Goodbye Disinformation Board, Hello Disinformation Index. Less than a year after many celebrated the disbanding of the Biden’s Administration Disinformation Board, it appears that the Administration has been funding a British group to rank sites to warn people about high-risk disinformation sites. Gabe Kaminsky at the Washington Examiner previously ran a story on the Index. The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) has released its index and every one of the high-risk sites turn out to be . . . wait for it . . . conservative or libertarian sites. HuffPost or Mother Jones (which were also analyzed), but HuffPost made the top list of most trustworthy for potential advertisers. It turns out that the “riskiest online news outlets” just happen to be some of the most popular sites for conservatives, libertarians, and independents. [N.B.: After my Hill column ran, the National Endowment for Democracy wrote to inform me that it had decided to stop funding the Global Disinformation Index].
The GDI is designed to steer advertisers and subscribers away from certain sites, potentially draining sites of revenue needed to operate. The organization issues the index to “advertisers and the ad tech industry in assessing the reputational and brand risk when advertising with online media outlets and to help them avoid financially supporting disinformation online.” The State Department is partially funding the effort. The Biden Administration gave $330 million to The National Endowment for Democracy, which partially supports the GDI’s budget.
GDI warned advertisers that these sites could damage their reputations and brands: New York Post, Reason, Real Clear Politics, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, One America News Network, The Federalist, Newsmax, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative.
The inclusion of the New York Post is particularly notable. It is ranked in the top ten newspapers in the country and the top ten digital news sites. (For full disclosure, I have written for the newspaper as well as many of those on the trusted side of the GDI ledger). The New York Post was suspended by social media companies over the Hunter Biden story before the 2020 election by companies relying on false stories appearing in many of the most trustworthy sites listed by GDI.
The allegedly dangerous sites also included Reason, a website associated with UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh, who was clearly gobsmacked by the warning. Reason regularly posts insightful and substantive analysis from conservative and libertarian scholars. With the diminishing number of such academics on faculties, the site is a relative rarity in offering a different take on cases and legal issues. The inclusion of Reason in the listing is absurd and shows an utter lack of objective and reliable criteria. For example, GDI says that the site offers “no information regarding authorship attribution, pre-publication fact-checking or post-publication corrections processes, or policies to prevent disinformation in its comments section.” That is obviously untrue as any cursory review of the site would confirm. The Reason articles contain clear indications of authorship.
Moreover, there is a reason why Reason does not have policies posted on the removal of disinformation: it opposes content moderation policies of groups like GDI on free speech grounds. Reason like my own blog Res Ipsa (www.jonathanturley.org) opposes disinformation “processes” used to limit free speech. As Volokh noted, “Reason does not specifically police disinformation in the comments section; that is perhaps an area where Reason‘s philosophy—free minds and free markets—clashes with GDI’s.”
The GDI reviewed sites on the far left like Mother Jones that routinely run unsupported attacks on the right and debunked theories on Russian collusion or other claims. For example, many of the sites ranked as most reliable only recently admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation. For two years, these sites spread this false story with little or no opposing viewpoints despite early refutation by American intelligence.
Even in 2021, NPR still claimed that “The laptop story was discredited by U.S. intelligence and independent investigations by news organizations.” After a chorus of objections to the clearly false story, it corrected the story but still stated falsely that “numerous news organizations cast doubt on the credibility of the laptop story.” It never explained the continuing “doubt”? Media organizations that effectively imposed a blackout on the story had already confirmed that the laptop was authentic.
Likewise, sites like NPR continued to make the false claim that former Attorney General Bill Barr cleared Lafayette Park for a photo op long after the claim was proven to be categorically untrue. The government-supported news outlet also has been routinely challenged for making biased or false claims about conservatives, including Supreme Court justices.
Nevertheless, the New York Post and Reason are listed as dangerous sites while sites like HuffPost are actually listed at the top of the least risky disinformation sites. HuffPost is regularly challenged on false or misleading attacks on conservatives.
None of that means that I would put NPR or Mother Jones or HuffPost on a do-not-advertise disinformation list. These are sites with a well-known liberal bent just as other sites have a conservative bent. I am not here to denounce those sites any more than I am here to defend the other sites for their content. Rather the concern is that GDI is applying skewed measures to target disfavored sites. It is concerning that the sites at either extreme of GDI’s spectrum of disinformation largely reflect the political spectrum. (One exception is the Wall Street Journal, which is in the most trustworthy grouping).
