Sunday, November 19, 2023

Joe Biden's Dusty "Lying About Lying" Ass Needs To Be Banned

jonathanturley  | Below is my column in The Messenger on the view of diplomats in the Biden Administration that the President is spreading “misinformation.” My interest in the story is less the merits than the allegation. The President is facing the same allegation of ignoring fact and spreading disinformation that has resulted in thousands being banned or blacklisted on social media. The Biden Administration has pushed for such censorship in areas where doctors and pundits held opposing views on subjects ranging from Covid-19 to climate control. The question is whether Joe Biden himself should be banned under the standards promulgated by his own Administration.

Here is the column:

An internal State Department dissent memo was leaked this past week, opposing the Biden administration’s position on the war between Israel and Hamas. What was most notable about the memo is that some administration staffers accused President Joe Biden of “spreading misinformation.”

It was a moment of crushing irony for some of us who have written and testified against the Biden administration’s censorship efforts. The question is whether, under the administration’s own standards, President Biden should now be banned or blacklisted to protect what his administration has called our “cognitive infrastructure.”

For years, the administration and many Democrats in Congress have resisted every effort to expose the sprawling government censorship program that one federal judge described as an “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.'” As I have written previously, it included grants to academic and third-party organizations to create a global system of blacklists and to pressure advertisers to withdraw support from conservative sites.

Most recently, a House Judiciary Committee report revealed another layer of this system, described as a “switchboarding” role for the censorship system by channeling demands for removal or bans from state and local officials. This switchboarding process was confirmed by Brian Scully of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), during prior court testimony. CISA’s director, Jen Easterly, previously declared the administration’s intent to extend its role over maintaining critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure” and combating not just mis- and disinformation but also “malinformation,” which CISA describes as “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

As a result, over the last four years, researchers, politicians, and even satirical sites have been banned or blacklisted for offering dissenting views of COVID measures, climate change, gender identity or social justice, according to the House Judiciary report. No level of censorship seemed to be sufficient for President Biden, who once claimed that social media companies were “killing people” by not silencing more dissenting voices.

Now, though, President Biden himself is accused — by some in his own administration — of spreading misinformation and supporting war criminals.

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