Right Wing Granny

News behind the news. This picture is me (white spot) standing on the bridge connecting European and North American tectonic plates. It is located in the Reykjanes area of Iceland. By-the-way, this is a color picture.

Right Wing Granny

Big Brother Is In Control Of Most Social Media

It may be years before we fully appreciate what Elon Musk has done by buying Twitter. He may have put a stake in the ground to protect Americans from government-controlled media.

On Monday, The Daily Caller reported the following:

The Department of Homeland Security has left open a special feature that allows government officials to flag Facebook posts for misinformation after scrapping a controversial advisory board tasked with developing guidelines for social media censorship, the Intercept reported Monday.

DHS announced plans for a Disinformation Governance Board to “develop guidelines, standards, guardrails to ensure that the work that has been ongoing for nearly 10 years does not infringe on people’s free speech rights, rights of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in May, according to The Hill. While DHS shuttered the initiative after an onslaught of bipartisan opposition decrying the potential censorship, the Intercept found through an analysis of public and leaked documents that government efforts to police tech companies goes on.

On Tuesday, The Western Journal reported:

Twitter and other social media platforms have been cozy with the Department of Homeland Security to squelch what DHS calls “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation,” or “MDM,” according to an investigative report published Monday by The Intercept.

But you knew that.

And maybe Elon Musk did in his purchase of Twitter last week.

Job one for Musk was to not only fire CEO Parag Agrawal but also Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and the individual responsible for booting former President Donald Trump off the platform and for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election.

You probably remember a few months ago when DHS rolled out what it called its Disinformation Governance Board, designed to go after “MDM” on social media. A firestorm of bad publicity meant the Biden administration had to quickly yank it offstage.

But the concept is still around and Gadde has been part of it.

Please follow the links above to read both articles. It is obvious that the government has interfered in the free speech rights of Americans. America has had a biased media for a long time, but social media should have been a neutral platform. For further information on the relationship between our government and Twitter, please go to The Conservative Treehouse and read the articles about Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop.

What The Disinformation Bureau Is Really About

The Disinformation Bureau has not gone away. On May 18, CNS News reported the following:

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday that DHS is pausing its Disinformation Governance Board so that there can be an “assessment” by former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, but “DHS is still going to continue the work.”

“DHS said today that they’ll be pausing the Disinformation Governance Board. Did the White House play a role at all in perhaps expressing frustration in how it was rolled out or express any involvement in how, whether or not it should be paused, and then also some experts have said that it was set up to fail the way it was rolled out.

In case you have forgotten, Jamie Gorelick was paid more than $26 million in total compensation as a top executive at Fannie Mae–before taxpayers had to bail out the mortgage giant. She has a very interesting biography.

The article notes:

“Look, the Department of Homeland Security, they began their statement repeating that the board had been intentionally mischaracterized, which is a little bit of what you were asking me, and they were explicit about what it does and does not do,” Jean-Pierre said.

“It was never about censorship, policing speech, or removing content from anywhere. Its function was to keep homeland security officials aware of how bad actors, including human smugglers, transnational criminal organizations and foreign adversaries could use disinformation to advance their goals,” she said.

If you believe that, I have some waterfront property in Arizona I can sell you.

On May 23, PJ Media reported:

Nina Jankowicz, the self-proclaimed “Mary Poppins of Disinformation” who was up until recently supposed to become the chief of Joe Biden’s Orwellian and ominous Disinformation Governance Board, can’t seem to stop herself from stepping on rakes. She has complained, now that the Board has been “paused,” that the Board itself was a victim of “disinformation,” which casts into question how effective it could possibly have ever been, if Jankowicz couldn’t even manage to counter false statements about what it was supposed to be doing. On Monday, she made matters even worse by remarking off-handedly that the Board was meant to do something that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had said it would not be doing: countering “disinformation” not just from foreign sources, but from Americans.

Jankowicz tweeted that she was “thinking a lot the past few weeks about the paper I co-authored in the US Army War College Quarterly in 2020,” and she provided the link. “It lays out a government strategy,” she continued, “for dealing with disinformation based on 3 Cs- capability, coordination, and cooperation.” She added: “Since this piece was published in summer 2020, the spread and effects of disinformation on American society have only worsened and become entrenched in domestic politics (as the last few weeks of my life have shown).” And: “This is the type of work I had hoped to do at DHS, and the type of work the USG sorely needs to invest in. This is the type of work that I have built my career on—not a few contextless tweets. And this is the type of work I will continue in the public sphere.”

America now has a Ministry of Truth.

Sometimes ‘The Spin’ Is Very Entertaining

On Wednesday, Steven Hayward posted an article at Power Line Blog about a breaking news story being reported by The Washington Post.

Steven Hayward reports:

Today is offering a surfeit of feel-good news, but this one came in too late for the pervious post. The Washington Post is just up with the breaking story that the Biden Administration has decided to “pause” (but almost certainly shut down) the mis-named “Disinformation Governance Board”:

Just three weeks after its announcement, the Disinformation Governance Board is being “paused,” according to multiple employees at DHS, capping a back-and-forth week of decisions that changed during the course of reporting of this story. On Monday, DHS decided to shut down the board, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation. By Tuesday morning, Jankowicz had drafted a resignation letter in response to the board’s dissolution.

But Tuesday night, Jankowicz was pulled into an urgent call with DHS officials who gave her the choice to stay on, even as the department’s work was put on hold because of the backlash it faced, according to multiple people with knowledge of the call. Working groups within DHS focused on mis-, dis- and mal-information have been suspended. The board could still be shut down pending a review from the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Jankowicz is evaluating her position within the department.

This is The Washington Post headline at the time of this article:

I hadn’t realized that free speech was such a partisan issue. I do notice that the headline is a little vague about where the disinformation is coming from–do they mean the White House is going to stop releasing disinformation?

The article at Power Line Blog concludes:

And “experts”—the mainstream media’s favorite sources for their ventriloquist journalism—show up for duty:

Experts say that right-wing disinformation and smear campaigns regularly follow the same playbook and that it’s crucial that the public and leaders of institutions, especially in the government, the media and educational bodies, understand more fully how these cycles operate.

There is absolutely nothing I can add to that statement.

The Ministry Of Truth Has Arrived

On Wednesday, The Gateway Pundit reported that President Biden has created the “Disinformation Governance Board.”

The article reports:

Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter last week, which was a triumphant victory in the ongoing war over free speech, the Biden Regime announced the creation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” that will be tasked with silencing anything deemed to be misinformation that’s related to homeland security. And, yes. It’s just as dystopian and creepy as it sounds.

The new board will operate under the authority of the Department of Homeland security with a special focus on Russia and “irregular migration,” according to the Post Millennial.

What’s “irregular migration”? Is that another name for illegal aliens? Remember, he who controls the vocabulary controls the debate.

The article continues:

As we have seen over the past 6-plus years now, the term ‘Russian misinformation’ is frequently used as a wide catch-all that includes most of what goes against the liberal establishment, so the fact that they are specifically targeting this kind of “misinformation” is that much more concerning.

News of the board was first announced by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas while speaking at a House Appropriations DHS Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday:

“Our Undersecretary for Policy, Rob Silvers is co-chair with our Principal Deputy General Counsel, Jennifer Gaskell, in leading a just recently constituted misinformation disinformation governance board. So we’re bringing — the goal is to bring the resources of the department together to address this threat.”

In 1984 they called in “The Ministry of Truth.” Is this even legal?