GDI accuses sites like Reason of lacking transparency on issues like authorship but the group is fairly opaque on its own conclusions and standards. The explanations for tagging these sites are riddled with subjective and ambiguous terms. For example, GDI includes RealClearPolitics due to what GDI considers “biased and sensational language.” Did the reviewers actually visit the sites of Mother Jones and HuffPost in evaluating comparative levels of bias? Were those sites paragons of neutrality and circumspection?
GDI further says that RealClearPolitics “lacked clear and diverse sources.” Many of the sites ranked as most reliable (and thus worthy of advertising revenue) are routinely criticized for excluding conservative or libertarian perspectives. HuffPost and Mother Jones have a range of diversity that runs from the left to the far left.
The New York Times has led efforts to exclude opposing voices from the right. In 2020, the the Times issued a cringing apology for running a column by Sen. Tom Cotton. The Times forced out editor James Bennet and apologized for publishing Cotton’s column calling for the use of the troops to restore order in Washington after days of rioting around the White House. (Bennet recently denounced his former newspaper for abandoning journalistic standards of balance).
The GDI disinformation index shows the very favoritism that it attributes to others. For example, in discouraging advertisers from supporting the New York Post, the group declares that “content sampled from the Post frequently displayed bias, sensationalism and clickbait, which carries the risk of misleading the site’s reader.” The line reflects the utter lack of self-awareness of self-appointed monitors of disinformation. There is no effort to explain what constitutes “clickbait” or “sensationalism” in comparison to more favored sites like HuffPost.
The fact that GDI reflects such bias is not particularly surprising. Disinformation efforts have long displayed pronounced political influences and agendas. Indeed, we have seen recent disclosures of how members of Congress like Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.) secretly sought to use disinformation claims to ban critics, including a columnist, from social media.
What is more troubling is the funding of the United States government for a group seeking to target conservative sites and deter advertisers from supporting them. I recently testified on the disclosures of the Twitter Files and the confirmation of coordination by the FBI and other federal agencies with social media companies in censoring citizens. I noted that the Administration played the public for chumps. After yielding to an outcry over the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board, the Administration disbanded it. It never mentioned that a far larger censorship effort was being carried out with an estimated 80 federal employees in targeting citizens and others. While the GDI effort is smaller in comparison and effect, it is an additional facet of this effort. It is not known if the Administration has other programs of this kind and the Democrats continue to vehemently oppose any investigation into these free speech concerns.
In other words, the Board was just a shiny object that distracted from a far more comprehensive effort to censor and control speech on social media. I still would not call it disinformation but one might call it deceitful.
NB: After this column ran, the NED wrote me to emphasize that the Biden Administration did not direct its funding of the GDI.
Jonathan, please excuse us for not believing you, your a deep state rat!
Hack GDI! Burn their AI up!
Have been running a few queries about all this on Ggle lately which have yielded some illuminating results. First, the founder of the GDI is Dr Daniel Rogers who is connected to a Chinese man named Houlin Zhao. Also, you recently mentioned a woman named Anika Collier Navaroli who was described merely as a former Twitter executive. She may be a specialist in so-called Critical Race Theory, so it’s unclear what exactly she was doing at Twitter. It gets murkier & murkier!
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” George Orwell
Turley, do you see what being “moderate” gets you? Don’t pretend that you weren’t warned or didn’t know. You stood with this leftist crowd for decades, and now you want to say “oh, but that’s not what I meant”?
Stretch71: Do you realize how important folks like Turley, Bari Weiss, and Naomi Wolfe are to conservatives? Even at times Bill Maher can be an ally to our side. These people are old-school liberals who seemingly enjoy freedom of speech. At this time in our culture, they are worth their weight in gold.
libturds are excellent at getting around the law. Maybe King Charles will uphold our rights, when he takes over our gov?
Fox News Responds To Dominion Briefs
In its motion for summary judgment filed Thursday, Fox News wrote that “statements Dominion challenges are not actionable defamation because Fox News’ coverage and commentary are not only not defamatory, but also protected by the First Amendment and New York doctrines emanating from it.”
“Dominion has come nowhere close to producing the ‘clear and convincing’ evidence that the relevant individuals at Fox News made or published any challenged statement with actual malice,” the Fox motion said.
