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Oh, really? Nina Jankowicz complains criticism of her bias was ‘wildly of out context’

May 19, 2022 | | Print Article

(Video: MSNBC)

Former Disinformation Governance Board czar Nina Jankowicz is facing backlash for suggesting that she was run off the now-defunct board because of so-called “disinformation” and not because she’s a partisan actor.

Speaking on MSNBC late Wednesday, she said she’s always “prided myself over my career of being a really nuanced, reasonable person. … To say that I’m just a partisan actor was wildly out of context.”

This remark triggered intense pushback, with critics pointing to the dozens of examples disproving her claim: She pushed the Russia collusion delusion hoax and conspiracy theory, she smeared the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and she dismissed concerns about the teaching of racial essentialism in schools, etc.

Continuing her remarks, Jankowicz also defended the extremely controversial Disinformation Governance Board, claiming that despite its Orwellian name and the Biden administration’s track record, its intention had nothing to do with silencing dissent.

“All these sensationalist narratives about what people thought the board was going to do were completely wrong. It was a coordinating mechanism. It was meant to, you know, make sure that the very large agency that is the Department of Homeland Security, that people were talking to each other within it,” she said.

She then provided an example concerning alleged “disinformation” after a natural disaster.

“Lets say a foreign adversary like Iran or China perhaps would put out a narrative that says ‘oh, you know, here’s how you get out of this city,’ or ‘here’s where you can find disaster aid.’ That’s the sort of disinformation and misinformation that we were looking to support the department in addressing, to make sure that they had best practices, and most importantly to protect Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy while we are doing all that work,” she claimed.

The problem, critics say, is that both she and the Biden administration have demonstrated time and time again that to them, so-called “disinformation” refers or has referred to any dissenting idea or thought, even if the idea is backed by evidence.

“Disinformation” has referred to evidence-backed assertions that cloth masks are useless, that natural immunity is as protective as vaccine immunity, that this administration’s policies have exacerbated inflation, that spending even more money would exacerbate it further, that this administration is funding crack pipes for drug addicts, that this administration hasn’t actually created any new jobs, etc.

Concluding her remarks on MSNBC, Jankowicz then accused her critics of spreading “disinformation.”

“Frankly, it’s kind of ironic that the board itself was taken over by disinformation when it was meant to fight it,” she said, referencing her critics.

But critics say that she proved their point by automatically labeling their dissenting critiques “disinformation,” despite the critiques being backed by legitimate evidence.

Evidence such as the following clip in which Jankowicz applied the “disinformation” label to several factual ideas (such as the fact that biological men are men) and several opinions (such as the opinion that Vice President Kamala Harris “slept her way to the top”):

Her poor judgment vis-a-vis the definition of “disinformation” has many in the public, not just conservatives, convinced that she shouldn’t be in charge of a board tasked with rooting out “disinformation.”

In fact, to critics, such a board shouldn’t even exist in the first place, because government — any government — should never have the power to control the flow of information and ideas. Because when a government does obtain such power, totalitarianism invariably comes next …

Vivek Saxena
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