Thread by @JewhadiTM

Establishment Disinformation Is Killing Western Democracy

Establishment disinformation and censorship are causing more offline harm than any other force. amgreatness.com/2020/10/17/est…

“It is now a proven fact that Hillary Clinton and her Democratic National Committee stooges initiated a coordinated, multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign to undermine Donald Trump and detract from her email scandal.

Establishment media breathlessly amplified false, paranoid, and circular narratives, many of which were greased by actual Russian disinformation laundered through the Steele dossier. Where are the calls from establishment media to identify journalists paid by Fusion GPS?

The FBI knew the Steele dossier and collusion narrative were false, just as they knew Hillary Clinton had weaponized these issues to cover up her email scandal—

and they still used it as a predicate to spy on Trump’s campaign and launch the Mueller investigation, falsifying documents along the way.

The FBI’s actions represent the greatest abuse of law enforcement power in half a century, and they were largely fueled by establishment disinformation.”

“Now consider the destruction and real-world harm caused by narratives about police racism following the death in May of George Floyd.

Many of these narratives were based on falsehoods, anecdotes, and incidents where full information was suppressed to advance Black Lives Matter and Antifa mobilization efforts. The vandalism and looting that took place caused $1 billion to $2 billion in damages.

Homicides are up 24 percent from last year in America’s 50 largest cities.

Of course, the looting and riots took place against the backdrop of the pseudo-academic “1619 Project,” an establishment journalism disinformation effort that subverts the history of America’s founding in a way Russia Today or People’s Daily could only dream of doing.

It would be tempting to dismiss the “1619 Project” as a fringe polemic by radical journalists, except it was sponsored by the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize, and now shapes public school curricula. That’s as established-endorsed as one can get.

But the project is so factually flawed that there is now a movement to revoke its Pulitzer by the National Association of Scholars.

Then there’s the most destructive event of 2020: the pandemic.

Establishment disinformation around COVID-19 is hard to pinpoint, but anyone paying attention can see the wreckage of attempts to advance certain narratives and suppress others. Remember when the U.S. Surgeon General said masks weren’t effective and then flip-flopped?

Or how anyone questioning lockdowns was persecuted? Or how Facebook and Twitter banned posts downplaying COVID’s deadliness? Now even @WHO has moderated its position on lockdowns, which have caused unprecedented job losses, business closures, and economic damage.

Establishment disinformation comes from both sides of the political aisle, but the “woke” radicalization of the Left combined with Trump derangement and a left-leaning media have given it a far-Left flavor.

Thus, fake attacks against Jussie Smollett and Althea Bernstein go unquestioned by the same media that slanders the Covington kids and Brett Kavanaugh. Leaks targeting Trump are not scrutinized or censored in the same way they are when targeting Biden or his son Hunter.

Dictionary definitions are conveniently changed to enforce establishment narratives.”

“Establishment disinformation becomes tyrannical when false establishment narratives are combined with the active suppression of authentic dissenting discourse, which has been made highly efficient by the consolidation of discourse on social media platforms.

Instead of state persecution and social credit scores, citizens of Western democracies face deplatforming, job losses, and character assassination by power-crazed, petty hall-monitor journalists and Soros-funded NGO researchers.

Today’s Hester Prynne is the person who says all lives matter or gender is real. Woke narratives are our Xi Jinping Thought.

While the Right has stupidly ignored these issues, the Left has weaponized “countering disinformation” as a DNC strategy backed by millions of dollars. The term has become so abused that a friend now jokes that “disinfo researcher” in someone’s Twitter bio is code for “DNC hack.”

As you can imagine, the partisan weaponization of disinformation has done untold damage to the civic unity needed to address these issues in good faith.

There’s still a segment of disinformation researchers who are earnest, fair, and professional. But these folks almost all lean Left and exist in institutional environments that prevent pushing back on establishment narratives.

This is why we haven’t seen reports on the Steele dossier or WMDs as disinformation case studies. And this is why we never hear BLM discussed in the same way QAnon is, even though any neutral definition would label them both conspiracy movements—

— with BLM causing dramatically more offline harm. Meanwhile, challenging the First Amendment has become part of the zeitgeist for many of these people.

But there’s something particularly insidious about coordinated false narratives from authority figures and institutions in our own democracies.

It’s even more insidious when the legitimate threat of foreign disinformation is instrumentalized to advance establishment narratives, as we saw in Russiagate and as we’re seeing again with the Hunter Biden leaks.

Establishment disinformation abuses public trust. It too often goes unchecked. No one in the disinformation community talks about it.

Until we confront the problem of establishment disinformation, Western democracy will suffer and the rise of a new, networked form of tyranny will condemn those who step out of line.”