Fox News, in a statement, said, “There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”
In an amended counter claim, Fox News also called into question Dominion’s damage claim, writing that “even under the most optimistic projections, Staple Street has never estimated Dominion’s value as a business to be anywhere near $1.6 billion.” Staple street is the majority owner of Dominion.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/fox-news-hosts-called-2020-election-fraud-total/story?id=97261751
They Didn’t Believe It Themselves
Yet Fox News Promoted False Election Claims
Newly disclosed messages and testimony from some of the biggest stars and most senior executives at Fox News revealed that they privately expressed disbelief about President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air.
The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems.
The messages also show that such doubts extended to the highest levels of the Fox Corporation, with Rupert Murdoch, its chairman, calling Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims “really crazy stuff.”
The filing, in state court in Delaware, contains the most vivid and detailed picture yet of what went on behind the scenes at Fox News and its corporate parent in the days and weeks after the 2020 election, when the conservative cable network’s coverage took an abrupt turn.
The brief shows that Fox News stars and executives were afraid of losing their audience, which started to defect to the conservative cable news alternatives Newsmax and OAN after Fox News called Arizona for Mr. Biden. And they seemed concerned with the impact that would have on the network’s profitability.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/business/media/fox-dominion-lawsuit.html
More From Dominion Briefs:
Fox News Was Deeply Concerned About Ratings Slide!
“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make… good journalists do bad things,” Bill Sammon, Fox News’ Washington Managing Editor, privately wrote on Dec. 2, 2020. Network executives above him stewed over the hit to Fox News’ brand among its viewers.
The audience started to erode severely starting on Election Night. Fox executives and stars were equally obsessed over the threat posed by the smaller right-wing network Newsmax.
Hannity texted Carlson and Ingraham that Fox’s Arizona call “destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.” Carlson shot back that it was “vandalism.” Others hosts, including Dana Perino, were equally shocked.
Fox News host Neil Cavuto was attacked by colleagues for pulling his show away from a presentation by then White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany in which she made unfounded claims of fraud once more.
Those revelations and far more surfaced in legal filings made public late Thursday afternoon as part of Dominion Voting System’s blockbuster $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox and its parent company.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1157558299/fox-news-stars-false-claims-trump-election-2020
I wonder if Turley will address the fact that Fox News was feeding their viewers lies to keep them from fleeing to other news sites. So much for integrity and truth. Trump supporters were being taken for the fools they are by Fox News all in the name of ratings.
They knew the voter fraud claims were not true but they still pushed them anyway. It’s not surprising given past behavior. Democrats were right all along.
You’re calling Trump supporters fools after seeing the weaponization of the IRS, FBI, CIA, and DOJ fully exposed by Elon Musk. Do you not count the suppression of criminality and corruption by Joe Biden prior to an election voter fraud or interference? Do you not call the Steele dossier and spying on the Trump campaign election fraud and interference? Do you not call Mail in ballot harvesting illegal and fraudulent? You want to call someone a fool, look in the mirror!
Yet
Foxall major media News Promoted FalseElection ClaimsRussia collusion claims for years, and still do.I wouldn’t worry about it. The parallel economy is rising up, and conservative advertisiers will just use the list to find suitable hosts for their ads 👍
The troll activity is really getting nuts here, guys. It makes sense on ad-supported sites; they post intentionally inflammatory material for eyeballs, search engine optimization, and ad revenue. On a free site like this trolls appear to sow discord and discredit, and that’s about it. I apologize for getting impatient lately, hope I haven’t offended, but this is getting silly. Thank goodness Res Ipsa *can’t* be defunded in that manner. The left is nervous, and when they get nervous, they attack, ban, and shut things down (or at least attempt to).
James,
In the past, I have called it, “they are getting desperate.”
As you point out, Res Ipsa cannot get shut down or defunded.
I think that upsets them. Hence they are getting shrill and their whataboutism is at a froth.
Side note, as a result of their desperation, I have read some of their comments.
I believe the stance you and HullBobby about push back has changed my mind.
They are the bullies on the playground. How to stop a bully? Dont run. Stop. Turn around. And punch him really hard in the nose.
We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth. … We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us
– Vladimir Lenin
BLM, ANTIFA, MSM, Leftists, and apparently DOJ, FBI, CIA, US State Dept, George Soros funded DAs, …you get the picture…all Marxists employing Vladimir Lenin’s tactics of brutal repression at all costs.
