We've been trained to think that endless rule by
tiny minorities of really horrible people is the
natural order of things, but that turns out to
be just another lie
By Matt Taibbi
March 26, 2023:
Information Clearing House-- Earlier today Susan Schmidt and I published
an
article about a series of changes at the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
(CISA), a creepy sub-division of the Department
of Homleand Security. It turns out that CISA,
which just a week or so ago was busted for
scrubbing embarrasing text from its website
by the Foundation for Freedom Online, quietly
eliminated its so-called “MDM” or
“Misinformation, Disinformation, and
Malinformation” subcommittee.
Just a year ago, the Department of Homeland
Security was going all-in on the fight against “MDM.”
The notion that America is fatally infected with
“Misinformation, Disinformation, and
Malinformation” was in fact the animating idea
begind the asinine plan the Biden administration
announced last April to
institute a “Disinformation Governance Board,”
which was to be headed by Nina Jankowicz,
a self-styled Mary Poppins of digital
rectitude:
America took one look at Jankowicz and at
most a few fleeting moments considering the
“Disinformation Governance Board” plan before
concluding, correctly, that it was a
beyond-loathsome expression of aristocratic
arrogance that needed shutting down before the
first Jankowicz presser. Characteristically, the
press lied about the public reaction, claiming
that the only displeasure was
heard from the “GOP.” In fact, all sane
people across the spectrum were instantly
nauseated, their distress loud enough that the
DHS hit “pause” on Jankowicz and the batty
MinTruth plan after just three weeks.
Even that might not have been fast enough, as
was discovered by my co-author Sue Schmidt,
who’s formerly of the Washington Post
but joined Racket this month for a
special report a team of us are preparing on
what fellow #TwitterFiles reporter Michael
Shellenberger calls the “Censorship-Industrial
Complex.” (More on that later). Looking
through the
minutes of CISA’s subcommittee meetings last
year, Sue found that the DHS’s little team of
self-appointed information guardians was deeply
worried about the “rollout” of their war against
MDM, worrying repeatedly about how to
“socialize” or “pre-socialize” various parties
to the idea of a federal truth squad, realizing
that just presenting the actual plan to a
sentient person without lots of sweeteners
wouldn’t go well.
One subcommittee member, whose name in the
spirit of our times is of course redacted,
seemed to realize the concept was too hot to
discuss in public. She “suggested removing
mention of MDM” — this, from a member of the
“MDM subcommittee”! — and “framing” the
subcommitee’s efforts more in terms of
“directing people to clear information about
elections procedures.” Another member
recommended CISA “point more to state officials
and state laws to make the authoritative source
of information less controversial. In other
words: “Let’s make it sound like someone other
than the hated us is running this
thing!”
Even two years ago, nobody was paying
attention to this world and the public, if it
cared at all, was probably inclined to welcome
more “election procedures” (as CISA would later
call them), not fewer. So the DHS, sensibly one
must conclude, dissolved its incorrectly named
“Countering Foreign Influence Task Force” — the
group spent most of 2020 zapping domestic
election posts — renamed it the MDM
subcommittee, and began meeting and posting
about the need to build “national resistance” to
“domestic threat actors.” As Sue just reported,
these folks saw “MDM” everywhere here at home,
insisting “CISA should consider MD across the
information ecosystem,” which included talk
radio, cable news, mainstream media, and
“hyper-partisan media.”
The architects of this plan not only
genuinely believed themselves above such
temptations, but saw nothing wrong with asking
for massive sums of money — Joe Biden’s first
economic proposal sought $690 million for CISA —
to captain an open-ended war on American
badthink, as defined by [names redacted]. Here
again, take note of Jankowicz’s lyrics:
It’s like when Rudy Giuliani shared
bad intel from Ukraine
Or when TikTok influencers said 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!
This was a group of self-described experts in
an utterly fictitious “anti-disinformation”
discipline who were so sure it was okay for them
to tell you whom not to vote for, one of them
sang about it. This, despite the fact
that of the ones whose names we know, like
Jankowicz, many were open swallowers of the
dumbest Russiagate hokum, like the
Alfa-Server story.
