Meet the Mary Poppins of disinformation.
On April 27, 2022, during a 2023 budget hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, only a few days after President Obama expressed regret over not doing more to combat “disinformation” (see Obama for Commissar), DHS director Alejandro Mayorkas revealed the existence of the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), a new organ of the Department of Homeland Security. Nina Jankowicz, formerly a “disinformation fellow” at the Wilson Center (named after the progressive president Woodrow Wilson) and an adviser for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, where she managed programs for the National Democratic Institute, has been appointed the director of the DGB.
America’s inaugural Disinformation Czar is author of the July 2020 book How To Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict. An alum of Bryn Mawr College, Jankowicz holds a Master’s degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. From the description of the book (from the website of publisher Bloomsbury): “Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world has finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia, who flood social media with disinformation, and circulate false and misleading information to fuel fake narratives and make the case for illegal warfare. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: what can the West do about it?”
Jankowicz has a history of spreading disinformation, amplifying both the so-called Steele Dossier, the discredited work of British ex-spy Christopher Steele used by the Democratic National Committee to falsely link Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency to Putin and the Russian government (the “Russian hoax” for short), and a letter signed by more than 50 former senior intelligence officials (including five head spooks of the CIA) asserting that emails belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden implicating the Biden family in international criminal activity were likely a Russian disinformation campaign. Jankowicz appears to have found the ideal vehicle through which to channel her cracked understanding of how the world works.
Despite her reputation in government circles, most Americans were introduced to Jankowicz in a video shared recently on Twitter that dates from September 18, 2020 in which she either engages in disinformation concerning the nature of the color revolution (see my blog “A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous to learn about the color revolution and its application to the United States during the presidency of Donald Trump) or exposed her profound ignorance of the way the world actually works. In either case, this tweet, which amounts to a lie, and Jankowicz’s work more generally, if trusted, functions as disinformation, misdirecting public concern in a direction that benefits the corporate state establishment and the transnationalist project, of which she is an enthusiastic participant.
After it was announced that Elon Musk would buy out Twitter, it appeared that the extensive throttling I have experience since returning to that platform to promote my blog was lifted (or was at least lessened). Whatever happened, my blog about Musk buying Twitter (Elon Musk and the Peril of Free Thinking) generated more attention than usual. In comments and messages, people expressed wonder about my characterization of the present situation as fascism. As readers of Freedom and Reason know, I have blogged extensively about the new fascism, the signs of which are everywhere, the creation of the DGB the most recent, so I invite visitors to read my blog.
The sledgehammer rhetoric of left-right, etc., and faulty understanding and ignorance of fascism has people staring blankly at the signs. Some in the establishment media spin concern over a formal Ministry of Truth as rightwing paranoia. The Daily Beast carried the headline “Fox News Hosts Rage Against New Government Disinformation Board.” But the usual wall-to-wall defense of authoritarian measures in the current order of things has yet to emerge. And, while Orwellian language is deployed (“Big Brother” and “Ministry of Truth” are trending), there is not mention of the fascism problem. I keep hoping that with the progress of the system, as more and more of what I say will happen happens, that people will look around them and say, “Damn, this looks a lot like fascism.” Of course, by then it may be too late. It may already be too late.
Meanwhile, here is our leader:
freedom and reason 