Tucker Carlson on ‘disinformation’

6 May
Posted on Author steel city scribe 7

Have you seen Sleepy Joe’s appointee, to the minted-for-her post of “Disinformation Czar”, do karaoke? Nina Jankowicz makes Sarah Palin look a beacon of sanity and reason. Here she is in 2015, taking the mike – and, given her subsequent stellar rise, the mickey – for a spot of cabaret on the theme, I kid you not, of “who do I fuck to be famous?”

That one took a little digging. More widely circulated, after her promotion to the top job at the Ministry of Truth, is her selfie video in a rewording of a Mary Poppins song. Yes, that  one. You couldn’t make this up.

Information laundering is really quite ferocious. It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious, by saying them in Congress or a mainstream outlet, so disinformation’s origins are slightly less atrocious.

The sanity and profundity of Biden’s new appointee leave me with yet more egg on my face, given my arguments with liberal pals – no, they haven’t all  unfriended me – who took me to task for not dancing in the streets after the tangerine narcissist’s 2020 defeat. As Caitlin put it, just two days ago:

It’s a good thing Trump lost because otherwise Roe v Wade would be on the chopping block and immigrants would still be getting mistreated and the Iran deal would still be dead and the military budget would keep inflating. That bastard would probably have us on the brink of World War 3 by now.

Meanwhile, here on Twitter, is the live evidence of the day the Disinformation Czar took TikTok by storm with her brilliantly reworked supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

https://twitter.com/wiczipedia/status/1362153807879303171?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1362153807879303171%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.foxnews.com%2Fpolitics%2Fwhite-house-disinformation-nina-jankowicz-tiktok

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Something for the weekend? How about Fox News host Tucker Carlson? He’s one of the many commentators from the right – John Mearsheimer, Peter Oborne, Peter Hitchens and American Conservative spring to mind – who, while I disagree profoundly with much of what they say, have earned my respect for their intelligence and wit. And, which is more, for insisting – in a world of facts trumped by narrative at every turn – that reason and evidence matter.

So here’s seventeen minutes of Tucker Carlson. His definitions of Left and Right may not be mine, especially with neocons so amply represented in both of America’s major parties, 1 but it’s good to see a mainstream opinion former who grasps the dangers of criminalising a concept for which no clear and legally acceptable definition has been offered.

“Hate speech” for instance. Or “disinformation”.

Oh, and along the way having a whale of a time lampooning the ridiculous Nina Jancowicz

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  1. Witness the presence of Victoria “fuck the EU” Nuland in every US Administration this century bar one. Say what you like about the Donald, a cabinet that shut its doors to this Russophobic warmonger can’t be entirely bad.

7 Replies to “Tucker Carlson on ‘disinformation’”

    • Thanks for the Dee Knight piece, bevin. It’s time I put out a resource list and this could be on it.

      No badge of honour for me I’m afraid. I’ve just been putting off upgrading to https because I can’t do that till I’ve done the other and can’t do the other till something else is fixed. You know how it goes …

      Reply

  2. This …

    https://www.goldmoney.com/research/goldmoney-insights/financial-war-takes-a-nasty-turn

    … is also an interesting piece. Claiming the real ‘nuclear’ level war is a financial one.

    Given what Andrei Martyanov often describes as the poor calibre of Western elites and their decision making [Pepe Escobar concluded in a recent interview that the West is an intellectual no fly zone] those of us near or at the bottom of the pecking order are probably in for something of a rough period which might well necessitate switching from a Western to and Eastern bank account?

    Reply

    • Which Eastern Bank did you have in mind? Any Eastern banks still operating are invariably going to be US/NATO assets and the West has either sanctioned or stolen the funds of non US/NATO inclined banks by now(remember the BoE stole Venezuelan gold for themselves).
      Mind you, if you are a westerner who has taken a loan out with Russia, you won’t have to pay it back according to the IMF’s advice to Ukraine back in 2014.
      It seems there are some upsides to being a lying cheating, thieving, bigoted, dumbed down westerner!

      🙂 Susan

      Reply

      • I was thinking more in line with distinct possibility of there no longer being any Western banks to choose from Susan.

