Nina Jankowicz the Warbling Warmonger

shows how to hidealittle hidealittle lie

Today’s episode looks at the new Disinformation Governance Board of Homeland Security and how it turns facts and logic into terrorism, and arbitrary authority into a power that can overrule Presidents and Congress. Its executive director, Nina Jankowicz, has put her philosophy into a disinfo ditty, which is the only place where you can find her definition of this new form of domestic threat. So I’ll be analyzing her examples and applying to them the original rules of how to figure out when someone’s trying to hidealittle hidealittle hidealittle lie, in her words. These rules, from the home of democracy in ancient Greece, were called rhetorical fallacies. And I’ll end with the 10 Principles of War Propaganda, developed before WWI. But first let’s talk about logic.

Remember that logic is your friend. Data can be suppressed or manipulated but logic means the rules of thinking and discourse, which must apply equally to all examples or it’s not, well, logical. Logic is synonymous with consistency and consistency is ethics; the phrase ‘justice is blind’ means that regardless of the person’s identity, the rule remains the same. The only weapon possible against injustice, without causing further injustice, is pointing out inconsistency in a rule’s application. That’s a lawyer’s sole job. The opposite of rule by logic is rule by arbitrary authority aka dictatorship.

Any term that’s used in a law must be defined according to how the authors of the law mean it. A valid definition doesn't repeat any form of the word in the definition, doesn't use proper nouns, defines all ambiguous terms used in the definition, provides measurable criteria for whether the term applies, and describes the process by which an example would be determined to be categorized under it or not. It also requires a process by which the application of the definition can be challenged according to specified rules in a public court.

If words confer the authorized use of power to take away freedoms, possessions and even life, we’ve already lost all of the above with our consent if we give up on definition. If we allow de facto laws that take away the rights of expression, association, and monetary exchange with no legislative or judicial process, we don’t live in any kind of a democracy.

A noun is an act of aggregating into a group where each is the same along some line, and what that line is needs to be specified. When Confucious was asked the first thing he would do if he was ruler, his answer was “fix language.” That would be the opposite of Humpty Dumpty, who said “in rather a scornful tone”:

“When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

“Who is to be master” would be more accurate and HD obfuscates this power play by giving the words themselves agency. He represents himself as master of the inanimate word and, by this sleight of tongue, pronounces himself to be king of the debate and master of Alice. Rather than power being subject to the rule of logic, he’s claimed power in a violent coup over words in a way that can’t be challenged because his arbitrary authority has made the meaning of words themselves arbitrary.

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This is what Nina Jankowicz represents at the pinnacle of meaninglessness that governance and law have reached in the United States. She is the Humpty Dumpty word czar who declares what words can live or die online. And since community only exists with a means of communication, this isn’t an idle threat. We are not the United States or any other group without communication. Her power, if allowed, is that of exile, of killing off the person at the neck so they can work but not speak or think, according to her self-made whims. As the Red Queen says, “Off with their heads!”

Since the new Ministry of Disinformation doesn’t bother to define what disinformation is, let’s examine it verse by verse in Nina’s disinfo ditty:

Information laundering is really quite ferocious. It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious. By saying them in Congress or a mainstream outlet, so disinformation’s origins are slightly less atrocious.

Disinformation is information laundering. Money laundering is taking money obtained through illegal means and legitimizing it through a legal business. Likewise, the origins of the disinformation are “atrocious” so it’s laundered through Congressional Speakers or the mainstream media. It’s Nina’s job to censor Senators, Representatives, newspapers, television and the internet. Apparently.

It’s how you hide a little, hide a little, little, little lie, it’s how you hide a little, little lie, it’s how you hide a little, little, little lie.

Strangely, publicizing lies seems to be a way to hide them. It would seem that posting a lie, particularly on an interactive medium like the internet, is the fastest way to get it shot down by a volley of contradictory evidence. Does the origin of a statement determine whether it’s truthful or not? Only in an authority-based system, like Galileo’s inquisition by the Catholic Church. In science, history or journalism, there are rules by which facts can be weighed for veracity.

When Rudy Giuliani shared bad intel from Ukraine. Or when TikTok influencers say Covid can’t cause pain. They’re laundering disinfo and we really should take note. And not support their lies with our wallet, voice or vote – oh!

Many of the ways to lie were catalogued by the ancient Greeks as rhetorical fallacies. One of those is the straw-man argument, where you argue against something that no one’s arguing for. I have yet to hear anyone argue that Covid can’t cause pain.

When I followed the link on Rudy Giuliani’s ‘bad intel’ it took me to Newsweek where the sidebar had another example of a ‘debate’: Nick Gillespie on “Covid-19 is Over for the Vaccinated” vs Tanzina Vega arguing “Show Empathy for Those Vulnerable to Covid-19,” by which she must mean the unvaccinated if Gillespie’s point stands.

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An actual counter-position might have presented Madhava Setty, MD, on his article, Did Moderna Trial Data Predict the Pandemic of the Vaccinated? He writes:

A new study suggests recipients of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine may be more likely to suffer repeated infections, perhaps indefinitely.

The study, still in preprint, found participants in Moderna’s adult trial who received the vaccine, and later were exposed to the virus, did not generate antibodies to a key component of the virus as often as did those in the placebo group.

The authors’ findings, which  are corroborated by U.K. data that demonstrate the rates of infection are significantly higher in the vaccinated, suggest Moderna knew of this safety signal in 2020 when the vaccine maker was conducting its trials.

