Who is Nina Jankowicz? Well, she’s head of the new “Disinformation Governance Board” at the Department of Homeland Security. Politico provides a bland, just the facts summary of the kerfuffle/brouhaha/sinister plot, Small group, big headache: Inside DHS’ messy Disinformation Governance Board launch, giving DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas plenty of space to “explain” why something that sounds an awful lot like a big—big and creepy—deal isn’t one—that, among other things, no one should give a damn who Nina is, because the DGB is just one of those tiny, inside the bureaucracy sub-subcommittees whose decisions impact will no one and never go anywhere. Next question?
This is pretty much all that Politico has to say, but compared to the Post it’s volumes, because the Post has nothing on Nina, which is kind of surprising, because she’s written 10 columns for them over the past several years, with titles like Why the Nobel Peace Prize award is a huge blow to Facebook, The threat from deepfakes isn’t hypothetical. Women feel it every day., and Our biggest mistake in the fight against fake news.
Rather bizarrely, no one who has written about Nina—and plenty of people have written about her—seem to be aware of these posts, presumably because they were all written at least a year ago and don’t show up at the top of a Google search. But surely people at the Post know about them, and, it seems, they’re pretending they don’t.
The tone of these pieces isn’t awful—just consistently wrong-headed. They reflect the strong frustration of people of contemporary liberals like President Obama over the failure of their ideas to receive overwhelming public support and the resultant conviction that this failure has to be the result of some sort of hidden malevolence on the part of, well, someone! Otherwise, how can you explain the fact that everyone doesn’t agree with me! It just doesn’t make any sense!
As a result, you get poor Barack complaining about such things as “There are millions of people who subscribed to the notion that Joe Biden is a socialist” and, apparently, believing that “something” needs to be done—and, worse, that something can be done—about people who exaggerate the wickedness of their political enemies. George Soros likened the Bush administration to the Nazis and Communists for engaging in the “politics of fear”, which just might be a little bit out there, but if Barack ever complained about that one, I never heard about it.
The self-righteous rancor with which people like Nina regard the social media is deeply unpleasant to behold. People so painfully unable to grasp any viewpoint other than their own should never be entrusted with power, particularly not the power to tell others what to think. One can only hope that Nina never gets the chance.
Afterwords
Politico’s Jack Shafer, writing at a time before Nina’s name actually surfaced, explains why the DGB is perhaps the dumbest idea the government’s dumbest agency ever had. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson suggests the DGB is “a bad name and a sillier idea”, and hopes that the amount of inept wheel-spinning displayed by DHS Secretary Mayorkas in “describing” the new board will serve as prelude to further ineptitude, ineffectualness, obscurity, and, ulitmately, expunction, to come.