“With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a systematic religious persecution began which would, throughout the history of the USSR, involve the murder of between 12 and 20 million Christians. In 1914 the Russian Orthodox Church had 55,173 churches, 29,593 chapels, 550 monasteries and 475 convents: the vast majority of them were closed and destroyed by the Communists. Something similar happened with the 5,000 Jewish synagogues and the 25,000 Muslim mosques that were in Russian territory in 1917. Before the Revolution there were also 112,629 priests and deacons and 95,259 monks and nuns of the Orthodox Church. The Communists unleashed brutal persecution against them.”
https://www.outono.net/elentir/2020/04/22/lenin-numbers-data-and-images-of-the-crimes-of-the-first-communist-dictator/
A big thanks to Barry Sotero! Loaded up the agencies with his Marxist fellowship, weaponized the agencies and created the MSM propaganda arm of the DNC. I read he’s at a billion somewhere now, a Marxist Capitalist Pig…
If Jeff Silberman were still around, no doubt he’d be commenting on all of the Fox / Dominion / Smartmatic news in the last couple of days. Fox News lost an attempt to shut down the multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuit that accuses the network of spreading lies that Smartmatic helped “steal” the 2020 election from Trump. And today in the Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News defamation case, both sides filed summary-judgment motions. Dominion’s brief has a lot of damning findings from discovery.
Do you have a name for the case and the name of the court? I would like to read the motion papers.
Here’s a copy of Dominion’s motion:
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/redacted-documents-in-dominion-fox-news-case/dca5e3880422426f/full.pdf
And Fox’s motion:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23684830-public-version-fnns-first-amended-counterclaim-accepted
The saddest (and scariest) thing of all is the Millennials do not support total freedom of speech. They support censorship. They are so far removed from the realities of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Bloc that they have absolutely no concept of what an authoritarian regime is like and how so many fled to America to escape those vile regimes. Quite sad, especially for Jewish Millennials who should be more attuned to the circumstances that led to the Holocaust, including the quashing of speech, political association, and the elimination of dissenting voices in the media.
Jonathan: I can understand your consternation by the GDI report. You think it’s an attack targeting “conservatives, libertarians, and independents”. I read the GDI report that I think is something quite different. Here’s my take.
The GDI is an analysis of 69 news sites–ranking them according to the degree to which they engage in disinformation. The NY Post is at the top of the list for news outlets that regularly engage in disinformation. The GDI says: “The NY Post was rated as high-risk, largely because of its lack of transparency around operational policies and practices. The site published no public guidelines for the use of bylines on its content, the types and number of sources its content relies on, or pre-publication fact checking or post-publication corrections processes”. That was an important metric in the GDI report–something you don’t mention. So what are some of the other reasons the Post might be considered the most likely to engage in disinformation?
The NY Post is a tabloid specializing in sensationalism .Most New Yorkers find the Post the least-credible major news source in the city. That’s because of the low quality sourcing and sensationalized writing and headlines–and, of course, the conservative bias of its owner Rupert Murdock–who you work for as a “legal analyst”. But the Post is the most popular tabloid in the country. Why? If you believe in right-wing conspiracy theories you will be an avid reader of the Post. It’s “confirmation bias”. The following is a good example of how the Post sensationalizes the news and engages in disinformation.
On 2/2 you published an article in the Post and here (“All Clear”) about the FBI investigation of the classified material found at Pres. Biden’s office and homes. In one of the Post articles you cited, the tabloid published several photos of Joe and Hunter Biden. One photo was of Joe Biden seated in his Corvette in front of his open garage with boxes and other objects that can vaguely be made out inside the garage. There was a red circle around that material. The Post caption under that photo read: “Classified documents were found at President Biden’s house in Wilmington, Delaware”. Another photo shows a box marked “Important Docs + photos”. An avid reader of the Post might find confirmation in the photos that Biden was hoarding classified material. But an objective analysis of the photos shows nothing of the sort. Something I pointed out in my comment to your column.
The NY Post specializes in sensationalism and disinformation. That’s why the GDI put the tabloid at the top of its list as one of the “Riskiest Sites”. That you choose to publishes your columns almost exclusively in the Post is your right. I have wondered lately why you no longer publish in the NY Times or Washington Post. You like working for Murdock. Apparently it pays well. Could it be that part of your contract includes writing only for Fox and the Post? Just wondering. In any case, you went to the “Crossroads” and made a pact with the Devil–like the father of the blues Robert Johnson–and now you have to live with the consequences–being now closely associated with the Post that engages in wholesale disinformation.
