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A Couple of Thoughts on the Biden MiniTrue
Thought the First: Isn’t this just typical? This Ministry of Truth the Brandon Administration is setting up represents the ruling class’s belated recognition that people no longer trust the state or the state-aligned corporate media. In their minds, this is because people are making unfair criticisms of the Government on social media, and they have to set up an institution to counteract the Narrative. It never occurs to them that the actual problem is that the Government really is corrupt and incompetent, much less are they inclined to do anything to fix the real problem. Not even Republicans — who often campaign on “draining the swamp” — have any real inclination to do so. Even Republican Congresses under Republican presidents have never eliminated a single agency, never cut a budget, never even imposed any basic measures of accountability on Deep State bureaucracies.
Thought the Second. It isn’t going to work. The “Disinformation Governance Board” is essentially being set up as a taxpayer-funded Politifact. Like Politifact, its mission is going to be to defend the administration and the preferred Narrative of the Democratic Party. Ultimately, every attempt by the Ministry of Truth to reinforce the administration narrative is going to be either immediately fact-checked (“For four years I was a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania,”) or ultimately proven wrong (“Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation.”) It is starting from a position of zero credibility, and can only go downhill from there.
Published in General
That’s what I thought. Jon Gabriel had it the other way around on the other thread.
I think there might have been a time before “disinformation” became a word, and then “misinformation” was probably used for both situations. And that meant a new word was needed.
Disinformation isn’t just propaganda, or lies, or even truth mixed with lies, or truth containing lies to make the truth meaningless, but includes also truth spoken to deceive, or that which was once true (or information that may or may not be true) that is now used as a tool to track security breaches.
That you disagree says nothing about whether I’m right or wrong.
I don’t like terminologies that require a secret codebook in order to interpret the words. There is nothing inherent in those prefixes that would lead one to those distinctions about intent.
Flip a coin. Or consult your favorite secret codebook.
I think the “secret codebook” might be the dictionary.
While many of us see Orwell’s 1984 as a warning, it appears that the Biden administration sees is as a handbook.
And yet they act like they have some of ownership over it because Orwell was a Democratic Socialist.