        See here:

        https://thesaker.is/europes-mad-ban-on-russian-oil/

        and here:

        https://tomluongo.me/2022/05/04/the-great-currency-reset-and-why-europe-is-trapped/

        One, of many, scary observations in the analysis provided by the first link is sufficient for even the most ostrich like to start stocking up on the survivalist literature:

        “for starters, no ( or less) Russian nat-gas and no Russian oil means many unsolvable things for the EU today. We´d also need to add the impact of having no oil, coal, or gas substitutes fast enough in large enough quantities. All of that put together means no (or less) refined products, no intermediate distillates, no heavy-duty machinery (think mining) no nickel nor aluminum, cobalt or lead or magnesium, no neon, no grains or edibles at large, wheat, corn, barley, rye, soybeans, timber, paper, titanium, rocket engines, nitrogen fertilizer, crop nutrients, potash, less petrochemicals, iron ore, minerals and rare-earths, uranium for nuclear power plants, lithium for batteries, no inputs for production of metals, plastics, fabrics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizer, chemicals, etc., no manganese, chromium, platinum, essential palladium for catalytic converters, copper, tin, mica, wolfram, bismuth, kaolin, talcum, tungsten, diamonds, phosphates, sulphur… and even no gold. By the way, as we should all know, none of these can be printed.”

        And what affects Europe will also impact on the UK. What we appear to be living through in real time is the economic suicide of [geographical] Europe.

        Reply

      • if you are a westerner who has taken a loan out with Russia, you won’t have to pay it back according to the IMF’s advice to Ukraine back in 2014

        Ha! I spoke of this in my 2016 post, Perilous Days:

        in 2013 Russia made a bridging loan to Ukraine. At $3bn it was a small but significant sum, on very favourable terms when Ukraine’s credit status would have incurred punitive rates on world markets. Payment in full was due in December, after the Maidan Square coup replaced Yanukovych with a semi fascist regime.

        Enter the International Monetary Fund. Since the US outvotes all comers, and can increase its share by arm-twisting states beholden to it, IMF rules are Washington rules. For decades these have debarred any country welshing on a sovereign debt from receiving loans by the IMF or by member states. That held for Greece last summer. But with that problem put to bed, the rules were altered. Now, Ukraine may borrow from the IMF without repaying Russia – nay, stiffing her is a de facto loan condition! Why? Because China and Russia are coming together – the one with its vast surplus, the other its vast energy reserves – to challenge a dollar hegemony going back to Bretton Woods and expanded after the fall of the USSR. Burning Russia on a relatively small sum was a shot across the bows. With the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank an emerging alternative to the IMF, developing and even western nations seeking finance might turn to the former to avoid swingeing austerity and public service cuts demanded by the latter.

        (In Greece last year a European Central Bank on the whole more hawkish even than the IMF was nevertheless happy to see Athens raise taxes for the elite, if that’s what it took to repay Berlin and Brussels; German taxpayers having kindly taken on Greece’s debt in a now familiar win-win for rentier capital. The IMF was having none of it. Where creditors take a pragmatic approach to debt recovery, it’s in the DNA of free market ideologues to favour public spending cuts for their low hanging privatisation fruits.)

        In a crisply forensic piece at close of 2015, with the deadline for Ukraine’s repayment ignored, Michael Hudson spells out the message from Washington:

        Imagine the following scenario five years from now. China will have spent half a decade building high-speed railroads, ports, power systems and other construction for Asian and African countries, enabling them to grow and export more. These exports will be coming online to repay the infrastructure loans. Also, suppose that Russia has been supplying the oil and gas energy for these projects on credit.

        To avert this prospect, suppose an American diplomat makes the following proposal to the leaders of countries in debt to China, Russia and the AIIB: “Now that you’ve got your increased production in place, why repay? We’ll make you rich if you stiff our adversaries and turn back to the West. We and our European allies will support your assigning your nations’ public infrastructure to yourselves and your supporters at insider prices, and then give these assets market value by selling shares in New York and London. Then, you can keep the money and spend it in the West.”

        How can China or Russia collect in such a situation? They can sue. But what court in the West will accept their jurisdiction?

        Reply

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