“Jonathan: I can understand your consternation by the GDI report. You think it’s an attack targeting “conservatives, libertarians, and independents”. I read the GDI report that I think is something quite different. Here’s my take.”
****************************
Here’s my take: You wanna buy a bridge?
any thoughts on the Hunter laptop story?
Dennis – No one believes that the GDI developed “metrics” for “disinformation” and then determined that the NYP and other conservative media failed to meet GDI’s standards. The reverse happened. Conservative media were targeted for indirect censorship (by discouraging advertising) and then the “metrics” were devised to give cover to this plan. Your screed does not support your thesis. Look at your second paragraph. Even though your article is about “disinformation”, you fail to adduce a single example. Instead we are serenaded with rhetoric about transparency. In your third paragraph, you tell us that most New Yorkers consider the NYP to be an unreliable source of information. That’s odd. It has a circulation of over 230,000, and many more visitors to its website (including me). New Yorkers must really be dim if they read newspapers in order to be misinformed. If you say that people read it to find confirmation of their views, I would say that the charge can better be made against the NYT. Your third paragraph claims that the NYP was deceptive in putting a circle over documents in a picture of Joe Biden’s garage, thereby suggesting that they were classified documents. As noted before, no one (except Biden) can know for sure whether those documents were classified or not. But is certainly a reasonable conjecture. If you want to find a clearer case of disinformation, look at the WP’s article the day after the MAL raid, which quoted an anonymous source (of course) that documents relating to nuclear secrets were found a MAL. That inflammatory charge has now been abandoned. Your final paragraph is a good example of your bias. Without any specifics, you say that the NYP specializes in sensationalism and disinformation. Then you suggest that Prof Turley publishes exclusively in that paper because Murdock pays him well. Is there some problem in getting paid well? You say that Turley is now “closely associated” with the “wholesale disinformation” of the NYP becauses he publishes in that paper. Would you say that anyone who publishes a column in the NYT is associated with the Russia-Trump collusion hoax, which the NYT relentlessy promoted?
Edwardmahl: So you think GDI already had a prejudice against the Post and developed its metrics on disinformation specifically to target that tabloid? If you really believe that, nothing I point out could change your opinion. The Biden administration may want to use the GDI findings for their own purposes but that doesn’t mean the GDI report was biased against the Post. As an admitted reader of the Post do you think they are unbiased? As of last year the Post had 146,649 readers. How many people live in NY City? About 8.5 million. Most news readers in NY don’t treat the Post as an objective or unbiased news site.
Now I did cite an example of the disinformation in the Post. See the 4th paragraph of my comment. Turley cited that Post article in his 2/2 column. The photos the Post attached to its article don’t support your “reasonable conjecture” that they provide evidence of Biden storing classified docs at his home. As a former attorney if I tried to use those photos to buttress such a claim I would be laughed out of court. I might even be sanctioned by the judge! To get those photos into evidence I would have to authenticate them. I would have to have witnesses–the person who took the photos to testify they were found on the Biden premises, that the contents of the boxes contained classified materials, etc. The photos by the Post don’t prove anything. It’s just another example of disinformation by the Post.
You are entitled to make any “reasonable conjecture” you want about the photos in the Post. But a “conjecture” is just an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information. Adding “reasonable” doesn’t change the definition. If you want to form your opinions based on incomplete information that, again, is your right. But don’t complain when the facts and evidence show otherwise. Basing your opinions from what you read in the Post or Turley’s columns is a sign you need to expand your reading universe.
“I can understand your consternation by the GDI report. . . .”
That entire comment is a prime example of the Left’s intellectual dishonesty. It’s a long-winded decoy meant to distract from the essential issue: that the GDI “report” is government censorship (this time via the State Department). The Left’s hope is that you’ll get so lost in the weeds of this photo and that headline, that you cannot focus on its desire to suppress dissent.
You address and important point
Trust is a necescity for a functional society.
Unfortunatly you also exemplify the problem.
Our institutions have lost the trust of most people.
Those of you on the left “Trust” entities which have a track record of massive error.
You present a source claiming that NY Post is untrustworthy.
