In 2012, the Obama campaign launched a ridiculous website called ATTACKWATCH.com, which, together with an email list and a Twitter account, were billed as “new resources to fight back” that would “fact check statements by Obama’s Republican opponents with links to ‘evidence’ to back them up.”
ATTACKWATCH! would watch the attacks from those dastardly Republicans and “support the truth” and “fight the smears.”
ATTACKWATCH!!! was risible and clunky, but it was also one of about four efforts by President Barack Obama to “fight the smears.” He had a website in 2008 called “fight the smears,” and then his White House rolled out a creepier version, FLAG.gov, giving good citizens the place where they could flag “misinformation.”
This week, President Joe Biden’s administration announced ATTACKWATCH!!!1!, Homeland Security division. The Disinformation Governance Board will monitor information threats to the homeland.
The woman heading this Ministry of Truth, Nina Jankowicz, has stated her fear of “free speech absolutists.”
In 2020, Jankowicz led the charge in claiming that the reports on Hunter Biden’s shady influence-peddling business deals were Russian “disinformation.”
It’s all part of this pathology in the Democratic Party that has spanned at least the entire beginning of the 21st century that believes the only way Republicans ever win is by convincing the public of false things (often with an assist from Russian disinformation agents).
Of course, we know from Democratic and media usage of the word what “disinformation” means. It means “stuff that’s bad for Democrats.”
Why did Democrats drop among Hispanic voters in 2020? It couldn’t be because the party’s policies and priorities and candidates were unappealing to more Hispanic voters. Democrats, in a pretty condescending way, have concluded that it must have been a wave of Spanish-language “disinformation.”
Matt Yglesias has a good post on all of this, in which he points out what the Democrats call “disinformation.” Here’s a telling passage from the New York Times piece peddling the Democrats’ line:
“Online disinformation hit Latino communities hard ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
“It came in the form of videos, tweets and WhatsApp messages, YouTube videos and the rants of Spanish-language radio hosts. It included false reports of widespread violence on the streets of Democratic cities after the murder of George Floyd, QAnon conspiracy theories, and overblown claims of terrorists and criminals crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.”
In other words, news they find inconvenient (violent riots) and “overblown claims” are now “disinformation.” This, and maybe future reports about Hunter Biden’s shady influence peddling, is the enemy against which the Biden administration is now siccing Homeland Security.
