McCarthy Redux

Pop Quiz

What Federal official said: “We should view (the Hunter Biden laptop) as a Trump campaign product,” because of the “involvement of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Trump associate Steve Bannon.”?

What US Senator said: “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer – the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in Government we can give.”?

What celebrated Georgetown graduate said: “Back on the ‘laptop from hell,’ apparently—Biden notes 50 former natsec officials and 5 former CIA heads that believe the laptop is a Russian influence op.”?

What author noted: “Whether or not my ideas on censorship via the fire department will be old hat by this time next week, I dare not predict. But when the wind is right, a faint odor of kerosene is exhaled from Senator McCarthy.”?

Who said: “Trump had not one, but two secret email servers to communicate with influential Russian bank. Unbelievable.”?

Answers at the end of this post.

George Santayana made a poignant observation when he said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is a sad consequence of our woefully inadequate education system that we are enduring a time of national perturbation which, to our so-called elites, has no precedent. There has always been a question as to how we identify misinformation and disinformation, dissipate the political squid ink and ultimately bring truth to the national dialogue.

A Short History Lesson

Seventy years ago we elected Dwight Eisenhower President after twenty years of “progressive” Democrat rule. That two decade period was marked by a totally ineffective response to the Great Depression, a mass genocide in Europe and two wars…WWII and Korea. Eisenhower was elected to manage the transition from war to peace and to preside over the regeneration of the US economy. Sadly he was not the most powerful political figure in America.

A Republican Senator from Wisconsin was engaged in a national witch hunt. Joseph McCarthy billed his megalomaniacal obsession as the “final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.” His minions scoured the country for people who could be identified as communist sympathizers, fellow travelers or unwitting agents of the world-wide communist conspiracy. They used the International Information Administration, an agency of the State Department, to track down literature that was deemed sympathetic to the communist philosophy. Books were removed from libraries at US government facilities…a figurative book burning.

The Senator conducted an organized campaign of fear mongering seeking out any person who had any contact with a known or suspected communist sympathizer, attended a meeting of any group that was deemed to have leftist leanings, real or imagined, or had accessed any book or magazine that was identified as communist propaganda. This campaign of domestic terror was driven by a group of government agents who had the power to identify any group or organization as a “communist front” based on little or no actual evidence.

McCarthyism was a crusade that endorsed the use of unfair allegations and investigations in an effort to hunt down people who might be subject to extortion by the communist party because of suspected personal behavior, generally homosexuality. In short, the premise for McCarthy’s entire reign of terror was disinformation and he was ruthless in ensuring that no one had a platform to challenge his baseless allegations. Those who wanted to correct the record were bullied into silence. His victims were smeared by innuendo. His interviews were punctuated by the question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?”

In the McCarthy era careers and lives were ruined, information was suppressed and/or distorted and people lived in fear that they would be identified erroneously as a “conscious articulate agent of the communist conspiracy.” Truth took a holiday.

Are We Condemned to Repeat It?

The term McCarthyism is now used as a political vilification. Eisenhower said at the time that “freedom cannot be censored into existence.” Nonetheless we appear doomed to repeat the reprehensible practices of the late and unlamented Senator because few people remember the scorched earth practices of McCarthyism and its reliance on disinformation, unfair allegations and distortions.

Today the accusatory question has become: “Have you ever voted for Donald Trump, supported Donald Trump or worn MAGA gear in public?” The ultra, mega MAGA voters are, according to our benighted President, the “most extreme group in American History” even including, one must assume, the Democrat party military wing aka the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and Fa-Antifa.

The enforcement tool is the campaign against misinformation and disinformation as defined by the Ministry of Truth, the leftist media and the Democrat party. And now the hapless maladministration of President Houseplant has created a Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) to be managed by a “expert” on the topic, Nina Jankowicz. Ms. Jankowicz (aka Scary Poppins) is to Georgetown what AOC is to Boston University…the best argument against the accreditation of those ersatz institutions.

It was depressing to watch the mental munchkin Alejandro Mayorkas try to dance around the description of the DGB’s mandate without using the word censorship. Senator Paul took a shot at nailing Jell-O to the wall by trying to pin the over-matched DHS Secretary down about what exactly constitutes mis and disinformation. Disinformation, according to the very small brains of Jankowicz and Mayorkas, involves a “connectivity to violence”. In actuality it involves, quite simply, any direct or indirect connection to anything that relates to former President Trump. Trump is seen as a disinformation pinata by the left and he is to be destroyed by “any means necessary”.

Senator Paul managed to make Mayorkas look like the fool that he is by asking two simple questions: Who defines what constitutes misinformation or disinformation? And who is the arbiter of truth? Basically the Mayorkas response was to introduce Nina Jankowicz, the new Joe McCarthy.

Misinformation is subjective and/or mistaken data that is not produced with malice aforethought. To describe Hilliary Clinton as a pleasant and charming woman is misinformation because the truth or obvious falsity of the statement is of no consequence. Ric Blaine says he went to Casablanca for the water and Captain Renault replies that there is no water in Casablanca. Blaine admits he was misinformed. No autopsy, no foul.

Disinformation involves the intentional misrepresentation of the facts and is done with malevolence. In today’s political climate there are several specific categories of information that are subject to McCarthyesque attacks: allegations of electoral fraud in 2020; denial of the so-called existential climate crisis; discussion of the source of Covid and the efficacy of our response to the pandemic; and dissent from the undisputed maxim regarding Russian collusion against our “democracy”. These are the pillars of the new McCarthyism.