Yet, Where was NY Times, CNN, WaPo, MSNBC, …. in reporting that the Steele Dossier was a Hoax, or that the Alpha Bank claim was a hoax ?
Who was doing actual inverstigative reporting ?
Who got the FACTS right >?
Nor is this about a single issue.
Who got the FACTS right regarding Covid ? Regarding Public Policies to mitigate Covid ?
Who got the fact right on the Hunter Biden Laptop ?
And on and on.
The purpose of the press is NOT to doggedly repeat one side of all issues.
It is not to take what some subset of institutional experts accept as gospel.
The free press exists to stand up to power. To ACTUALLY search for the Truth rather
that accepting what their prefered sources tell them.
You are capable of seeing some of the flaws of the right, but blind to the far larger problems with the left.
I am not personally a big follower of institutional media.
Your Report is obvious garbage – as whatever their problems Fox, and NY Post are far more likely to provide the truth than NYT, CNN or WaPo today.
But that does not make Fox or NY Post reliable sources.
Increasingly I am getting my information from more and more independent journalists.
The Matt Taibbi’s, The Glenn Greenwald’s, the Barri Weis’s
These are mostly real investigative journalists – most of whom lean left, but who have left institutional media,
because they want t report the Truth, not corporate policy.
And the TRUTH today is the same as it has been for 200+ years.
Leftism does not work. It never has.
Conservatives have lots of problems, But one of the CORE things conservatives get RIGHT, core to their set of values,
Is that we should think twice before breaking what is working well enough.
While Change is necescary – the overwhelming majority of change is BAD. Outside of government in the free market,
Bad change, even good change that is just not quite good enough – fails quickly on its own.
But what government does – which is far more often than not failure, is very hard, nearly impossible to fix.
“It’s the [Supreme Court], stupid!”
– James Carville
_____________
America is not communist.
No Stalins here, oh, no, certainly not. Only Lincolns, a century and a half of Lincolns.
___________________________________________________________________
“It Can’t Happen Here”
– Sinclair Lewis
____________
“DISINFORMATION GOVERNANCE BOARD”
What Fresh Hell is next?
___________________
Social Credit System – Chinese Communist Party
The Social Credit System (Chinese: 社会信用体系; pinyin: shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì) is a national credit rating and blacklist being developed by the government of the People’s Republic of China.[1] The social credit initiative calls for the establishment of a record system so that businesses, individuals and government institutions can be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness.[2][3]
– Wiki
_____
Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board is pure unconstitutional communism and must have been immediately struck down by the Supreme Court under the doctrine of Judicial Review. It wasn’t. Upon the emergence of each component, the entire communist American welfare state must have been struck down by the Supreme Court under the doctrine of Judicial Review. It wasn’t.
American freedom persisted for 71 years until “Crazy Abe” Lincoln commenced the nullification of the Constitution and the incremental implementation of the principles of communism. Karl Marx wrote, “They consider it an earnest of the epoch…that it fell to…Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through…the RECONSTRUCTION of a social world.” He did. America is a socialist-cum-communist state.
Congress has the power to tax for ONLY debt, defense and infrastructure, aka general welfare. Congress has the power to regulate ONLY money, commerce and land and naval Forces. Congress has no power to “claim or exercise” dominion over private property. “Crazy Abe” taxed for an unconstitutional war and claimed and exercised dominion over everything. American freedom persisted for only 71 years before Lincoln put it on the path to Karl Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Government exists, under the Constitution and Bill of Rights, to provide maximal freedom to individuals while it is severely limited and restricted to merely facilitating that maximal freedom of individuals through the provision of security and infrastructure.
The Supreme Court is the personification of the Constitution, the Justices of which swear an oath to support its clear meaning and intent. The Supreme Court must support the Constitution, the whole Constitution and nothing but the Constitution, certainly not the Communist Manifesto, so help it God. The Supreme Court was conspicuously absent during Lincoln’s “Reign of Terror.” It has been conspicuously absent ever since.
The Supreme Court acted retroactively by 50 years to strike down the false abortion “rights” of the corrupt Supreme Court of 1973. The Supreme Court must act retroactively by as many as 150 years to correct the unconstitutional dictatorship, “…RECONSTRUCTION of a social world…” and corollary implementation of the principles of communism commenced by Lincoln.
