GOP “Weaponization” Committee Follows Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Footsteps

Mar 08, 2023

Nina Jankowicz, an internationally known disinformation expert, has spent the past year and a half as the target of a disinformation campaign. Now she’s going be the focus of an attempt at publicly humiliation via a witch hunting House Committee.

Supported by the likes of Rep. Darrell Issa and targeted more than 250 times by Fox News, with hosts and guests repeating false “assertions of fact” about her more than 400 times, her less than two month stint as head of the newly formed DHS Disinformation Governance Board made her one of the right’s top bogeyman.

From Politico:

Since then, she says, she’s received tens of thousands of harassing online posts and hundreds of violent threats. One anonymous poster – who called her a “Tranny Jew” on April 28 – said: “I can’t wait for the open violence phase of this war to kick off.”
As the taunts peaked last spring, she says she pleaded with her superiors to allow her to speak to the media to “defend myself.” Fox shows were showing her picture and talking about her being pregnant so she could be easily identified, she said.

Rep. Jim Jordan plans to make Jankowicz a star witness before his new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government. He has demanded that she appear, issuing a subpoena to amp up the drama. Jankowicz says she will abide by it.

Look for the twenty-first century edition of “are you now or have you ever been?” to be played out for Fox News viewers. Jordan is under scrutiny from both sides of the aisle for the lack of work product from the Weaponization committee, and the failure of its first round of public hearings due to the flakiness of its witnesses.

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I can’t know if the DHS disinformation effort was a good or bad thing, mostly because it was closed down before producing any work product.

I am a passionate supporter of the First Amendment. I am also aware that deliberately crafted disinformation campaigns exist for the purpose of discrediting democracy as a form of government. I believe the campaign to discredit Ms. Jankowicz served the purpose of hiding the involvement of US officials with hostile foreign powers.

Far right Republicans weren’t waiting for silly ol’ facts in 2022. Missouri’s Sen. Josh Hawley, (best known for the Jan 6 video showing him running for his life) claimed the board was “policing Americans’ speech,” calling Jankowicz a “human geyser of misinformation,” based on earlier tweets about Hunter Biden’s laptop in which she suggested it could be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

The now-defunct initiative that Jankowicz briefly headed was aimed at developing government-wide recommendations to stop the flow of disinformation sponsored by China, Russia and violent domestic extremists. Jankowicz, who managed programs on Russia and Belarus for the National Democratic Institute and has advised the Ukrainian government, was chosen for her expertise in online disinformation, according to the Department of Homeland Security, under which she served.

Jankowicz’ standing as an expert on disinformation stems from the 2020 publication of How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict. In that book she examined Russian influence operations aimed at weakening democratic nations. Included are six case studies, one per chapter: Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine together with the Netherlands, Czech Republic, and the United States.

Her argument for countering amplified falsehoods included media literacy, public awareness, and an educated electorate as the best means to guard against a disinformation campaign. Nowhere was censorship or suppression of free speech mentioned.

As discerning readers should know by now, misinformation and slander are two favored methods for extremists looking to discredit critics.

Fox News might be learning that there can be consequences for spreading manure, as the lawsuit by Dominion Systems has already yielded transcripts of depositions and texted conversations showing the network’s executives and personalities’ bad intentions despite privately acknowledging the truth.

It kinda doesn’t matter where this legal case goes now, as the people whose perspectives were warped by authoritative sounding lies won’t hear the bad news about the network they think is fair and balanced. We can only hope there’s a financial penalty large enough to serve as a warning to other professional liars.

An “investigation” by Tucker Carlson, based on 44,000 hours of video given to him for exclusive use by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, has produced exactly nothing except expressions of ignorance from Jan 6 apologists in Congress.

This is the same Tucker Carlson who’s quoted in lawsuit evidence as saying he “hated” former President Donald Trump.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. … I hate him passionately.”

As part of the unbelievable narrative now being presented by Tucker, the mobs that invaded the House and Senate were simply tourists, who were mostly peaceful. The 140 police officers who were injured that day might beg to disagree, but Tucker doesn’t care.

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene took up the cause of Q-anon Shaman Jacob Chansley, currently serving a 44 month sentence. She called for retrial in his case, apparently ignorant of the fact that there was no trial, because Chansley accepted a plea bargain. He became famous after being photographed storming the Capitol wearing face paint and horns and triumphantly posing shirtless on the Senate dais. Greene somehow thinks horn-man was welcomed by the Capitol Police.

That’s it folks. It’s just another day where lies and deceit are being used to bury democratic governance…

…Except for one thing. Jankowicz has set up a Go Fund Me to pay the costs of a lawsuit against Fox. And the forces of misrepresentation are already repeating slanders to denounce the effort to clear her name.