Why promote ignorance? Isn’t there enough of it in the world?
It wasn’t that long ago that the Association for the Library Service to Children agreed to rename the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award due to its “racial insensitivity”.
Prior to this, Dr. Seuss was criticized and condemned. Yes, Dr. Seuss…Mr. “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”
That Dr. Seuss.
Definitely criminal language there… both are labeled as insensitive to issues pertaining to race.
Racism is a serious topic and one that should not be taken lightly. But removing books or renaming awards does not support learning or teachable moments.
Here are a few other examples of renaming.
In Boston, Yawkey Way has been renamed to Jersey Street due to allegations that Thomas Yawkey, once Red Sox owner, was a racist.
Now, Faneuil Hall is on the list since it too is considered racist being named after a slave owner, Peter Faneuil.
Here is the issue: History teaches us lessons. Many of these lessons are painful and uncomfortable, but important nonetheless.
By erasing and renaming we are not learning, rather we are repeating. If we remove books and names are we changing anything? The answer is no.
History does not go away, nor should it. By leaving books on shelves and names on buildings we are not overlooking horrific moments, such as slavery or unfair trials, most certainly not.
But removing these tragic moments from history books or sites does not allow us to educate. Instead, it promotes ignorance.
Also, let’s keep in mind that erasing instances in history such as slavery from history books is disrespectful to those who suffered.
Why?
Because through the removal of their story we are not acknowledging their life or their suffering. That is the worst type of ignorance.
If we remove parts of history for fear of upsetting someone, we learn no valuable lessons about humanity, life, change, history or what we as Americans and human beings need to do to be better people.
History is our story, for better or worse. In basic social studies courses across America we see pieces of history being erased.
Not telling students about parts of history does not change that it happened. Renaming buildings and streets and taking down monuments do not make things better for children or our country.
History is not meant to be erased, but remembered, challenged, and learned from. Ignorance is poison, haven’t we learned that, yet?
As Americans we learn the “never again” statement from a very early age. Why? Because the worst parts of history teach us that we must learn to be better versions of ourselves, which is a very positive message.
Rather, ignorance is being promoted in classrooms and society at large by removing, books, words and history that are labeled as shameful. Yes, there have been numerous examples in both America and world history that are lamentable.
We must educate our students and everyone for that matter about these moments, so that they do not repeat the same mistakes and instead become better stewards of their lives and others.
What are we teaching students and ourselves, then? If we erase history and we remove words, events, ideas and valuable knowledge, then what will we know? No longer can one speak of history, God, religion, politics, gender, race, ethnicity. The list goes on and on.
This is precisely why the term snowflake has become so popular. These conversations are necessary not only for understanding history but our current state of affairs. Without these discussions we become ignorant. This is exactly what is taking place in our beloved America.
Our great country was built on differences and came to flourish because of them, not in spite of them. No one denies that perfection does not exist in our society and of course there is work to be done. But nothing great will be achieved if we continue to promote ignorance.
History is not perfect and is rife with tragedy, war, destruction and tumult. But this is how we learn. We take these moments and question them. We re-examine them.
We figure things out, for better or worse and we make the best attempt possible to grow and change. We cannot do this if we pretend that it did not happen.
We learn from the worst moments in our lives. We learn from the past. We learn from mistakes, failure and under the harshest of conditions. Without these moments we do not evolve and change for the better. So, it is here that I say, as an educator, do not erase, but teach.
Educate about the tragedies and trials of our past so that we better understand the good in this world. Teach so that we can be better human beings and to be the change. Teach so that we learn to live and give, to prosper and pay it forward, to be kind and live well so that we stand as an emblem of the best parts of this world.
We can only improve on who we are as people if we learn from the past. Promoting ignorance does not encourage this, instead it perpetuates the cycle and does not promote a better future.
Operative targeting Elon Musk’s push for free speech on Twitter engaged in her own secret influence operation
If nothing else, the move by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to purchase Twitter has ripped the mask off the hostility to free speech by the mainstream media and leftists across the board.
Where 50 years ago liberals were all about free speech, that is no longer the case, and Musk’s bid for Twitter has proven it.
According to a piece in Revolver News, Musk’s move to purchase Twitter and turn it into the free-speech public square it was intended to be has exposed the left as being the abject hypocrites they are. In essence, “free” speech is fine so long as it pushes leftist narratives.
