Modern Day Don Quixote To Take On Windmills And The Lying Liars
A conservative member of the British Parliament said last week that he will resign after admitting twice to watching pornography in the House of Commons. The lawmaker, Neil Parish, said the first time he viewed the explicit material was an accident after searching online for farm vehicles. The second time was deliberate and a “moment of madness,” the 65-year-old said.
In this country, such behavior would win a trump endorsement. Not only that, an American legislator in such a spot would scream “fake news,” claiming that he was only doing research into Disney’s promulgation of kiddie porn and would win a standing ovation from his colleagues.
Sort of what happened with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., after he was caught lying about denying that he said that trump should have resigned after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol invasion by trump supporters.
Or Republican Herschel Walker, a U.S. Senate candidate in Georgia who has been accused of threatening the lives of two women.
Or Republican Sean Parnell, who ended his U.S. Senate campaign in Pennsylvania last year amid domestic abuse allegations.
Or Republican Roy Moore, a 2017 candidate for U.S. Senate in Alabama who was accused by two women of initiating unwanted sexual encounters when Moore was in his 30s and they were 16 and 14.
Or Republican Charles Herbster, trump’s choice for Nebraska governor who was accused in April of groping eight women, including Republican State Sen. Julie Slama in 2019 and others who said Herbster touched them inappropriately between 2017 and 2022 at events such as beauty pageants or political fundraisers and one woman who Herbster had privately grabbed and forcibly kissed her while Herbster denies, denies, denies and chalks it all up to scurrilous, “libelous fake news.”
Or trump, the former deviant in chief, who has denied multiple allegations ranging from sexual harassment to rape, has backed other candidates who have been accused of sexual misconduct or domestic violence and denied the allegations.
It’s time we got on all of these liars to tell the truth, about everything from phony cures for COVID-19 to bogus claims that climate change is a farce. It’s time that Fox News be held accountable for stories like reporting on the scourge of disease that will be brought to the U.S. by immigrants, although it never happened or the band of gypsies who invaded a Pennsylvania town and left feces on the streets, although it never happened, also.
And don’t forget the mother of all lies, the big lie that Biden won the election because of millions of fake votes. And now the Michigan Republican Party nominates two mega zealous proponents of trump’s stolen election lie, including Matthew DePerno for attorney general and Kristina Karamo for secretary of state. If either wins the general election, it’s a lie that could have monstrous importance in 2024 when the state attorney general and secretary of state could invalidate anything other than a trump victory in Michigan.
The new disinformation board has a smorgasbord of choices to spread facts about. They could start with trump’s rally on Saturday in in Greenwood, Neb., where trump offered a glowing endorsement for Herbster. Other GOP luminaries speaking at the rally included Kellyanne Conway, 2016 Trump campaign manager and counselor to the President, who once enlightened us all about “alternative facts.”
Another speaker was David N. Bossie, president of a conservative, advocacy group, Citizens United, 2016 deputy campaign manager for trump’s presidential campaign and producer of “Rigged, The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump,” a film that was a winner in right wing circles but somehow was overlooked by the Academy Awards. Bossie got in some hot water and was temporarily in the trump doghouse in May 2019 when the Internal Revenue Service accused him of defrauding political donors by funneling their donations to himself through consultants and book sales. By January 2020, Bossie and trump had kissed and made up.
Also speaking was Matthew Aaron “Matt” Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union and leader of the lobbying firm, Cove Strategies, which had strong ties to the trump administration. While ballots were being counted during the 2020 election, Schlapp claimed that 9,000 votes were improperly cast in Nevada, a claim later debunked. In the final days of the Trump administration, Schlapp lobbied for a pardon for Parker Petit, a major Republican donor, who was the Georgia finance chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign and was convicted of securities fraud in November 2020.
And finally there is Mike Lindell, a man who might be the hardest person on the planet to look at. Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, has dedicated himself to defending trump’s big lie.
