In this sense, it may serve an important educational role, for few recent developments—apart, perhaps, from the appointment of Joe Biden as president of the United States—illustrate so graphically the critical political lesson that the preposterous oft seamlessly coexists with the malevolent.
Benito Mussolini was preposterous.
So was Adolf Hitler.
But both were also malevolent.
So it is with the Biden administration’s new department of suppression and narrative rehabilitation.
To point out that Hitler illustrates the proposition that someone can be both ridiculous and malevolent is not to say someone who is both ridiculous and malevolent is, or is like, Hitler.
No, it’s simply to say that both are ridiculous and malevolent.
The ridiculousness is the first thing you notice.
The malevolent part is obvious when you see what it is that she regards as Trump-inspired, Russian-inflected “disinformation.”
Hunter Biden’s laptop, for example.
The New York Post broke the story just a week or two before the 2020 presidential election.
The entire media suppression apparatus swung into action immediately and suppressed the story.
Twitter gagged anyone who mentioned it.
It’s pretty clear that had the story, which was true, been allowed to circulate, the results of the 2020 would have been different, which is to say Trump’s victory would have had to have been acknowledged.
So you see how Jankowicz’s branding of the story as “Republican” or “Trumpist” or “Russian” disinformation is partly funny but also partly malevolent.
It was one of the events that compromised a U.S. presidential election.
That was the point, of course, but that fact doesn’t make Jankowicz’s false claim any less malevolent.
Here we have a patently partisan activist invested with the responsibility to police speech for the country’s Department of Homeland Security.
Think about that.
Nor is the Hunter Biden wheeze an aberration.
Naked partisanship is the name of this game, which is why this new propaganda bureau has been saddled with a name right out of Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the Ministry of Truth.
In Orwell’s book, of course, the ironically named institution has two tasks: to suppress the truth and to spread lies.
So it is with the “Disinformation Governance Board.”
It has long been alleged, but also ignored, that Omar was for several years married to her brother.
The evidence that she married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi appears to be overwhelming, indeed dispositive.
“Ilhan Omar is a favorite for this sort of racist, sexual rhetoric that’s compounded,” Jankowicz claimed; “the idea that she married her brother to immigrate to the United States, for instance.”
But it’s not “an idea.”
It’s likely a fact.
Omar was married to Elmi from 2009 to 2017.
She then remarried her first husband, Ahmed Hirsi, just before she began her campaign for Congress.
She is now married to a political consultant named Tim Mynett.
It’s nice to be part of the nomenklatura.
The Alpha News story drily reports that “Republicans are questioning whether Jankowicz has the proper credentials to lead the disinformation board” and wonder further whether the agency will be used as “a political tool.”
I think that there can be no question about either.
Jankowicz is clearly, indeed ostentatiously unfit to lead any such agency and the agency itself is clearly an unacceptable, not to say un-American, effort to suppress free speech.
