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TIME mag chooses Ministry of Truth Mary Poppins as one of its ‘most influential people in AI’

September 8, 2023 | | Print Article

Time magazine is facing mockery for choosing a censorious far-leftist as one of its “most influential people in AI.”

Published this week, the list of the “most influential people in AI” includes Nina Jankowicz, a radical far-leftist who thinks any dissenting facts and opinions are a form of so-called “disinformation.”

Jankowicz became a household name in conservative homes last year when the Biden administration installed her as the head of the so-called Disinformation Governance Board, a veritable “Ministry of Truth” designed to censor speech.

She was admittedly a perfect fit for the job given her history of claiming that virtually every single Republican talking point is a form of “disinformation”:

Both the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board and Jankowicz’ appointment to it prompted massive backlash, with conservatives, libertarians, and others accusing the administration of trying to silence dissenting speech.

While grilling Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas at the time, Republican Sen. Rand Paul noted that the government is in no position to determine what is or isn’t truthful given its own record of promoting disinformation.

“Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government. Are you familiar with McNamara, the Pentagon Papers? Are you familiar with George W. Bush and the weapons of mass destruction? Are you familiar with Iran Contra? … I don’t trust government to figure out what the truth is,” he said.

Besides being a censor, Jankowicz is also a proponent of critical race theory (CRT), a racial essentialist ideology that seeks to organize all people into a racial hierarchy where the supposed “oppressed” are granted the most rights and the supposed “oppressors” are granted the least.

It’s based on the idea that the discrimination and injustices committed in the past by whites and males can only be rectified by modern discrimination and injustice against whites and males, especially white males.

According to reports, Jankowicz even includes quotes from the founder of CRT in her 2020 book, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict.”

Of course, none of these countervailing facts are mentioned in Time’s puff piece about Jankowicz. Instead the piece follows her own pattern of thinking by automatically accusing all of her critics of spreading disinformation.

“[H]ours into her appointment, the then 33-year-old became the target of a sustained disinformation campaign herself. Right-wing trolls on the internet waged continuous attacks that included allegations that she was transgender and infertile,” the piece reads.

“Prominent Republicans and Fox News, mining conservative perceptions of leftist bias in tech, derisively dubbed the board a ‘ministry of truth.’ Jankowicz eventually resigned, and the U.S. government disbanded the board just three weeks after it was first announced,” it continues.

Critics were flummoxed by Time’s report, with some demanding proof that any conservatives ever accused her of being transgender and infertile.

Twitchy, a conservative publisher, noted for instance that the only so-called “attacks” they ever saw “were people retweeting her old tweets about how the laptop was fake and the Steele dossier was real.”

As in the Hunter Biden laptop that it turns out was REAL, and the infamous Steele dossier that it turns out was fictitious nonsense.

The point is that, for someone who was appointed to combat so-called “disinformation” (which more often than not just refers to any dissenting fact or opinion the left dislikes), Jankowicz is herself a master of actual disinformation.

Even the libertarians at Reason magazine recognized this.

“Jankowicz was a progressive ideologue with a poor track record of identifying misinformation. She had fallen for narratives that had hoodwinked other liberals, including the false notion that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story was a hoax of Russian origin,” the magazine noted back in 2022.

“Federal law enforcement officials played a prominent role in providing cover for this false notion; 50 of them signed a letter asserting the story was Russian disinformation, which provided the mainstream media and social media companies with intellectual cover to suppress the story. There is good reason to worry that Jankowicz’s disinformation board could have done the same had it been up and running at the time.”

Exactly …

Vivek Saxena
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