I spent a long time covering the 2008 Wall
Street crash, which meant devoting large amounts
of energy to some of the world’s most
unredeeming people. These were swindlers who
sold snake-oil mortgage products that put
millions out of their homes and wiped out
retirement funds of people who spent decades
working as toll operators, firefighters,
teachers. Such predators were awful, amoral
people, but all the same, I occasionally found
myself writing with something like admiration.
These crooks were creators of truly ingenious
schemes who did what they did out of lust,
greed, jealousy, and other (at least
identifiably human) forms of depravity.
These [name redacted] would-be censors are
different. They have no sense of humor, no
imagination, and exactly one distinguishing
characteristic: they know what’s best for you.
Anti-disinfo work suits them because they all
have a Poppins streak that quietly gets off on
binning your digital dirty bits (after the
voyeuristic thrill of logging on to watch them
in secret, with special credentials, which they
rub with pleasure in evenings). They’re the
vilest kind of snobs, and when they finally were
forced to show their real selves to the public —
and here I feel safe in thanking Elon Musk for
making that possible, via the #TwitterFiles —
the public rightfully recoiled from these
arrogant power-worshipping mediocrities.
The Governance Board was already dead, and
now the whole MDM mission is being wound down,
which feels like a win. Perhaps they’re just
publicly retreating from the concept for now,
but at this point, I’ll take that. Moreover
there are signs everywhere that people are
losing their fear of departing from the
orthodoxy such types would like to impose, and
pushing for a return to normalcy, which for the
first time in ages feels within reach.
There was a ridiculous scene at Stanford law
school recently, in which a conservative judge
was muffled by a gaggle of future lawyers
who’d been led by an assistant Dean in a
characteristically moronic shouting-down
exercise. The current strain of Junior Anti-Sex
League-type protesters who fill campuses from
coast to coast now sure do love their “heckler’s
veto…”
The Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez
was brilliant in response. Instead of doing what
the heads of organizations have been doing for
years in such situations, instead of doing,
frankly, what I did during my own cancelation
episode — frantically over-apologizing to people
who have no use for or interest in apologies —
Martinez sternly called the students out as
clowns, reminding them in a
long, serious, punishing letter that if they
ever become officers of the court, they will be
held to a higher standard than “lay people,”
swearing to conduct themselves “at all times
with dignity, courtesy and integrity.”
Martinez went further, saying that on her
watch, the school would not be doing the usual
and committing itself to starter slates of
political positions out of fear of reproach.
“Our commitment to diversity, equity, and
inclusion is not going to take the form of
having the school administration announce
institutional positions on a wide range of
current social and political issues,” she wrote.
The age of just giving in to mobs instead of
insisting on our right to have different
opinions and beliefs seems to be receding. It is
beginning to dawn on sane, tolerant people
everywhere that there are more of us than there
are of them, and this still matters in a
democracy.
There’s a reason why these people are so
focused on technocratic solutions, from magic AI
schemes to control information to deploying
packs of Boston Dynamics robot-dogs, who’ll
patrol suburban neighborhoods and peer in
windows for visual confirmation of Alexa-overheard
transgressions. General Mark Milley just said on
a podcast that armies
may be fully robotic in 15 years, arousing
general neoliberal giddiness (Milley quoted
Dylan). These people need tech, because you know
what they don’t have? Friends. Organic support.
Or, ways to win them, like art, music,
literature, or comedy.
I have a theory about what happened to
America in this regard. After 9/11, people were
scared, and they fell for a succession of
propaganda campaigns convincing them that the
hole in Fortress America, the chink in our
national armor, was our system of democratic
rights.
The “MDM subcommittee” members think the same
way: there’s a section in one of last year’s
meetings in which a former Secretary of
Washington State notes that the bad countries,
“such as Russia, use the First Amendment
effectively.” Moreover, in general, “our
adversaries… use our Constitution effectively.”
