It’s Monday, May 2nd, 2022…the day after Communists around the world and across the country…
…celebrated May Day.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, NRO‘s Charlie Cooke lends his usual biting satire to the latest unconstitutional move by an Administration whose only consistency in its conduct has been a total disregard for the rule of law, as he notes…
“Linguistically, the name of the Department of Homeland Security has always sounded a little off to me — a little . . . well, Russian. So I suppose that it is only fitting that it should be the DHS, and not, say, the Post Office, that will house America’s newest Ministry of Truth. Per Secretary Mayorkas, his already-sprawling agency will be adding a “Disinformation Governance Board” to its offerings, the better to fight the “huge threat to our homeland” that is free American citizens saying things that the federal government doesn’t like.
At the head of this new venture will sit an extremely strange woman named Nina Jankowicz, who, if her other activities are any indication, was apparently asked to choose between agreeing to the role at DHS and being turned down after yet another audition for the musical Wicked. A cursory look at Jankowicz’s social-media history suggests that, while she is certainly interested in disinformation, her passion is dressing up as Liza Minnelli. In one video (shown below), Jankowicz adapts the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to convey that “Information laundering is really quite ferocious / It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious.” In another, she offers up that pornographic twist on the Harry Potter books for which we’ve all been clamoring. “I helped him solve the mystery of the egg,” she warbles. “But I’d like to solve the mystery between his legs.” Her canon is limited in scope, but what I’ve seen of it is enough to test even the most committed civil libertarian in his opposition to casual waterboarding.
Fielding questions about the move, Jen Psaki told reporters yesterday that “it sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities,” before adding, “I’m not sure who opposes that effort?” As it happens, I can help Psaki out here: I do. I oppose it, because it’s grotesque and indefensible. If by “prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country” Psaki means that the federal government intends to censor its critics, then Jankowicz and her friends will immediately find themselves in court. (They should already be there!)And if she doesn’t mean that — if she means that Jankowicz and her team will act as PR agents for the Department of Homeland Security — then there is no need for anything as lofty as a “Disinformation Governance Board” in the first instance. The DHS already has a press office.
Given the manner in which Jankowicz’s appointment has been received by pretty much everyone, we are likely to see some backtracking over the coming days. But at this point, it’s too late for all that. Instead, we need some guarantees.At the very least, Americans ought to know what Jankowicz and Co. are up to at every point their “board” is in action. Her meetings must be taped; her emails must be made public; her phone calls must be recorded; and, as a modest prophylactic measure, she ought to wear a bodycam whenever she is carrying out her duties.This is the United States of America, not Cuba, and, as a matter of elementary principle, we ought not to have anything called the “Disinformation Governance Board of the Department of Homeland Security.” If, for whatever reason, the president disagrees with that principle, he must be made to account for it. Adding 24/7 surveillance and closely monitored ankle bracelets to figures such as Nina Jankowicz is the minimum the citizenry can demand in return.
All told, it will be tough to find a more perfect example of Modern American Progressivism than this for a good while. It exhibits an entirely undeserved epistemological self-confidence. It is driven by a niche moral panic that begins and ends online. It is unabashedly authoritarian in concept and in tone. It involves the addition to the public payroll of one of the silliest people in all the land. And, like so much that the contemporary Left ends up doing, it has pushed the vast majority of psychologically normal voters into paroxysms of derisive laughter. One of the most remarkable features of our age is that the more het up about an issue the American Left seems to be, the less serious its saviors seem to become. David Harsanyi is correct to argue that the very idea of “the state putting an imprimatur on ‘truth’” is both “dangerous to freedom” and “laughable,” but I wonder if he is perhaps overestimating the extent to which the Democratic Party and its chums will ever be able to control America’s national conversation. We are told that we are in the midst of a chronic “information crisis,” and yet the best progressives can do to fight it is promote Brian Stelter, Taylor Lorenz, Jen Psaki, and Nina Jankowicz.
