a preposterous and laughable figure
as Nina Jankowicz — a liberal cartoon, a caricature of a #Resistance
Twitter fanatic who spent 2016 posting adolescent partisan tripe such
as: “Maybe @HillaryClinton's most important point so far: ‘A
@realDonaldTrump presidency would embolden ISIS.’ #ImWithHer” — has,
in some sense, made this board seem more benign and harmless. After
all,