The enforcement tools are the censorious algorithms of the MOT, the slanted coverage by the left wing media and the reinforcement of the leftist catechism in the state run schools.

The 2020 Election

The new Dinesh D’Souza movie and book entitled 2000 Mules is a tour de force exposing the actual fraud surrounding mail in ballots. The “fact checking” by the left of this movie has been pathetic and duplicitous. These truth deniers have actually argued that the use of cell phone tracking data to tie videos of cars engaged in the illegal deposition of mail in ballots at drop boxes is, they argue, unreliable. Yet the use of cell phones to track the tourists on Capitol Hill on January 6 is ballyhooed as the best of criminal enforcement. The Navarro Report by Peter Navarro, Neither Free nor Fair by Joel Pollak and Rigged by Mollie Hemingway all document wholesale election fraud.

Climate Change

Any suggestion that there is no scientific support for the climate cooling in the 1970’s, morphing to climate warming in the 1990s, then to climate chaos when the warming “paused” and finally to existential climate crisis is forcefully suppressed by the leftist establishment. Claim: polar bears are dying. Truth: the polar bear population has grown dramatically. Claim: increased CO2 levels threaten all life on the planet. Truth: Takeda Kunihiko, vice chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University has postulated that: “CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or the other…Every scientist knows this but it doesn’t pay to say so.” CO2 levels were actually higher during the last Ice Age. Claim: global warming over the last 30 years is a threat to our very existence. Truth: The earth has been warming since the end of the last Ice Age and this warming has been a huge benefit to the planet. (And please disregard the pearl clutching about climate cooling in the 1970’s). Claim: climate models clearly project an almost asymptotic increase in temperatures over the next century. Truth: the models have been dead wrong in projecting temperatures over the past 20 years. Models predict the past with great accuracy but for the future not so much.

Covid

Claim: the Covid virus did not originate at the virology institute in Wuhan and to suggest otherwise was xenophobic disinformation. Truth: there is now a consensus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was in fact the source and, to make matters worse, the US government provided funding for the gain of function research. Claim: Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were not efficacious with respect to treating Covid. Truth: nations around the world used these prophylactic medicines to treat Covid patients and hundreds of thousands of lives were saved. In the US Dr. Anthony Kervorkian Fauci suppressed the use of those two drugs to protect the profits of Big Pharma. Fauci lied, people died.

Russian Collusion

Claim: the Steele Dossier was proof that Putin and Trump shared the same hot tub while planning the hijacking of the 2016 election. Truth: the dossier was the work product of Fusion GPS, Team Clinton and Hans Christian Anderson. Claim: Trump’s assertion he was surveilled in Trump Tower before and after the election was definitively identified as disinformation right up until he was proven correct. Claim: Trump had two secret servers connected to Alfa Bank in Russia. Truth: John Durham has handed down several indictments of the Clinton operatives who actually set up the servers. Claim: Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation and, as such, the MOT censored the story until after the election. Truth: even the NYT has now (grudgingly) admitted that the laptop is real and the information thereon has been confirmed. Did it affect the election? Polls shows as much as one in six Biden voters (the actual voters and not the fictitious mail in voters) would not have voted for the man who vanquished Cornpop had they known about the laptop. Oops!

So who will define disinformation and what is the truth? And when something that has been identified as disinformation is later found to be true who will correct the record? See the pop quiz answers to understand the problem. The simple answer is that we don’t need the DGB or the halfwit who will manage the Board. Let the arguments be made in the open arena of ideas without editorial assistance.

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” James Madison (T)rumps Nina Jankowicz

Random thoughts:

In 2004 the Democrats held a “Take Back America” Conference. Illinois State Senator Barrack Obama spoke at that Conference. When the Tea Party Movement, founded in 2009, wanted to “Take Back America” it became, as if by magic, racist and anti-Obama.

Criticism of Elon Musk will be censored because he is, after all, an African-American.

One must appreciate the irony of protests against the repeal of Roe v. Wade being conducted on Mother’s Day!

Great T-shirt quote: Make Orwell Fiction Again

Things Charles Dodgson could never have, with a straight face, put in Alice in Wonderland: The Oregon legislature now requires tampons and other menstrual cycle products to be included in ALL school bathrooms. You will weep openly if you watch the legislature actually debating the question as to whether “boys” menstruate.

Pop Quiz answers:

What Federal bureaucrat said: “We should view (the Hunter Biden laptop) as a Trump campaign product,” because of the “involvement of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Trump associate Steve Bannon.”? Nina Jankowicz, the Georgetown genius herself, spreading disinformation…never corrected.

What US Senator said: “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer – the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in Government we can give.”? Joe McCarthy

What celebrated Georgetown graduate said: “Back on the ‘laptop from hell,’ apparently—Biden notes 50 former natsec officials and 5 former CIA heads that believe the laptop is a Russian influence op.”? Nina Jankowicz, Minister of Truth, spreading disinformation…never corrected.

What author noted: “Whether or not my ideas on censorship via the fire department will be old hat by this time next week, I dare not predict. But when the wind is right, a faint odor of kerosene is exhaled from Senator McCarthy.”? Ray Bradbury

Who said: “Trump had not one, but two secret email servers to communicate with influential Russian bank. Unbelievable.”? Scary Poppins, human truth detector, spreading disinformation…never corrected.