A surprise popped up on my Twitter feed last week – the launch of BBC Verify, as announced by BBC journalist Marianna Spring. Apparently, the state broadcaster is now going to verify what is fact and what is fake news. Better late than never, I suppose, given the BBC’s relentless promotion of pro-lockdown and pro-vaccine misinformation during the Pandemic. However, as the presentation went on it revealed a somewhat different agenda – less of the fact-checking and more of the “searching for conspiracy theories from the far-right”. This was in support of the noble goal of protecting the British people from outbreaks of civil disorder supposedly linked to ‘conspiracy theories’, like the Jan 6th brouhaha. And Spring herself is going to get her hands dirty, at least as much can be done using such tools as Google Maps and Facebook, along with 60 other BBC journalists. (How much is this costing?)
There was something very familiar about Ms. Spring for U.S. audiences. We had a ‘disinformation tsar’ just like her a year ago in the form of Nina Jankowicz.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) decided last year that it had fulfilled its primary mission of securing our borders by throwing them wide open, and instead decided to take on real issues such as rooting out disinformation to protect the homeland. In April 2022, DHS Top Man, Alejandro Majorkas, announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) and the hiring of disinformation ‘expert’ Nina Jankowicz to run it.
Ms. Jankowicz was not exactly well qualified for the job of rooting out fake news. She agreed with the 51 former Intelligence officials who proclaimed the laptop owned by Hunter Biden was Russian disinformation, when in fact the officials’ statement turned out to be disinformation. Ditto the Steele dossier procured by the Hilary campaign to trash Trump in the 2016 Presidential race. She believed this dodgy dossier was true even after reporting in 2017 showed it was not, and after 2019 when the Mueller Report confirmed this beyond doubt. In an unfortunate Tik Tok video, Jankowicz channeled Mary Poppins with an updated version of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ which referenced Democrat Party talking points on Ukraine and Covid. None of this is surprising as Jankowicz’s professional career up until that point had been spent in traditional Democrat Party training grounds such as the National Democratic Institute.
The brief of the DGB (one letter different from the KGB as the Wall Street Journal pointed out) was remarkably similar to that of BBC Verify, although it was based in a state agency as opposed to the state broadcaster. It intended to put a government imprimatur on what was fact and what was disinformation. To most Americans outside of Washington DC this is anathema. Americans believe the arbiter of truth is the individual, not the state, and that belief is enshrined in our Constitution as well as our laws.
Within three weeks of being born, the Disinformation Board was dead. The battle was not won on philosophical or constitutional grounds, but because of the ridicule inspired by Jankowicz’s antics. She came across as a less sympathetic version of Elizabeth Warren, if such a thing is possible, with the icing on the cake being the Mary Poppins video. Although in the minority in both the House and the Senate, Republicans killed the Board by mostly playing or referring to the video.
But a word of warning to those thinking that laughing at Spring and the rest of the BBC Verifiers will bring about another easy victory for free speech. The DHS may have ‘paused’ the Board and got rid of Ms. Jankowicz in May 2022, but the need to fight against certain points of view under the guise of protecting the American people from ‘far-right’ extremism is still being pursued only in more devious ways.
Last week, for example, the Media Research Center published some interesting reporting on the DHS. The DHS has changed the focus of the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP) from real terrorism to the political Right. In the last two years, it has provided $40 Million in funding for 80 projects by various public institutions and private organisations that seem to be operating under the assumption that ‘far-right’ includes 50% of the American population, and that it is directly tied to white supremacy. One particularly disgraceful chart, taken from material developed by one of the grantees – the University of Dayton – shows the Republican Party, Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, Prager U and Quillette, among other perfectly respectable organisations, linked directly to Nazi-supporting fringe organisations.