However politically impossible it is considered to be, the remedy for unconstitutional acts by the executive and judicial branches is Judicial Review. The remedy for dereliction of duty by the Supreme Court is impeachment and conviction. The remedy for the failure of Congress to impeach and convict is patriotic American statesmen crossing lines to impeach for the benefit of the Constitution. The remedy for the catastrophic governmental failure to strictly adhere to the Constitution is “…to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
_______
Article 1, Section 8
“The Congress shall have Power…to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare…”
“The Congress shall have Power…to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes;…to coin Money, regulate the Value thereof,…to make Rules for the…Regulation of the land and naval Forces;….”
5th Amendment
“No person shall be…deprived of…property,….”
_____________________________________
“Judicial Review in the United States”
Annotation
The legitimacy of judicial review and the judge’s approach to judicial review are discussed.
Abstract
The doctrine of judicial review holds that the courts are vested with the authority to determine the legitimacy of the acts of the executive and the legislative branches of government.
– U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs
_____________________________________________
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Declaration of Independence, 1776
At 12:19 Svelaz said that the GDI has received a trivial amount of support from the U.S. What difference does that make? They are still supporting an organization that discredits those with which they don’t agree. We are paying for a panel on disinformation without any say so from our elected representatives. They have a phone and a pen and let the law be damned. They use the phone and the pen and then turn around and tell us how they are protecting our Democracy. Socialist Democracy is more like it.
“We are paying for a panel on disinformation without any say so from our elected representatives.”
TiT is an idiot. Your elected representatives did have a say. The funding that goes to the organization IS supported by both parties. It has been since 1983. Congress is funding providing some of the funding. It’s not even guaranteed that taxpayer funds were used in creating the GDI.
Back in 1960 after John Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon. Someone asked senator Everate Dirksen, Republican from Illinois, why didn’t the republicans make an issue out of dead people voting for Kennedy in Chicago. His reply, that’s cause dead people in southern Illinois voted for Nixon. Maybe someday we will have honest fair elections that we can easily accept the outcome.
In a trial a Southern small-town prosecuting attorney called his first
witness, a grandmotherly, elderly woman to the stand. He approached her and
asked, “Mrs. Jones, do you know me?”
She responded, “Why, yes, I do know you, Mr. Williams. I’ve known you
since you were a boy, and frankly, you’ve been a big disappointment to me.
You lie, you cheat on your wife, and you manipulate people and talk about
them behind their backs. You think you’re a big shot when you haven’t the
brains to realize you’ll never amount to anything more than a two-bit paper
pusher. Yes, I know you.”
The lawyer was stunned. Not knowing what else to do, he pointed across the
room and asked, “Mrs. Jones, do you know the defense attorney?”
She again replied, “Why yes, I do. I’ve known Mr. Bradley since he was a
youngster, too. He’s lazy, bigoted, and he has a drinking problem. He can’t
build a normal relationship with anyone, and his law practice is one of the
worst in the entire state. Not to mention he cheated on his wife with three
different women. One of them was your wife. Yes, I know him.”
The defense attorney nearly died.
The judge asked both counselors to approach the bench and, in a very quiet
voice said, “If either of you idiots asks her if she knows me, I’ll send
you both to the Electric Chair!”
(OT)
“Leaders of the far-right Proud Boys say they intend to subpoena former President Donald Trump to testify in the ongoing trial pertaining to the group’s alleged conspiracy to forcibly derail the transfer of power from Trump to President Joe Biden.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/16/proud-boys-leaders-facing-jan-6-charges-say-they-intend-to-subpoena-trump-00083234
The Supreme Court is set to reconsider whether to hear a lawsuit alleging President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Vice President Mike Pence, 291 House members, and 94 senators violated their oaths of office by refusing to investigate evidence of fraud in the 2020 election before certifying Biden as the victor on Jan. 6, 2021, allowing for Biden and Harris to be “fraudulently” inaugurated.
…”If a person who takes the Oath of Office owes allegiance to the United States,” Brunson continues, and the U.S. code regarding treason “states that whoever owing such allegiance violates this allegiance shall be incapable of holding office, then wouldn’t it be fitting that they shall be removed from office as well?”
“A total of 147 Republican lawmakers objected to the certification of the election on Jan. 6.”
https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/scotus-reconsider-hearing-2020-election-case-against-biden-harris-pence?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter
Yeah, that was a fun ride round the internet reading background and responses.
