Stay of Execution

After one of the worst roll-outs since the Edsel, the Department of Homeland Control, I mean Homeland Security is putting its ill-conceived Disinformation Governance Board on pause.

Even this was more successful that the DGB. Photo: Personal collection

This comes after wannabe musical star Nina Jankowicz  became more well know for serving up more Whoppers than Burger King about such stories such as the Hunter Biden laptop and the Christopher Steele Dossier.

Wouldn't play in Peoria.

The blame for all of this is being placed on those pesky American citizens who, for some unexplained reason, objected to a government agency being the arbiter of truth. How dare they labor under the mistaken notion that the purpose of the First Amendment is to allow people to be express commentary on current affairs? 

Why shouldn't Jankowicz be trusted? After all she worked for the "independent"  Woodrow Wilson Center,  named after the only President in American history to be even more cognitively impaired than Joe Biden.  She believes in Freedom of Speech, as long as the government, or at least acceptable people control it.

 

What could ever go wrong?

We have been assured by no less a luminary than Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas that the board would only be concerned with disinformation from foreign sources. Somehow that is not not very comforting considering that we were told that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Trump Campaign trick based on Russian disinformation. Once the government declares that something is Russian of foreign disinformation, even if it is factual information from a domestic source, what is to stop the government from silencing it? Isn't that what the First Amendment is supposed to prevent?

 Be assured, though, that there is no reason for concern. After all, the Disinformation Governing Board will have no operational authority. 

The DGB has no operational authority, but they will give information to those who do.

The government should not have this kind of overt power. All the government has to do is label honest domestic dissent as foreign disinformation, then all bets are off. Once the government takes that power, there is no way for citizens to pull it back.

Given the history of the past few years with government and political malfeasance, we cannot afford to take the risk.

All's fair in Love and Propaganda

During war time, governments prevent some information from being presented to its citizens while promoting other information. 

In World War II, the German government commissioned the development of a new radio that was more affordable than anything previously available to many German citizens. The Germans developed this new radio and included entertainment programs on their radio stations(s) so that citizens would feel like "alles in Ordnung" and make them more willing to listen to speeches from der  Fuehrer. 

While it has been alleged that these radios lacked the sensitivity to pick of foreign broadcasts such as those from the BBC in the United Kingdom, there is no evidence that this was true. Any limitation to the radio was due more to economy of design and manufacture than for any political reason. The government did make it illegal to listen to enemy broadcasts under penalties up to and including death.

Volksempfänger (Peoples Radio) model VE301 photo: https://spectrum.ieee.org

Across the channel, the British government shut down all radio stations except for the BBC Home Service. The government prohibited the manufacture of radios that could receive the long wave band -- a band below the AM band as known in the US that never caught on in North America but was widely used in Europe until years after the war. They even shut down movie theaters and restricted radio entertainment. Eventually the British realized the error of their ways and allowed more entertainment. 

Whether you agree with such policies or not, you do have to realize that Great Britain and Germany were direct participants in the war.

Today, we are -- if the globalists have anything to say about it -- on the brink of World War III. Despite Joe Biden's best, or most clumsy, efforts the United States is not involved in the fight between Ukraine and Russia. 

The story is that Ukraine is an innocent state viciously attacked by a brutal neighbor. Little has been made of the fact that there has been talk of Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, or that there have been reports of the United States funding biowarfare labs in Ukraine. How do you think the United States would react if there were similar reports about Russia and Cuba? It has also been alleged that some reports of atrocities are fraudulent.

In the United States, the MSM is giving us the information the government wants us to have. Anyone, such as Tucker Carlson, who tries to provide the public with complete information is portrayed as a traitor. Big Tech is going along with the program as well. DuckDuckGo, who has positioned themselves as not being like those oppressive Big Tech companies who track everything you do; suggesting, although not saying, that they are also an unbiased utility for on-line searches has come out and said that they now downrate any search result that does not support the party line.

Screen capture: Conservative Treehouse

At this point we have no dog in this fight. I do not know what to believe. It does not help matters that if the Biden Administration were to say that the sun rises in the east, I would wake up early to see for myself. It is a sad state of affairs when people do not believe that their government does not have their best interests at heart -- but here we are.