Or it might look at all the disturbing data from the 80,000 pages released by Pfizer or the Danish peer-reviewed study showing that immunity with Pfizer’s 2nd and 3rd boosters wanes within a few weeks against Omicron.

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But let’s go back to looking at Rudy Giuliani’s ‘bad intel from Ukraine.’ The article is from Dec 2019 and posts Giuliani’s tweets that from hundreds of hours of research he has the witnesses and documents to show that “corruption in 2016 was so extensive it was [the President’s] DUTY to ask for US-Ukraine investigation.” He continues that “extortion, bribery & money-laundering goes beyond Biden’s.”

Since the Ukraine war, what has come out about the US and particularly the Bidens’ involvement makes these claims an irrefutable understatement.

It is, in fact, shocking that impeachment could have been considered for an investigation that, in a possible future-retrospective, we might see as having had the potential to avert WWIII and nuclear disaster.

I am no fan of Trump’s and have often made the point that he was the Great Setup to the Great Reset. I think the Deep State is playing both sides of the chessboard with all of us as pawns. But the net result of the impeachment trial was to make anyone exposing the Hunter, Victoria and Joe shitshow in Ukraine into a Trumplodite, including Glenn Greenwald. The abandoned laptop was the poster child for disinfo.

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Jumping on the bandwagon, The Atlantic held a conference with the U of Chicago, featuring Obama, on Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy. Daniel Schmidt, a freshman writer for the college paper, The Chicago Thinker, asked the panel:

In 2020 you wrote, ‘Those who live outside the Fox News bubble do not, of course, need to learn any of the stuff about Hunter Biden,’ referring to his laptop, of course. A poll, later, found that if voters knew about the contents of the laptop, 16% of Joe Biden voters would have acted differently.

Now, of course, we know a few weeks ago that The New York Times confirmed that the content is real. Do you think the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation and what can be learned from that in ensuring that what we label as disinformation is truly disinformation and not reality?

Anne Applebaum employed another rhetorical trick in answering that the issue was:

… not whether it’s disinformation. I mean, I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So, I don’t find it to be interesting. I mean, that would be my problem with that as a major news story.

But while the laptop wasn’t major news, the laptop as a lie was a nonstop story posted everywhere. Another student listed five false narratives promoted by CNN and asked “is it time to finally declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer operative?” When both of these challenges went viral, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief, said:

I think one darkly humorous but inevitable measurement of our success is that our disinformation conference has been the subject of disinformation campaigns on social media already.

The Chicago Thinker retorted:

And just like that @JeffreyGoldberg proved our point! First rule in the corporate media’s playbook: dismiss truthful reporting as ‘disinformation’ to avoid accountability. A fitting end to the conference!

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And to close and broaden the scope, I’d like to quote 10 Principles of War Propaganda published and translated to English by Nikta on Daily Kos in 2009:

In 2001 (before 9/11), Belgian historian Anne Morelli published a book analyzing the basic principles of war propaganda. Unfortunately and as far as I can tell, it was never translated to English (only in German). She credits the work of Lord Ponsonby, an amazing and unfortunately somewhat forgotten character. He stood, largely alone, in the Commons opposing WWI before it started, predicting not just the massacre it was going to be, but more interestingly for our purpose, how it was going to be sold to the masses.

Morelli enumerates it as the following principles:

  1.  We don't want war, we are only defending ourselves
  2. The other guy is the sole responsible for this war
  3. Our adversary's leader is evil and looks evil
  4. We are defending a noble purpose, not special interests
  5. The enemy is purposefully causing atrocities; we only commit mistakes
  6. The enemy is using unlawful weapons
  7. We have very little losses, the enemy is losing big
  8. Intellectuals and artists support our cause
  9. Our cause is sacred
 10. Those who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

And any facts or logic that contradict our propaganda is disinformation.

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For more on this topic, here’s The Reality Puzzle and the Propaganda Playbook:

I look at reality as a jigsaw puzzle that requires both the masculine and feminine sides of the brain to solve--the masculine-analytical "does it fit?" and the feminine-intuitive big picture. I apply this to my poster of Mesoamerica Resiste! from the Beehive Collective that uses wind-up chattering teeth to represent tourism and vampire bats for indigenous midwifery. Kennedy's book gives historical context to the 1910 puzzle piece that changed medicine from strengthening the immune system to germ warfare. I examine the mechanisms of manipulation and list three rules of the propaganda playbook: 1) name things the opposite of what they are, 2) it's easier to lie big than lie small, and 3) the best defense is a good offense.

And Are We Being Manipulated? on Paul Kingsnorth

On Unherd, Freddie Sayers interviewed philosopher and writer Paul Kingsnorth on "Why I Changed My Mind in the Vaccine Wars." I use his thesis, antithesis, synthesis model but show why it's backwards and it's the orthodox view that rejects science. I quote Robert F. Kennedy's chapter, HIV Heretics, on how science is not a consensus and tell about my realization, after 50 years of futile arguments, that my mother didn't believe in the existence of facts. I cite Dr. Amishi Jha's definition of science as "a pursuit through a process of understanding what is," and how that relates to peer-reviewed studies. I look at the deeper questions of "are we being manipulated?" and "how can this end well?" I conclude that Paul's example of a person changing their mind is one of the most powerful forces on earth, and hope that #IWasWrong goes viral.