They’ve been telling us this stuff ever since
the Towers came down. We were told our enemies
will use even our open system of justice against
us, so forget the admirable streak of America
never having had an in-camera criminal trial.
Let’s clear the court even for deportation
hearings of suspected terrorists, they said.
Let’s not even tell the public the names
of the deported!
“The era that dawned on September 11th, and
the war against terrorism that has pervaded the
sinews of our national life since that day, are
reflected in thousands of ways” the Third
Circuit Court wrote in 2002, adding: “Since the
primary national policy must be self-preservation,it
seems elementary that, to the extent open
deportation hearings might impair national
security, that security is implicated.”
It was the same with torture, rendition,
watch lists, drones, whatever. To respond to
terrorism, we were told, we needed to be more
“nimble” than old-school democracy allowed. We
couldn’t wait for congress to declare wars, or
build probable cause, or afford the right to
face one’s accusers. The stakes were too high
for such luxuries. Even giving “enemy
combatants” Geneva convention rights would
confer legitimacy to the opposition it didn’t
deserve, and we couldn’t afford to give that
legitimacy. Our grip on safety was that tenunous.
No: the new era of a West infected with a
borderless evil returned from the 8th century
needed a bureaucracy of super-empowered minders,
who’d do torturing if it needed doing, and
quietly make lists of who gets to fly or open a
bank account. Most of all, these minders would
make those terrible decisions about who gets to
live and die in a drone-patrolled world. The
Imitation Game from 2014, starring Benedict
Cumberbatch and telling the awful tale of Alan
Turing’s quest to crack the Enigma code, was a
great movie, but perhaps also the ultimate
portrait of the Obama-era political class, whose
members all saw themselves as misunderstood
geniuses quietly saving civilization through
endless mathematical murder, committed from
afar, by remote control, without fanfare or
appreciation.
America balked some at George W. Bush as “The
Decider,” but was more than happy to let the
Community Organizer head up those secret
decisions. With the genial and patient-sounding
Obama in office, the deciders assumed a new
brand of business-casual cruelty. I vividly
remember going to a ballgame with a longtime
Justice source in those years, someone I liked,
who casually told me in between bites of a hot
dog that of course we should just drone Julian
Assange, because he was a “terrorist,” and the
“reality is, you just have to kill them.”
Each year, more and more of government became
classified, and we had less and less access to
information about where tax dollars were being
spent, or what was going on at places like the
Federal Reserve. We let it happen, abandoning
the democratic responsibility to govern
ourselves, in the process willing the world’s
smuggest aristocracy into existence. It wasn’t
the worst time — a lot of good TV was made in
those years — but while we were napping, these
people were turning America into a secret
administrative state committed to endless war,
mass surveillance, social credit scoring,
censorship, and other horrors, a system that’s
only just now beginning to show itself.
The managerial state was held in place for
over a decade by a kind of magic spell, which
works thanks to the public’s faith in the
competence of our minders. That spell held by
default for an extra four years while Trump was
in office, but it’s been broken now, in part
thanks to refuseniks like Musk (who
caused all kinds of havoc by opting out of an
airtight information-control cartel), but mainly
because we’ve now had enough opportunities to
examine up close the loathsome nanny-staters to
whom we surrendered all those years ago.
Whatever hold these people had on us, and it was
real — I spent years worrying about regaining
the favor of people who were denouncing me as a
Russian asset even as they demanded my vote —
it’s gone now, and we can start thinking about
moving on to something better.
This is what I choose to think, this weekend
evening. We don’t have to concede to a future of
always being at war somewhere abroad, and with
each other at home. We don’t have to put up with
a government that doesn’t tell us anything. Most
of all, we can go back to enjoying life, on our
own terms, without stressing over an endless
succession of panics invented by politically
insecure losers. We can do so much better, and
we will, because this place is ours to run, a
fact the singing censors should never have let
us remember.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Reader financed- No
Advertising - No Government Grants -
No Algorithm - This
Is Independent
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)