May 10, 2022 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian
If you’re a reader of this blog, you likely are interested in current events. And therefore, it is also likely that you already know that on April 27 our Department of Homeland Security revealed (at a Congressional budget hearing) that it had set up something called its Disinformation Grievance Board. Secretary Mayorkas, who was testifying, stated that the DGB would not have operational authority, but would rather act as an advisory body to study best practices and provide guidance to the government on how to counter disinformation threats. The head of the new Board, who had already been named, is a woman named Nina Jankowicz.
Put aside for a moment any problems you may have with the idea of the federal government trying to decide what is and is not “disinformation.” For this post let’s just look at Ms. Jankowicz and her qualifications for the job.
It seems that prior to her appointment, Ms. Jankowicz had been working at something called the Woodrow Wilson Center. Have you heard of it? It’s a federally-funded think tank, part of the Smithsonian complex in Washington.
According to its own website, the Wilson Center’s mission is to provide “independent research” and “nonpartisan insight and analysis [to help] power the decisions of policymakers, civic leaders, and the general public across a wide spectrum of beliefs and backgrounds.”
Oh, puh-lease. Disinformation anyone? This is the Smithsonian. If you know anything about the Smithsonian, you know that there is nothing actually “non-partisan” about it, other than perhaps not having a “Democratic Party” sign on the front door. The “non-partisan” claim is just a label intended to mislead. Clearly, anything coming out of it will be at the leftmost end of woke radicalism and hyper-partisanship. Meanwhile, how could they keep operating under the name of that vile racist Woodrow Wilson? Princeton University, where Wilson was President, removed his name from its School of International Affairs back in 2020.
It seems that Ms. Jankowicz, during her time at the Wilson Center, specialized in this subject of “disinformation.” Indeed, she was a go-to source for the mainstream press to help them and their audience to distinguish the real information from the disinformation. For example, when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020, the Associated Press needed someone who was a bona fide “expert” in disinformation to help the public decide, in the few days remaining before the election, whether the damning emails on the laptop were real or fake. Ms. Jankowicz stepped up. From the AP, October 14, 2020:
ARE THE NEW EMAILS AUTHENTIC? The actual origins of the emails are unclear. And disinformation experts say there are multiple red flags that raise doubts about their authenticity, including questions about whether the laptop actually belongs to Hunter Biden, said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the nonpartisan Wilson Center in Washington.
Others have also noted (example: Washington Examiner here) that Ms. Jankowicz repeatedly lent her cred as a supposed disinformation expert to the task of supporting Christopher Steele and his Trump/Russia dossier.
So there might be some problems with listening to the “experts” as a way to distinguish real information from disinformation. An alternative approach is to compare what someone says to some verifiable factual information that you might be able to find. For that exercise as to Ms. Jankowicz, I turn to the invaluable New York Post, which thankfully for all of us is available without paywall.
On May 5, the Post came up with a video of Ms. Jankowicz speaking at the City Club of Cleveland in October 2021. Here is a link to the Post article, and here is a link to a video of the full City Club event, which is about an hour long. The title of Ms. Jankowicz’s talk was “Disinformation and Democracy: Civic Discourse in the Digital Age.” I couldn’t watch the whole hour of Ms. Jankowicz speaking, because life is short and she is nuts, but most of it seemed to be about how the Russkies are probably infiltrating the Facebook communications of your local civic association, because after all they’re the Russkies, and they’re really sophisticated, and that’s the kind of thing they do. But at the end of the session, there was a Q&A. And the Q&A got into the subject of whether allegations of Critical Race Theory getting into elementary schools are real versus disinformation. From the Post:
[Ms. Jankowicz] was repeatedly asked about school boards during [her] speech at The City Club of Cleveland. . . . “Critical Race Theory has become one of those hot-button issues that the Republicans and other disinformers, who are engaged in disinformation for profit, frankly … have seized on,” she said. “[I]t’s no different than any of the other hot-button issues that have allowed disinformation to flourish. . . .”
A couple of days later, on May 7, the Post came up with some copies of a new book now being distributed to New York City school kids aged 2 to 5. The book is titled “Our Skin,” by authors Megan Johnson, Jessica Ralli and Isabel Roxas. Here are a couple of good quotes from the book:
“A long time ago, way before you were born, a group of white people made up an idea called race. They sorted people by skin color and said that white people were better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserve more than everybody else,” the book declares. {It goes on]: “Racism is also the things people do and the unfair rules they make about race so that white people get more power, and are treated better than everybody else.”
Don’t believe that these could be accurate quotes? Here is a screenshot of one of the pages:
No Critical Race Theory there!
Anyway, we now live in the bizarre world where Ms. Jankowicz not only gets to accuse others of disinformation, but also gets to advise the government to crack down on those she accuses, while her own statements become the very definition of truth. You’d say it must be a parody, but I don’t think so.
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