It’s almost as if . . .“
Here’s the juice, in meme form courtesy of Balls:
Think about it: We’ve gone from him…
…to him…
…to her…
…in less than a year. And this demented, deviant still has well over two years left. It should also be noted, given its timing, the Disinformation Governance Board isn’t intended to control anything other than the results of the 2022 election. And we credit Morgan Ortagus for being the first person we’ve heard calling both the legality and constitutionality the Biden version of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth into question:
Next, even diehard Progressive Matt Taibi recognizes…
People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop.The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.
In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020.
Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, ora next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley…”
A orifice far looser than normal owing to persistent Progressive passage.
Since we’re on the subject of sphincters, check out the royal a*s-reaming Florida Republican Greg Steube recently gave Alejandro Mayorkas:
Despite claiming domestic terrorism is the #1 threat to the homeland, @SecMayorkas can’t name a single case that he referred from DHS to DOJ for white supremacy or domestic terrorism. pic.twitter.com/9ZtYp1A3eo
— Congressman Greg Steube (@RepGregSteube) April 28, 2022
You can enjoy Steube’s evisceration of Mayorkas in full at today’s On the Lightweight Side video, accessible through link #4 immediately below our Quote of the Day at the top of the page.
Meanwhile, as this clip from the White House Correspondents Dinner demonstrates, it appears the unbelievably tone-deaf 46* finds the pain America’s feeling at the pump, the pantry and just about everywhere else hilarious:
“Since you’ve come into office, things are really looking up. Gas is up, rent is up, food is up! Everything!”
“Fertilizer shortages are real now because Russia is a big exporter of fertilizer. Even though fertilizer is not sanctioned, less fertilizer is coming out of Russia,” she explained. “As a result we’re working with countries to think about natural solutions like manure and compost and this may hasten transitions that would have been in the interest of farmers to make eventually anyway. So never let a crisis go to waste.“
No matter fertilizers are a significant reason the world’s farmers produce crop yields their fathers only dreamed of, or that untold millions would undoubtedly die of starvation in the course of Mrs. Sunstein’s utterly unnecessary, counterproductive transition. Again, not that any of Samantha’s friends, family or supporters would miss nary a meal.
Which, in conjunction with 46*’s ill-timed laughter, begs the question whether Biden didn’t invite Putin’s invasion for this very reason?!?
And which brings us, at least in the minds of the Biden clown car, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…
…and George Lawlor:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap for the first offering of May with another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, as we learn of a three-person crime wave on the Florida-Alabama border:
“Alabama police have issued an arrest warrant for a woman caught on camera riding a stolen lawnmower and pulling a trailer with other stolen items, including a University of Alabama yard sign. Flomaton police said the woman – whom they later identified as Madonna Barnhill – is one of several individuals charged in multiple burglaries over the past two weeks.
Police received a report on April 24 of a burglary at a residence in Flomaton, which is near Alabama’s border with Florida…Investigators determined that the woman drove the lawnmower down multiple streets before traveling into Florida.
…Police have signed warrants for third-degree burglary and fourth-degree property theft for the following individuals: Madonna Barnhill, Michael Adams, and Jonathan McKinley.
…Police have urged residents, in light of the burglary, to invest in security cameras.“
Yeah: security cameras are good, but a Remington 870 would settle the matter out of court!
Magoo
Video of the Day
Courtesy of The Nickel, the great VDH addresses the Dimocrats’ dramatic transmorgrafication into the Party of the Elite.
Tales of The Darkside
Funny, we can’t recall CNN’s rabid Leftist media analyst (with the emphasis on “anal”) David Zurawik claiming Mark Zuckerburg represented a clear and present danger BEFORE Elon Musk bought Twitter, not to mention his silence when Jeff Bezos bought the WaPo!
On the Lightweight Side
Congressman Greg Steube does Florida proud. The duplicitous Mayorkas deserves two behind one of his over-sized ears.
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