Trump Republicans are terrified of new government initiative to fight Russian misinformation
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The entire Republican brand has been built on a wobbly foundation of vile lies and exaggerations. It has to be. How else do you convince people that cruelly suppressing flows of immigrants to a country that faces both short- and long-term labor shortages is a good idea? Or that harassing gay and trans kids and the companies that support them somehow makes up for scuttling a child tax credit that would vastly improve the lives of tens of millions of parents in this country?
Without Russian lies and misinformation, it’s a safe bet Donald Trump would have spent recent years snorting Adderall out of his carpet until his brain bled, repeatedly bragging about passing dementia tests, and tweeting incomprehensible nonsense from his toilet. Which is pretty much what he did anyway, of course—but he would have been doing it on his own time, and in his own home, not forcing us to observe every lurid plot twist in his profane horror show. And his toilet would likely have been powerful enough to completely flush all his embarrassing errors and revolting secrets, up to and including Eric.
So it stands to reason that conservatives would freak about a new initiative to counter the disinformation upon which they rely.
It’s this news that has left the right shrieking:
The Department of Homeland Security is stepping up an effort to counter disinformation coming from Russia as well as misleading information that human smugglers circulate to target migrants hoping to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The spread of disinformation can affect border security, Americans’ safety during disasters, and public trust in our democratic institutions,” the department said in a statement Wednesday.
Okay, that’s brutally unfair. Countering lies about immigration with the truth? How are Republicans supposed to demagogue the issue? This is like stealing Thor’s hammer. Or Captain America’s shield. Or Trump’s steam-powered hydraulic girdle. And since Russian disinformation is now the lifeblood of the GOP, if they take that away, Trump is just a garden-variety traitor with 24/7 Secret Service protection.
The new board also will monitor and prepare for Russian disinformation threats as this year’s midterm elections near and the Kremlin continues an aggressive disinformation campaign around the war in Ukraine. Russia has repeatedly waged misinformation campaigns aimed at U.S. audiences to further divisions around election time and spread conspiracy theories around U.S. COVID-19 vaccines. Most recently, Russian state media outlets, social media accounts and officials have used the internet to call photographs, reporting and videos of dead bodies and bombed buildings in Ukraine fake.
The board will be headed by Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who has researched online Russian misinformation campaigns. Sounds reasonable, right? I mean, no self-respecting American wants notorious war criminal Vladimir Putin sowing chaos among our citizens and tilting the playing field in favor of candidates he can more easily manipulate into supporting his diabolical plans, right?
Ha ha ha! You naif! These people do, of course.
Hmm, that video, originally posted in February, was actually kind of great. But Jankowicz parodied Mary Poppins, and Mary Poppins is a “groomer” now, so …
Despotic regime. That’s rich from Junior. Pot meet every other pot and kettle on the fucking planet.
I would be just as upset as Tom here is if, to Republicans, “radical leftist” didn’t simply mean any American who has yet to experience a horse-paste enema.
Of course, new Twitter Daddy Elon Musk felt compelled to get in on the act as well.
And then there was this nitwit:
What’s next? Space lasers, of course. It’s what Goebbels would have done if the technology hadn’t been monopolized by the Jews.
And in case the irony isn’t rich enough for you yet, Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad apologist Tulsi Gabbard got in on the act.
And if that wasn’t quite enough irony to break your brain, well, this will pulverize it:
Of course, countering Russian disinformation is something all Western liberal democracies should be doing. It’s something Trump should have done while he could have done it. Instead, Trump stood onstage with Putin in Helsinki and gave him the green light to misinform all he wanted.
Trump was both the primary beneficiary and most eager domestic proponent of Russian disinformation. So if you’re in the Trump cult, you’ll naturally regard any attempt to stanch Russia’s dangerous, anti-democratic lies as an existential threat.
It’s obvious by now that they’ll just keep saying “Ministry of Truth” until it means something to their followers, even though it’s a safe bet very few of these philistines have actually read George Orwell’s1984 or even understand the reference. But the problem with the comparison is that the Ministry of Truth did nothing but tell lies. In other words, it was the 1940s version of Fox News’ “Fair and Balanced.”
Today’s conservatives aren’t about spreading the facts. They just want to spread manipulative (and manipulated) versions—and they own and operate the vast majority of this country’s manure spreaders. They like the current political landscape—with its endless hillocks of bullshit—just the way it is. So now they’ll ramp up their lies in order to keep the Russian lie pipeline open in the face of efforts to shut it down.
It’s what traitors do, after all.
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