Shortly after Musk announced his bid to take over the tech giant, the left went into action, and they were not even trying to hide what they were attempting to do.
The most glaring example was the appointment of “Scary Poppins” Nina Jankowicz to head the Biden administration’s Ministry of Truth, the so-called “Disinformation Governance Board.”
When the mask (and some really bizarre videos) ripped the mask off of how insane Jankowicz is, the administration decided to shelve the program…for now.
The same mindset of individual that threw Sen. Joseph McCarthy to the wolves in the 1950s was suddenly concerned with too much free speech. Or at least the type of free speech with which they disagreed. One such person is Renee DiResta, who published a piece in The Atlantic.
As Revolver notes, DiResta took to her column to give the appearance that she was the white knight of free speech and she was there to defend that right. Compare that with the Department of Homeland Security, which likewise claimed the Ministry of Truth (sorry, we’re calling it for what it is…or was…) was in fact set up to “defend” free speech. Laughable.
As posted in The Atlantic [emphasis Revolver]:
The idea of Twitter as the “global town square” was articulated by then-CEO Dick Costolo in 2013. He likened it to something from ancient Athens:
Thousands of years ago in the Greek Agora, that’s where you went to find out what was going on and talk about it, right? You came and talked about what was going on in your part of the village, and I came and talked about what was going on in mine, and the politician was there, and we listened to the issues of the day, and a musician was there and a preacher was there, et cetera, and it was multidirectional and it was unfiltered, and it was inside out, beaning the news was coming from the people it was happening to, not some observer.
The unintended consequences of the platform that Jack Dorsey and his co-founders built, however, came into stark relief as it grew; a variety of unfortunate things that happen when humans engage with humans happened. On Twitter, however, these problems reached unprecedented heights via unfettered virality and velocity.
The Islamic State made a home on the platform; harassment mobs proliferated; state actors and conspiracy theorists alike recognized that Twitter was a remarkable venue for propagandizing, unmediated, to millions.
Public opinion began to shift against the hands-off approach. Government regulators began to pay attention.
How could the company maximize freedom of expression while minimizing the unique harms that the new communication infrastructure had enabled.
A content-moderation regime emerged. Over the next seven years, its rules and practices would evolve in response to new and novel challenges: taking down terrorist propaganda, minimizing bad information during a pandemic, handling a litany of rumors and lies about election theft.
So, take another look at the above passage, as Revolver suggests. DiResta likened terrorist propaganda, i.e. ISIS propaganda to skepticism over COVID and election integrity. She says they are basically the same thing.
Further examining that the Jankowicz’s “Ministry of Truth” was placed inside the Department of Homeland Security, a law enforcement agency, exposes what all of this is about…the criminalization of speech that goes against the regime.
So in other words, if you have questions about the efficacy of COVID vaccines or if masks truly do work, or if you are concerned about having safe, secure, and trustworthy elections, you are no better than an ISIS terrorist. In other words, statistically half of the United States population are the equivalent of terrorists for your beliefs.
Continuing her attack on Musk, DiResta writes [emphasis Revolver]:
Since the advent of more content moderation on Twitter and other online platforms, the prototypical public square has been retconned—particularly by Musk’s supporters in the United States—into a haven for absolute free speech. This is not accurate.
The real public square has always been moderated. Public-nuisance laws and noise ordinances have log placed restrictions on the time, place, and manner of expression protected by the First Amendment. Try to get a group of ideological allies together to follow someone around a public park in the center of town shrieking at them, and see how that plays out.
That argument is so absurd as to not merit a response. In an earlier piece for The Atlantic, DiResta actually encouraged censorship of narratives on social media while also making the hilarious claim there is no political bias on social media. She claimed in the piece that “misinformation” comes “primarily from the right” (her opinion) which gives the “false appearance” that social media companies are biased against the right.
From DiResta [emphasis Revolver]:
The distinct behavior of serial spreaders of misinformation should theoretically make them easy for Facebook or Twitter to identify. Platforms that place warning labels on false or misleading content could penalize accounts that repeatedly create it; after an account earned a certain number of strikes, the platform’s algorithms could suspend it or limit users’ ability to share its posts. But platforms also want to appear politically neutral.
