Typical disinformation

One of the most blackly humorous things I’ve come across in the last couple of days was a discussion between Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying on the US Homeland Security’s helpful definitions of “terrorism” speech.

“Disinformation,” it seems, is a government’s (usually Russia’s) deliberate planting of lies in order to mislead the innocent western mind into wrongthink. “Misinformation” is when wicked citizens purvey such lies. And “malinformation” is when information (without regard to its truth) tends to undermine trust in the government and its institutions (that’s our government, of course, not foreign ones). Speaking any of these, apparently, constitutes an act of terrorism. You have been warned.

Heather and Bret play with the definitions with respect to the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which according to official sources last year was Russian disinformation. When that was disproved it became mere misinformation, but was still censored by the mainstream media in order to protect the integrity of the presidential election (though in the end the censorship didn’t prevent what the main-stream media and the new official regime describe as an “insurrection” at the Capitol – part of the evidence is the terrorist misinformation about election fraud on people’s cell phones).

Now, though, both the DOJ and the New York Times have admitted that the laptop and the massive corruption it reveals in the Biden family are genuine. Because that undermines President Biden’s administration, it must surely constitute malinformation from both those organs. Why, our commentators ask, are the NYT and DOJ not already being charged with terrorism? Heather suggests that having loyally denounced the story as disinformation last year, they get a free pass on speaking malinformation now the story turns out to be true. Are you keeping up?

Incidentally, the likelihood that Biden’s puppetmasters have let the story out because they want to replace him with a less incompetent and vote-losing figurehead shows that what “malinformation” really means is information harmful to the powers and principalities behind the throne, the throne itself being totally expendable.

And thus the wicked madness of all our current regimes is revealed, for Homeland Security’s censorship of information that doesn’t suit its masters is being echoed across the Once Free World. In Britain, I mistakenly thought that the rot set in with the BBC’s “Trusted News Initiative,” which works to make sure that all recognised news and media platforms sing from the same hymn sheet on … well, there seem no defined limits on the boundaries of official narratives. Oh, I forgot – it’s also to kill all sources of alternative truths. The screws are set to tighten further here through the Online Safety Bill, which seeks to protect your gullible ears from dis- mis- and mal-, by forcing media platforms to censor aberrant content, as if they needed any persuading; and from the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which gives the Home Secretary the right to declare any potential protest illegal – with, I gather, sentences for disobedience of up to ten years in prison (“a tenner” in the Gulag under Article 58).

Needless to say, the premises of all these moves to curtail free speech are totalitarian. They are ostensibly to stop the radicalisation of impressionable young people by extremist groups. But that hasn’t stopped them being used already on middle class housewives and independent journalists. Similarly, the excuse of stopping disruptive protests by Extinction Rebellion or Insulate Britain (for which there is some evidence for official involvement in “astroturfing” anyway) can already be seen, from the disruption and censorship of Vaccine Mandate protests, to be a front for keeping the ordinary people quiet. The silencing of all voices opposed to the State is the very essence of tyranny, whether of the Nazi or the Communist variety, which are really two versions of the same thing. Which of the two persuasions is fueling this is an interesting discussion for another day.

But it appears that the insidious curtailment of free speech goes back at least a year or two further than I thought – a fact that passed me by when I was writing Seeing Through Smoke in 2019. For in connection with the Hunter Biden story, it has struck me how politicians described this in 2020 as “typical Russian disinformation,” which of course is a particularly familiar phrase now, as we learn from our propaganda that false flag chemical attacks are also typical of Russian misinformation.

Now, that made me remember the Western false flag chemical attack in Syria in 2018, as revealed by Wikileaks, and the fact that several other “typical Russian disinformation” episodes before the Biden laptop, such as the Trump Election Collusion of 2016 and the Russian funding and infiltration of Canadian Truckers, have turned out to be also untrue. In fact, it raises in my suspicious little mind the possibility that the phrase “typical Russian disinformation” might be code for “typical deep state disinformation.”

Until they invaded Ukraine, Russia seemed to be quite a useful whipping boy – annoyingly unco-operative with Western globalism, apparently weak in power to retaliate, and having the advantage of still being seen through the filter of Cold War Communism by the broad masses.

In fact, the only clear case of genuine Russian disinformation I could remember off-hand was the Novichok poisoning of the Skripals in 2019. As you’ll find if you read my e-book, I cited it there as an example of how propaganda can achieve a purpose even if it is too nonsensical to believe. But I also remembered that one or two sources on geopolitics, which I have since found to be reliable on other matters, were at the time highly sceptical not of the Russian version of the story, but of the British version.

In particular British Intelligence’s “unmasking” of two Russian operatives said to be travelling under false names aroused these observers’ suspicions. Within days, President Putin had found them, because they were, contra our authorities, using their real names, and they appeared in a very ad-hoc RT press conference and performed either like very poorly trained assassins/spies, or very bemused tourists. Perhaps MI5 didn’t expect them to be produced for public examination.

Now, whether they were indeed Novichok couriers or whether the stuff did, in fact, come from nearby Porton Down to create a convenient false flag, as the Russians claimed, I can’t say. How would I know without joining one or other intelligence service, or perhaps by being taken out by one of them? But what I can say is that very few members of the public were impressed with the Russian story, in the context of the extensive news coverage, the locking-down of Salisbury for months, and so on. Ostensibly, it was proof that if you put truth up against lies, our sensible people can easily discern the difference. It convinced me at the time, anyway.

But what I had failed to notice was how the incident led immediately to an international intelligence effort not to stop people carrying nerve-gas across national borders, but to stop disinformation and misinformation (malinformation not having been invented yet), essentially by the first stages of the government censorship of the news that we saw rolled out on a grand scale in COVID the following year, and are now seeing used to make speech – like the speech in this article – a terrorist act. There was no need for any of that, when so few of the public were persuaded by the “disinformation.” So was the incident a convenient excuse for more control?

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but I’d far rather read a variety of points of view, and the relative strength of their evidence, than be poisoned with Novichok. Our rulers appear to disagree. Why?