Soup Sandwich Will Kill Us All
Homeland Security discovers the growing threat of TBD
It’s a nothing, but it will stop all the nothing.
In response to the news that the Biden administration is creating a Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Homeland Security, I spent some time this evening trying to figure out that that means. What will be the duties of a Disinformation Governance Board, how will it be staffed, what will be its legal authority, minor stuff like that. If you feel the need, search up the news stories on the thing, and see if any of them address any of these questions, but you already know the answer. So I did this…
…and a bunch of others like it, looking for policy documents, and nope. There will be a thing, and it will do some stuff, news at 11:00.
But while I was off on my snipe hunt, I found the context for the decision: the growing threat of domestic terrorism, which is caused by misinformation. See, we need the Disinformation Governance Board to stop domestic terrorism, because one causes the other. The Russian bots put the dangerous ideas in the minds of the domestic terrorists, and then the domestic terrorists go…do the…uh…
All of this semi-information comes from this:
You can read it as a PDF file by clicking above, or download it here. Or, you know, not, 'because I can save you twenty pages of wasted time. Here’s where everything falls apart, in two paragraphs. Start with the threat, defined on pg. 4, and you can stop reading after the first sentence without missing much:
And then this, a description of the challenges that lie ahead as DHS struggles to face this enormous problem, is from pg. 5:
Just compare the first sentence from each of those paragraphs, for crying out loud.
So:
X is one of the most significant threats to the United States. Also, we don’t track X, responsibility for finding and tracking X is scattered all over the place, we don’t collect or validate data on X, we’ve never really even defined X, and we don’t have a functioning system for reporting X. But it’s a huge threat!1
So now that we face the existential threat of a terrifying [TBD], we’re going to have a [TBD] to address the roots of [TBD]. We don’t know what it is, but we’re going to have a board to address its root causes.
Should be great. Can’t wait to see the budget for it.
By the way, pg. 6: “Initial data call results identified 35 allegations between FY 2019 and the third quarter of FY 2021 characterized as being potentially related to violent extremist activity. Upon further review of the allegations, the working group identified four incidents that involved active participation or support for violent extremist activity over the covered period. The other 31 allegations were either unsubstantiated as being related to domestic violent extremism or found to be miscategorized in the data call responses.”
The GROWING THREAT OF, uh, these four cases. Four. Nationally!
Historically, every totalitarian state has established, as the ultimate instrument of control, some form of 'secret police'. And of course, every nation on earth has, under many different names, some form of state security apparatus. Often, they are one and the same. In 'the west', we already have an unknown number of unaccountable three and four letter alphabet agencies. Many with overlapping, often fuzzy, mandates. Many with 'black budgets'. Few accountable. To anyone - or anything. And all of them charged with some aspect of "security". (As defined by whom? Or what? I wonder). This latest initiative is merely the next step in a well thought out strategy. 'They' have eliminated most of our basic freedoms. Our freedoms of speech, religion, movement, association, and assembly have been severely curtailed. And they're coming for our guns. They're purging the military of members who are aware their oath was defend the constitution. That was thrown in the trash two years ago. Now we have yet another agency. An agency spun off of the DHS. And we can all see how effective that agency has been. Or not been. Society is disintegrating at an ever increasing rate. And our rulers have formally announced that they are putting an as yet undisclosed amount of money and resources in yet another mechanism to control the peons. Not, you will note, to deal with inflation, the southern border, demographic challenges, the disaster that is our woefully inadequate educational system, health care, or the dysfunctional legal systems. One is minded of the frog in the pot analogy. We're in the pot. Have been for a while. The water is getting hotter than hell. Nearly at a boil. Very soon we'll be cooked. Frog legs anyone?
Linsey McGoey's work on ignorance helped me navigate how anyone could genuinely believe this is a good idea, without just being evil.
McGoey's latest "The Unknowers, How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World" goes into Elite Ignorance - which they themselves are blind to, and Strategic Ignorance - which is deliberately using ignorance to retain power. Studies have even found the poorer, the more empathetic - as the poor have to be able to read others in order to have a better chance of survival. Perhaps Elites own ignorance hold the seeds to their downfall, if we could just figure out how to exploit their ignorance.