Inconveniently for them, our research found that although some election-related misinformation circulated on the left, the pattern of the same accounts repeatedly spreading false or misleading claims about voting, or the legitimacy of the election itself, occurred almost exclusively among pro-Trump influencers, QAnon boosters, and other outlets on the right.
We are not the only ones to observe this; researchers at Harvard described the former president and the right-wing media as driving a “disinformation campaign” around mail-in voter fraud during the 2020 election; the researchers’ prior work had meticulously detailed a “propaganda feedback loop” within the closely linked right-wing media ecosystem.
DiResta’s mistake was quoting a study done by Harvard, a far-left cesspool of lower learning if there ever was one. And, as Revolver discovered, the study she cited was founded by none other than the Open Society Institute, a George Soros production.
Clearly this “study” was designed to reach a specific outcome. Oh, it was also funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation, another left-wing liberal organization.
Revolver did discover something buried deep inside the study which bears scrutiny:
Our results are based on analyzing over 55 thousand online media stories, five million tweets, and 75 thousand posts on public Facebook pages garnering millions of engagements.
They are consistent with our findings about the American political media ecosystem from 2015-2018 published in Network Propaganda, in which we found that Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists.
Ah so it wasn’t about “Russian disinformation.” It’s about Trump and his supporters. In fact, when Twitter banned Trump from the platform DiResta didn’t bat an eyelash…after all, it was carrying out her wishes (as well as millions of other leftists.
Of course all of the above is just an appetizer for what DiResta is really up to.
In her previous life, DiResta worked as a research director for a cyber security firm called New Knowledge. The purpose of that company was allegedly to study the spread of disinformation, “malign narratives,” and Russian influence operations, Revolver noted.
In fact, DiResta had supplied written testimony to the US Senate addressing issues such as Russian disinformation and influence operations, including the so-called Internet Research Agency, alleged to be one of the leading purveyors of political influence.
However one such operation that DiResta withheld from the Senate in her testimony…New Knowledge’s participation in an influence operation to sway the outcome of the 2017 Alabama special Senate election between Roy Moore and Doug Jones.
So sordid was the influence operation that New Knowledge’s then-head described it as a “false flag” operation to portray Moore as the beneficiary of a secret Russian influence operation.
As reported in the New York Times:
As Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race, according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results.
The secret project, carried out on Facebook and Twitter, was likely too small to have a significant effect on the race, in which the Democratic candidate it was designed to help, Doug Jones, edged out the Republican Roy S. Moore.
But it was a sign that American political operatives from both parties have paid close attention to the Russian methods, which some fear may come to taint elections in the United States.
One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by the New York Times, says explicitly that I “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”
The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.
“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.
Mr. Morgan said in an interview that the Russian botnet ruse “does not ring a bell,” adding that others had worked on the effort and had authored the report. He said he saw the project as “a small experiment” designed to explore how certain online tactics worked, not to affect the election.
Mr. Morgan said he could not account for the claims in the report that the project sought to “enrage and energize Democrats” and “depress turnout” among Republicans, partly by emphasizing accusations that Mr. Moore had pursued teenage girls when he was a prosecutor in his 30s.
“The research project was intended to help us understand how these kind of campaigns operated,” said Mr. Morgan. “We thought it was useful to work in the context of a real election but design it to have almost no impact.”
The Times subsequently obtained a statement from DiResta, who admitted her involvement in the influence campaign, although she attempted to downplay her role.
I know there were people who believed the Democrats needed to fight fire with fire,” Ms. DiResta said, adding that she disagreed. “It was absolutely chatter going around the party.”
But she said Mr. Morgan simply asked her for suggestions of online tactics worth testing. “My understanding was that they were going to investigate to what extent they could grow audiences for Facebook pages using sensational news,” she said.
In other words, DiResta, a “research director” for New Knowledge is trying to convince us that despite her career researching Russian disinformation and influence was herself caught with her hand in the cookie jar in an influence campaign designed to undermine and discredit an American politician by planting bogus stories that he benefited from such an operation.
Moreover, as Revolver notes, the fact that both the New York Times, as well as the executive director of New Knowledge attempted to downplay the scandal, claiming it had a “minimal” impact on the Alabama Senate race, is laughable.
“The research project was intended to help us understand how these kind of campaigns operated,” said Mr. Morgan. “We thought it was useful to work in the context of a real election but design it to have almost no impact.”
