(2022-05-18) Solana Intermission At The Ministry Of Truth

Mike Solana: Intermission at the Ministry of Truth. After two years of increasingly-normalized political censorship, federalization of truth arbitration alarmed every sane person in the country (along with all the crazies). Fury was immediate, and profound.

I hit up Santi Ruiz for details on Nina Jankowicz.

Jankowicz has barely over a year of Washington postgraduate experience, and her professional reputation relies on one relevant book, 2020’s “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict,”

Other disinformation professionals thought Jankowicz was a rube, and said so publicly. In a fine-toothed analysis for The Bulwark, actual EU diplomatic professional Monika Richter broke down claims in Jankowicz’s book on Russian disinformation. The piece is worth reading in full. Jankowicz consistently gets basic facts wrong, not just out of laziness, but because two of her seven interview sources are themselves actual Russian disinformation.

Jankowicz was manifestly unqualified for a role that was itself a bad idea in the first place, Lorenz is a hack, and public outcry at obvious government overreach is a feature, not a bug, of American democracy

Other disinformation professionals thought Jankowicz was a rube, and said so publicly

In a fine-toothed analysis for The Bulwark, actual EU diplomatic professional Monika Richter broke down claims in Jankowicz’s book on Russian disinformation

The piece is worth reading in full. Jankowicz consistently gets basic facts wrong, not just out of laziness, but because two of her seven interview sources are themselves actual Russian disinformation.

The piece is worth reading in full. Jankowicz consistently gets basic facts wrong, not just out of laziness... two of her seven interview sources are themselves actual Russian disinformation

Jankowicz has a track record of being suckered by false, debunked claims about disinformation — that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plant, or that the Trump pee tape was real. None of this made its way into the Washington Post piece. Lorenz, of course, has a track record of false claims.

And a layer below one finds the class dynamics.

The kinds of people who get picked to head a “Disinformation Governance Board” don’t need deep area knowledge. They just need to be on the right side.

Senate Democrats abruptly canceled a hearing with Jankowicz last week, with aides acknowledging she was a political liability.

Recently, the Times published a piece about Elon Musk’s childhood in South Africa, in which the reporter described Apartheid government propaganda as “the dangers of unchecked speech.” That same two-step is the whole point of the Board and the coverage of it: your online takes and enemy regime campaigns are the same thing and should be fought with the same tools.