Given that the organisations at the top of this pyramid supposedly pose the biggest threat to the homeland since Al-Qaeda, it’s remarkable that no-one seems to have more than a hazy idea of who they are. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center has acknowledged that the number of these supposedly dangerous, far-right organisations is down and identifies the threat as follows: “as organisational loyalty has dwindled and the internet has become white nationalism’s organising principle, however, the ideology is best understood as a loose coalition of social networks orbiting online propaganda hubs and forums.” Of course, such vagueness is ideal for the anti-disinfo grant applications – the vaguer things are, the easier it is to conjure up far-right conspiracies. No need to bother with real terrorists coming through our open borders when shadowy people linked to right-of-centre media companies and free speech organisations represent the real threat.
This is BBC Verify’s view as well, if their launch video is anything to go by. Spring defines their journalistic approach as setting up fake accounts on social media, aka ‘trolls’, to monitor sinister stuff going on in chat rooms, FB groups, and no doubt Twitter, now Elon Musk has gone over to the dark side with his support for free speech, a tool of white supremacy. Spring is promising a podcast called ‘Marianna in Conspiracyland’ inspired by Alice In Wonderland (she has to go down various alt-media rabbit holes to chase the conspiracy theorists).
The predilection of these two young women an ocean apart for using children’s literature to articulate their concerns about disinformation is not a coincidence. Our real problems in both the U.S. and the U.K. are largely the responsibility of our dysfunctional governments – porous borders, high inflation, rampant crime, Net Zero, the blowback from the disastrous lockdown policy. The narrative that the real threat to our prosperity and well-being is lurking in dark corners of the Internet is essentially a fairy story.
Stop Press: If you want to see what a coordinated misinformation campaign really looks like, check out this video.
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Video montage of all the covid lies, always worth a refresher.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/disease/the-covid-mockingbird-narrative-video-montage/
Thanks for sharing this. It was extremely funny – but of course demonstrates very clearly just what an extremely sinister web of “approved” disinformation and misinformation we have all been subjected too. Many people remain tangled in this web of lies and propaganda. Our only hope in this war against the people is to call out all official misinformation and disinformation. It is the people that need to police the facts – not the Marianna Springs of this world! We vastly outnumber them!
Marianna Spring = Nina Jankowicz.
Marianna Spring=Joseph Goebbels!
I’m not sure if this is her but it does look like her;
https://twitter.com/FatEmperor/status/1662953520646045696/photo/1
Good article but please remember there was no pandemic – that was Lie Number 1 from which sprang all the other lies
The first fairy story……
Well done tof.
Just because the face of BBC Verify is a perky young woman with cute dimples and a perpetually-hurt ‘How could you be so cwuel?’ expression, doesn’t hide how deeply sinister all of this looks. Miss Spring is welcome to run a blog and the BBC is welcome to proclaim itself the arbiter of Truth (TM) but not on a vicious poll tax. Why should I be forced, at risk of fines or jail, to fund something that hates me and wants to destroy my life?
I don’t have a TV licence. I don’t watch or record live TV (broadcast via aerial, satellite, internet) or use iPlayer.
Neither do I, but for my elderly parents Sky Sports is a lifeline. I suppose I do watch Nerdotic, The Critical Drinker and Robert Meyer Burnett do livestreams on YouTube, so that probably counts!!
If I’m perfectly honest, I would admit to being radicalised, at least in the way that the BBC and other purveyors of “truth” and “fact checks” mean it.
I used to be a typical centrist. I believed that the system while flawed was generally a force for good. I thought the media was biased but generally well-intentioned. I believed we lived in a mostly free world, constrained by the limits required to have a civilised society.
I don’t believe any of that now. I fear the system. I think the bureaucracy is dangerous, the people in it completely in it for themselves and out to control everyone.I think our democracy is a joke. A complete farce. And I see freedom of speech dying in front of me every day.
BUT, I haven’t been “radicalised” by any right wing organisation. I owe my change entirely to the bureaucrats, politicians, established media and left wing political activists. I have been persuaded by them and their actions, not by any right wing organisation. And the more they try to pin it on “right wing radicals” and “conspiracy theorists” the more they persuade me of the opposite.
I cannot disagree with a single word of that.