The project had a budget of just $100,000, in a race that cost approximately $51 million, including the primaries, according to Federal Election Commission records.
So there is an attempt to justify a budget of “just $100,000,” yet the Internet Research Agency, the so-called “Russian troll farm” that served as a basis for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s entire report spent only $46,000 on Facebook ads in the leadup to the 2016 election, or less than half of what was spent on the Moore smear campaign.
So think about this again. The hit job DiResta participated in on Moore cost twice as much as the “troll farm” which was basically the basis for the whole disinformation industry. Unbelievable.
So damning was the Alabama disinformation campaign on Moore that other people involved in the “disinformation industry” actually slammed the Alabama “false flag” operation in which DiResta participated, Revolver said.
For example, in a panel discussion called “Disinformation in Social Media as a Threat to Democratic Institutions,” an operative from within that industry, Alina Polyakova drew attention to the Alabama scheme as an example of “Russian-style disinformation tactics” being used within the US.
A partial transcript from the panel discussion reads as follows:
This firm, which was actually given a contract by Senate Intelligent [sic] Committee to write a major report on IRA (the Russian troll farm)…actually used the same techniques that the Russians used to try to shift the elections in the special senatorial elections in Alabama last year. What they did is they set up fake Russian accounts, fake Russian trolls, fake Russian bots, to make it seem like the Russians were supporting the Republican candidate (Roy Moore)…
Yet another colleague in the disinformation industry, Ambassador Daniel Fried piled on in an even more forceful manner, in the following partial transcript:
That awful example of an American group creating a false example of Russian disinformation campaign in the Alabama election reminds me, should remind us all…the temptation of evil is in front of every person.
…
I hope that this example has become so scandalous and discredited that no one dares do it again.
According to Revolver, both Fried and Polyakova are “as high ranked as it gets within the Disinformation Industry hierarchy.” In addition, for example, Fried previously served as a senior official in the State Department as Assistant Secretary of European and Eurasian Affairs. According to his biography at the Atlantic Council, he was a major figure in crafting NATO expansion policy and was a key architect of US sanctions policy against Russia.
In other words, Fried is held rather highly, so if someone like that, who widely condemned the hit job DiResta was involved in, might have negative consequences on her. That, however, is hardly the case. In fact, despite condemning the Alabama operation, Fried cited her as an authority on disinformation in a 2020 publication he authored with Polyakova, “Democratic Offense Against Disinformation.”
Worse yet, her work is cited in an official DHS memo on “combatting targeted disinformation campaigns.”
Now one might be somewhat shocked that the DHS would cite someone like DiResta, it really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. As Revolver recently reported, Scary Poppins, aka Nina Jankowicz showed up in a major leak of internal documents belonging to an organization called the Integrity Initiative, a NATO and US State Department-funded group that facilitated covert campaigns on Twitter to meddle in the political affairs of NATO democracies.
In case you haven’t figured it out het, this whole “disinformation” stuff is as convoluted, twisted, and swampy as the rest of Washington, DC. For example, the Integrity Initiative leaks included a list of NGOs (non-government organizations) and media outlets which are believed friendly to its operations. One such organization is called the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
In true swamp fashion, the president and CEO of CEPA is none other than Alina Polyakova, the same one who condemned DiResta’s Alabama information operation. Yet she is president and CEO of an organization identified as “partnering” with the Integrity Initiative, identified as one of the most egregious influence operations in US history.
Revolver explains the convoluted story behind the whole sordid mess:
“When it comes to Alina Polyakova and Ambassador Dan Fried implicitly condemning DiResta for her role in the Alabama operation, it is perhaps appropriate to suggest the following guideline: Let the Disinformation researcher, who hasn’t worked for an anti-discrimination group caught red-handed using disinformation as a pretext to conduct the secretive influence operations meddling in politics of Wester democracies cast the first stone.”
The more unbelievable aspect of this whole thing is that despite her role in the Alabama hit job on Moore, DiResta has actually improved her lot, going from lead researcher at New Knowledge to a position as research director at Stanford’s Internet Research Laboratory.