“The Proposal”
____________
“There has [sic] to be consequences for voting in favor of legislation that is ruled unconstitutional…”
“Vote in favor of a law ruled unconstitutional? Lose 10% of your voting power for each occurrence.”
– Anonymous
___________
President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Vice President Mike Pence, 291 House members, and 94 senators et al. might be down to about 38.9 percent of their vote by now if the substance of this eminently sagacious proposal were ever adopted.
“A majority of Republicans are Christian nationalists:”
Show us in your own words the proof and the paragraph that proves your contention. It doesn’t pass the smell test. Anyone can make up whatever they want. That is what you did but you aren’t being truthful.
Blah, blah, blah. I didn’t even bother to read the entirety of today’s piece because Turley’s just plain wrong. He tries to make it sound like the list of disinformation sites is biased, and/or that the disinformation they publish is just routine “conservative” viewpoints that are being censored by maninstream media, neither of which is true. One of Turley’s assignments is to attack any entity or person who points out the lies and disinformation of alt-right media, under the guise of “censorship:”, including the new Fox (fake) News theme of “censorship by proxy”. All of the outlets he lists have been, to one extent or another, peddlers of disinformation, including, and especially, the NY Post, another Murdoch outlet, that publishes Turley’s tripe. Here is Turley’s partial list: “New York Post, Reason, Real Clear Politics, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, One America News Network, The Federalist, Newsmax, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative.”
In other disinformation media news, Fox (fake) News host Sean Hannity has admitted he knew that the Big Lie wasn’t true. In fact, Fox (fake) News is trying to defend itself against defamation by claiming that it was just “reporting” Trump’s feelings and his beliefs about the outcome of 2020–not asserting as truthful fact the allegations of widespread voter fraud and/or statements about Smartmatic machines fixing the election in favor of Biden. Gee, did you disciples catch that distinction–Fox claims they weren’t saying the Big Lie and accusations against Smartmatic are true, just that Trump believed them to be true? How about you, Turley? Is that why your pieces are heavily riddled with qualifiers as: “reportedly”, “allegedly”, “claims”, “asserts”–is this done to prevent you from being sued for defamation like Hannity, Bartiromo, Pirro and Giuliani? Smartmatic successfully defeated a motion to dismiss its defamation case against Fox (fake) News hosts and Rudy Giuliani. The statements they published about Smartmatic are (to use a Turley descriptor) “breathtaking”–including the claim that Smartmatic vote tabulation machines were set up to prevent states from cross-checking the accuracy of vote totals and that vote tabulations could be manipulated remotely, neither of which is true. Turley’s piece is supposedly about “deceitfulness”. Why not start with your employer, Turley, and all of the reporting about the Big Lie and what that’s done our our country and people’s faith in the security of our elections?
Blah, blah, blah. I didn’t even bother to read the entirety of today’s piece because Gigi, as always, is just plain wrong.
The usual stream of consciousness posing as pseudo-intellectual analysis is always scripted BS.
Hey, keep the page hits coming though, svelaz has been taking a beating lately, good of you to assume the punching hag role.
“Beggers should be no choosers, but yet they will: Who can bryng a begger from choyse to begge still?”
– John Heywood, 1562
__________________
NUTCHACHACHA, may we sunset affirmative action yet, or do you still need it?
“Blah, blah, blah.” Well, so far we agree. As for the rest of your comment, not so much. But do tell me: why in a free society committed to the principle of free expression, do we need a government-funded “Global Disinformation Index” to instruct us what to read and how to think?
That pesky constitution and representative government keeps getting in the way of the “evil” intentions of those who desire to destroy our nation. Answer? Use corporations, non-elected government agencies and foreign actors to do the dirty work.
If anyone thinks they have a modicum of privacy, they better think again. NSA and other government agencies share facilities with Google and other high tech companies. Now with AI, they can profile a person and design advertisements specifically to a person’s wants and needs. They understand metrics and they have our number. Such technology is only one step away from being used for nefarious purposes.
More than 92% of internet search information is derived from Google searches. They have the power and cleverness to rank information and make it difficult to find other information. Wikipedia also has bias when featuring conservative personalities and certain events.
The key is controlling information.
Caveat Emptor!
The difference between a despotic government and totalitarianism is that in the later, the victims are radicalized, similar to cult members, the victims will “drink the Kool-Aide.”