When You Control The Mail, You Control... Information!
When You Control The Mail, You Control... Information!
Transparency kills the disinformation police
Joe Biden’s Disinformation Board is on pause. Key to the suspension of the much-maligned Department of Homeland Security project was the fact — despite assurances from Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a long-time practitioner of disinformation on border issues — that it was led by a deeply unqualified individual who came across less like an Orwellian thought policeman than some kind of irritating theater kid joke.
Nina Jankowicz, who in addition to running interference for the Azov forces in Ukraine had engaged in embarrassing musical displays, many of which went viral on the very social media she was intended to manage and monitor. As Stephen Miller notes at The Spectator, her critics weren’t just on the right, but the left as well — despite what disinformation operator Taylor Lorenz would have you believe.
This combination of ridicule and ridiculousness proved too much even for this “I didn’t say the thing you heard me say” White House to spin — and they know disinformation, oh boy do they know it.
It’s sad, really. Gone are the days when you could just… control the mail.
Once upon a time, it might have been easier. In the past few weeks, Secretary Mayorkas called Jankowicz “eminently qualified, a renowned expert” and assured the country she was politically neutral. This might be a form of disinformation you could get away with if your chosen appointee wasn’t a member of the Bryn Mawr class of 2011.
But this is a different time, and rather than keep your glee club send-ups confined to the rooms where everyone agrees they’re just so brilliant, you have to post them online for the world to see. And when they see it, they draw their own conclusions.
Remember: The title “Mary Poppins of disinformation” wasn’t given to Jankowicz by the New York Post. She gave it to herself. She told us who she wanted to be, and then her allies called it disinformation when we took her at her word.
This transparency is a good thing. It feeds the decline and fall of the expert class. The failures of past generations of bureaucratic elites were often hidden, their true motives undiscoverable by the people except by dint of their regulations and pronouncements. The old czars were faceless and unknowable and spoke in swamp riddles, but these latter Millennials and older Zoomers just can’t shut up when talking about their favorite subject: themselves.
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