Aside from NGOs such as CEPA engaging in the “disinformation” business, many major colleges and universities have similar “think tanks” which engage in so-called “disinformation” research. At least that what they claim to be doing when in fact, they are using “disinformation” as a pretext to censor speech online which they don’t personally care for. Such think tanks have appeared at Harvard, as well as Stanford and many others [Revolver emphasis]:
Renee DiResta and Alex Stamos lead research on social media disinformation at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Their current project, The Election Integrity Partnership is a coalition of research entities focus on supporting real-time information exchange between the research community, election officials government agencies, civil society organizations and social media platforms. Together they aim to detect and mitigate the impact of attempts to prevent or deter people from voting or to delegitimize election results. Stamos, previously the Chief Security Officer at Facebook, is the director of the Observatory, while DiResta serves as research manager.
In a hilarious development, DiResta, who was herself neck-deep in a disinformation campaign in the Alabama Senate race, oversaw a Stanford University report issued by the Election Integrity Partnership titled, “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election.”
Revolver writes:
And so we have a report on 2020 misinformation conducted by an election integrity partnership that is run by a woman who was caught red-handed in an influence op meddling in Alabama, and that’s sponsored by two organizations that are implicated in the Integrity Initiative leaks, and associated with an Integrity Initiative cluster member who falsely identified an elderly UK man as a Russian troll. And we’re just getting started. Rather than cover the report in its entirety, we will conclude by drawing attention to one particular part of the report that just so happens to deal with Revolver News.
Leading up to the 2020 election, Revolver reported on “Color Revolutions” (a piece cited in one of our articles at Law Enforcement Today). These pieces by Revolver identified a number of national security officials who conducted so-called “color revolution” regime change operations overseas, and that similar tactics were being employed in the United States to undermine former President Trump.
As Revolver notes, the “regime”…aka the “swamp”…was not happy with Revolver’s reporting, with “disinformation” operatives being especially perturbed. That is probably because there is significant overlap between both. One of those who slammed Revolver’s take was none other than Nina Jankowicz.
You may have seen the term "color revolution" floating around social media the past few days.
Let's talk about what they are and why the US isn't a candidate for one ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/dUIOrfg4Lv
— Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) September 18, 2020
DiResta appeared on CNN’s “Amanpour” in an attempt to undermine Revolver:
And, as Revolver reports, the Election Integrity Partnership didn’t even attempt to address the merits of Revolver’s piece about color revolutions. Instead like clockwork they tried to tie the term into Russia and China and therefor claimed it was part of a disinformation campaign to discredit the results of the 2020 election.
Without getting into an enormous amount of detail, the faculty lead for the Stanford Internet Observatory is a man named Michael McFaul. The observatory’s mission is to “study abuse in current information technologies, with a focus on the misuse of social media.” Ding, ding, ding.
McFaul being the “faculty lead” to the organization running DiResta’s “Election Integrity” study is absurd. Why you may ask?
McFaul was himself implicated in the Revolver pieces on color revolutions. McFaul served as US Ambassador to Russia during the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine—which even the Huffington Post discussed in the context of the Color Revolution agenda.
Autocrats have demonized the phrase, "color revolutions." (& revolution generally has a negative connotation for many.) Instead, I use the term "democratic breakthroughs."
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) August 23, 2020
In part, Revolver’s piece on McFaul said:
Michael McFaul, another Color Revolution Expert, and key anti-Trump operative somewhat gives the game away in the following tweet in which the term “democratic breakthrough” makes an appearance as a better sounding alternative to “Color Revolution.”
Most likely as a response to Revolver News’ first Color Revolution article on State Department official George Kent, former Ambassador McFaul issued the following tweet as a matter of damage control:
Further, on Sept. 4, 2020, McFaul gave the game away in a since-deleted tweet:
Trump has lost the Intelligence Community. He has lost the State Department. He has lost the military. How can he continue to serve as our Commander in Chief?
So here we have McFaul who was a major piece in Revolver’s Color Revolution series where key professionals were attempting to undermine and destroy Trump’s presidency. For that fact not to be mentioned in DiResta’s Election Integrity Partnership report, that one of its own lead faculty advisors was a main subject of that very reporting is mind-boggling.
Make no mistake about it. This farce “disinformation” and “misinformation” scam is nothing but an opportunity to silence and destroy speech which doesn’t fit the narrative under the BS pretense of protecting the American people against “influence” operations. In fact, the disinformation industry, as pointed out by Revolver, is engaged in an influence operation against American citizens, an operation disguised as the “war on domestic terrorism.”
Revolver promises there will be much more forthcoming about the disinformation industry scam. Stay tuned.
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