President Biden Directly Takes On Critics Of So-called 'Ministry of Truth'
Political right flailing DHS panel the same way that they attacked Obamacare for its "death panels"
That didn't take long.
Apparently tired of going after transgender youth, and bored with trying to smear Democrats as “pedophiles,” right-wingers have their new boogyman.
And it's President Biden's so-called “Ministry of Truth.”
The president, however, has been just as quick to fight back against Republicans framing a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) panel in literal Orwellian terms, as a “Ministry of Truth.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas mentioned the creation of the board in multiple congressional hearings last week. In one, he linked it to efforts to combat misinformation from human smugglers. In another, he said it would be used to counter Russian cyber and election misinformation:
“We have just established a mis- and disinformation governance board in the Department of Homeland Security to more effectively combat this threat, not only to election security but to our homeland security,” he said.
To the minds of Republicans, this limited role somehow amounts to the sort of “Big Government censorship,” which George Orwell wrote about in his dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949.
In perhaps the perfect melding of irony and chutzpah, Sen Josh Hawley (R-Mo) — who famously was caught in an image giving the mob a fist-pump not long before they stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stymie democracy — had the gall to claim of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board: “Rather than police our border, Homeland Security has decided to make policing Americans’ speech its top priority.”
If all of this sounds a tad familiar, it should.
This is the same dishonest hyperbole which Republicans tried to employ when they began maligning President Barack Obama's healthcare reform plan for what they called “death panels.”
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley told a crowd back home in Iowa, “We should not have a government program that determines you're gonna pull the plug on Grandma.”
Only problem was, of course, that it just wasn't true.
It was such a huge whopper that year that the prominent, independent fact-checking website PolitiFact dubbed it its “Lie Of The Year.”
Biden jumped into the fray quickly, over the weekend, to try to stop this latest falsehood, dead in its tracks.
“The industry is changing significantly. There is an incredible pressure on you all to deliver heat instead of shed light because the technology is changing so much. [...] But, the truth matters. American democracy is not a reality show,” Biden told journalists as he spoke at the annual Washington DC gala known as the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
The facts are Biden's absolutely correct.
A rise in misinformation and disinformation — whether they be falsehoods surrounding former president Donald Trump's “Big Lie,” about falsely claiming to have won the 2020 presidential election; disinformation largely from the right about the efficacy and dangers surrounding the vaccines for COVID-19; or the widely debunked QAnon conspiracy which holds that prominent Democrats are running a pedophilia ring out of the basement of Washington DC, pizza shop which has no basement — they have become pernicious and corrosive to US politics and democracy.
And, last week, when far-right congressman, and loyal Trump adherent, Jim Jordan of Ohio challenged the head of DHS over this apparently new board, Mayorkas stood his ground.
“Congressman, the Disinformation Board addresses disinformation that imperils the safety and security of our homeland,” Mayorkas said. “And one of the primary areas that we are focused on is the dissemination of disinformation and its … connectivity to violence.”
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