Telling the facts used to be the media’s job, until Fox News and its viral replicas came on the scene and truly weaponized the news, cherry picking and distorting to further the politics of the right wing and its anti-LGBTQ rights, white supremacist factions.
So the government is trying a new tack, formation of a Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security. The board’s charge is to refute disinformation on-line and in other sources, such as the kind that is coming out of Russia regarding its invasion of Ukraine and misleading information that human smugglers circulate to target migrants hoping to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border.
In creating the new board, the government said it wants to avoid situations like the confusion that spread last September around President Biden’s immigration policies. The disinformation combined with messages that were shared widely across the Haitian community on Meta’s Facebook and WhatsApp platforms, leading some of the 14,000 migrants to the border town of Del Rio, Texas, where they set up camp. Some were ultimately expelled and were flown out of the U.S.
The new board will be led by disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, who has researched Russian misinformation tactics and online harassment. Jankowicz attended Bryn Mawr College, double-majoring in Russian and political science. She attended a semester at Herzen State Pedagogical University in Russia in 2010 and graduated in 2011. In 2017, she was a Fulbright fellow in Kyiv, working with the foreign ministry of Ukraine. She has also served as a disinformation fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and as supervisor of the Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute. She is the author of two books, “How to Lose the Information War” and “How to be a Woman Online” and has contributed to The Washington Post and The New York Times.
The proverbial ink on the announcement of the new board was still wet when in a nanosecond of sanctimonious, cynical hypocrisy, a feeding frenzy was unleashed and in true Orwellian fashion, the Republican right wing, led in lockstep by Fox News, is claiming that the disinformation board is designed to spread disinformation.
For example:
Washington Examiner: “Biden disinformation board is threat to American democracy.”
Fox News: Greg Gutfield, “The left is embracing censorship.”
Fox News: Joe Concha, “Warns Biden’s disinformation board will be weaponized.”
Fox News: Tucker Carlson, “You are seeing a full scale attack on free speech. This is a joke. Everyone involved in this is a buffoon.”
Fox News: Stephen Miller, “We have a propagandist in chief.”
Fox News: Jimmy Failla, “Disinformation is anything the Biden admin doesn’t like.”
Fox News: Larry Kudlow, “This is a Putin-style attempt to suppress information.”
“Rather than police our border, Homeland Security has decided to make policing Americans’ speech its top priority,” tweeted Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. “They’re creating a Disinformation Board.”
As an indication of his genuine concern for truth, in December 2020, Hawley was the first senator to announce plans to object to the certification of Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Hawley led Senate efforts to overturn the Electoral College vote count and rallied supporters of the “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theory that motivated an attack on the U.S. Capitol. If Hawley says it is sunny outside, you can be sure it’s pouring.
And of course, Florida GOP Gov. Ron Desantis, the disinformation virtuoso, added that, “you cannot have a Ministry of Truth in this country.” That from a politician who hopes he is clawing his way to the White House while peddling lies about the LGBTQ community and full-throated denials of systemic racism in the nation.
Never fear because DeSantis pledged to fight back this “unprecedented threat.”
And House Minority Leader McCarthy, he who won a standing ovation from Republicans for standing his ground and refusing to fess up to lying, tweeted, “Biden must immediately abandon his plan to create an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.”
But at least we have Tim Daunt, who I would nominate to lead the new disinformation board. For those people, like me, who never heard of Daunt, he was so disgusted with trump and the trumpian bootlickers, that the Michigan Republican resigned on Tuesday from the GOP’s state committee. Daunt risked potential political suicide when he sent an email his resignation, calling trump a “deranged narcissist.”
Daunt chided the great majority of his GOP colleagues who have agreed to follow trump like lemmings.
“Rather than assembling the courage to do the right thing, at the right time, and guide the activist base towards the truth, they’ve repeatedly backed down and dissembled, hoping that just one more act of cowardice will be what does the trick,” Daunt said.
Well said.