I also used to consider myself as a centrist. Fiscally conservative and socially centre left. However I have been radicalised by successive governments and their policies and self made crises over the last 30 years or so including
The Iraq war
The invasion of Afghanistan
The Westminster expenses scandal
The mismanagement of the NHS
The mishandling of the vote to leave the EU and the subsequent abandonment of Northern Ireland
Covid and the subsequent waging of psychological warfare by their own elected representatives on the entire population, funded by the population
The injectable biotoxins and the coercion to comply
The cover up 20 years of systematic abuse and rape of white female children by men of predominantly Pakistani heritage
The opening of our borders to the illegal invasion by rape jihadists
The politicising of the police
The dismantling and neutering of the armed forces
The handing of the Ukraine war
So now as a result of this radicalisation my views have stated where they were and the policies of successive governments have shifted far to the left, leaving me somewhere out on the extreme right. My one new position is that capital punishment should be reintroduced and those responsible for the above should be treated accordingly.
This.
Exactly!
Spot on Boomer. I’m in exactly the same boat as you. Like you I haven’t changed my political views but because of the swing to the left of the Conservative Party I now find myself labelled a right wing extremist and probably a conspiracy theorist to boot.
I think many people will empathise with your views. Perhaps those that do should form the Radicalised Party?
Make that 113 in agreement with you
When Trump visited the UK Joke O’Burn on The Daily Politics played some audio of Trump saying that Boris would make a great PM. She then turned to the panel which included Claire Fox and said that Trump said Boris would make a better PM than May. The panel then made no objection to the fake news which they then discussed. However I did and the response from BBC Complaints was verbal incontinence. hence why I no longer have a TV licence.
Subsequently I’ve complained about their website featuring the false claim that epidemics grow exponentially without reply.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.” ― George Orwell, 1984
When people think reading something as mild-mannered as Quillette or watching PragerU is regarded as one step below neo-Nazism, you know something is insanely wrong in our society. By that rationale, old ladies who have a cup of tea with the vicar in the church hall after a Sunday service, must be far right revolutionaries who are busy cleaning AK47s for their skinhead grandchildren between eating custard creams!
One of the main BBC tactics is “Omission”. ———They don’t tell lies as such (or least not blatantly). They simply omit telling you something they have decided is something you shouldn’t know or hear. (Wrongthink)
Yes, they don’t normally blatantly lie, but deceptively mislead.
For example, knowing that most people see a headline and don’t study detail, they had this big BBC News headline in September 2021, at a time when – according to the UK Health Security Agency’s official reports for September 2021 – 75% of Covid deaths were fully vaccinated:
“Covid deaths rare among fully vaccinated – ONS”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58545548#:~:text=Fully%20vaccinated%20people%20are%20much,National%20Statistics%20(ONS)%20show.
‘Verify’ and BBC shouldn’t be in the same sentence.
As for what is truthful, I insist on deciding that for myself.
BBC setting themselves up as arbiters of truth is just an insult. Just about every news bulletin is full of lies and half truths. How dare they spend license payers money promoting Marxist crap.
Another misinformation becoming the truth. Spectacular new article in Vaccine, confirming what, Bhakdi, Hockertz&co said from the start.
Let’s see how BBC Verify handles it….
“…emerging evidence suggests that the reported increase in IgG4 levels detected after repeated vaccination with the mRNA vaccines may not be a protective mechanism; rather, it constitutes an immune tolerance mechanism to the spike protein that could promote unopposed SARS-CoV2 infection and replication by suppressing natural antiviral responses. Increased IgG4 synthesis due to repeated mRNA vaccination with high antigen concentrations may also cause autoimmune diseases, and promote cancer growth and autoimmune myocarditis in susceptible individuals.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37243095/
What we need is a pyramid that clearly identifies the malign influences that are permeating our lives from the globalist left!
I’m so grateful that a 27 year old is sharing their total lack of experience with those taxpayers who are forced to pay her salary. Yet another product of the brilliant education system in the UK