Opinion | Biden’s Hopeless Disinformation Police

The press was able to pry out of the DHS the board's goal to contest the misinformation that had deceived immigrants from Haiti and other places that the U.S. southern border was open. Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and conservative media like the Washington Times freaked out at the announcement and warned of an impending DHS crackdown on free thinking.

The idea that the Biden administration would institute an authoritarian regime through its agents at DHS is immediately dismissible if it were true, because it is one of the most ineffectual departments in the president's Cabinet. We should be afraid if Biden gave the task to Agriculture or Commerce. If we reallocated all of the arms we're currently shipping to Ukraine, we wouldn't be able to stamp out disinformation or build an American Reich. It is peopled by a confederacy of dunces and botch- artists incapable of carrying out its current mission. According to a Government Accountability Office report, the DHS ignored the warning signs on Jan. 6. The intelligence about the wave of Haitian immigrants who crossed the border was not shared. The DHS will surely miss any Russkies' misinformation. Many people think that the department should be abolished because it has so many duplicate duties. Boxer wrote an op-ed regretting her Senate vote.

Never mind DHS. What do you think the government should do to determine what is true and what is misinformation? Who thinks the government can tell the truth? Our government has always made lies at an industrial scale. It blocks its own citizens from becoming aware of vital information. Press aides are paid to play hide and seek.

This is the government that lied about winning the war in Vietnam and lied about a love affair in the White House. The truth was changed by President Barack Obama. A quarter of the 600 statements checked by PolitiFact were found to be false, mostly false orpants on fire. 50 intelligence officials assured the nation that the Hunter Biden laptop story bore all the hallmarks of a Russian information operation. The idea that Covid could have come from a Chinese lab was dismissed as propaganda by the Biden administration. The Washington Post has proof that even Joe Biden can handle simple truths. Do we need to reexamine the Donald Trump presidency?

Brink would give a safe-cracker a job driving an armored car if the federal government were to make the official custodian of truth. Who will accept DHS determinations? Reporters are not used to government lies. The man is not in the street. The government wouldn't want to diaper and stuff into an escape-proof playpen. The Biden administration will have the power to declare things out of bounds if the Disinformation Governance Board is created. Without stepping out on the slippery slope, that would give Biden's people the power to find things objectionable. It is only a short slide to suppress the information or replace it with something else.

Russian misinformation has been a problem for almost a century. In the 1930s, the Russians started sending fake defectors to the West to spread misinformation. The Soviets focused on the United States after World War II. After the fall of Nazi Germany, the Soviet leadership covertly funded newspapers and radio stations around the world to influence public opinion. It tried to plant documents in publications. The tall tale was that AIDS was the result of American biological weapons experimentation. And so on.

We survived without a Disinformation Governance Board. There are not every particles that can be blocked. People who are good at inventing lies can produce disinformation faster than people who are not good at inventing lies. See the report about the Russian lie. The government should leave the job of policing disinformation to the competitive organs of the press, which compete to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the time, and immediately, by revealing them to make them the common property.

If the DHS needs a paperwork project, it can set up a bureau to study and eradicate U.S. government misinformation.

Is that alright?

Thanks to Nick for making me aware of this one. David C. Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker fame responded to the Disinformation Governance Board news by asking if they were a punk rocker in 1982. You're response is: That's punk rock; That's not punk rock. The list is full so you can't subscribe to my email alert. My feed liked Cracker more than CVB. My RSS feed doesn't believe in anything.