Just shy of 40 years after George Orwell’s predicted date, the current administration has introduced their version of the Ministry of Truth. It will be a child of the Department of Homeland Security and is officially called the Disinformation Governance Board. It’s goal it to manage disinformation on social media and news outlets leading up to the midterm elections and beyond. Considering that the DHS has a history of things like avoiding questions about the number of people entering the country illegally and hiding their redistribution of these folks to all parts of the nation by busing or flying them at taxpayer expense, I’m sure they will fairly and objectively manage “disinformation”. Stories like that nefarious Russian campaign that tried to spread stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the last election can now be crushed by the government without needing to rely on Facebook or the now-questionable Twitter. But wait…didn’t all that stuff about Hunter turn out to be true? Haven’t all the stories about the last President’s ties to Russia turned out to be fabrications trumpeted by many of the same people who will soon be determining what qualifies as disinformation? Will “disinformation” tags be assigned by people who research the material and dispassionately determine its veracity, or will the new Powers That Be just tag material that shines a bad light on a pet agenda/belief or presents a point of view that they simply disagree with? My bet is on the latter. Why? A little research into the current administration’s history of statements and proclamations reveal that on many subjects supported by “top experts in the field” or “all scientists” turned out to be agenda-driven spin, aggressive misdirection away from a problem of their making, or just plain wrong.
The Disinformation Governance Board was created to manage the spread of disinformation.
That can be taken a couple of different ways and I fear that unless more people wake up and pay attention to what our elected officials are doing behind the curtain, Orwell’s book about a depressing dystopian future may get promoted from literature to prophecy by future historians. That is, if it survives a possible Farenheit 451 scenario sponsored by the new Governance Board.