Bad Crow Review Weather: Cloudy
With a chance of fascism
Links are at the end.
I may have mentioned a conversation with a friend following the 2016 election, in which he said he thought Trump would successfully attempt a transition to authoritarian rule and I said the infrastructure for it wasn’t there.
Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump
Well, it is now. Gizmodo, of all places, has a relatively long story about a Homeland Security plot to gin up a fake terrorist group for Trump’s benefit before the election.1
The Department of Homeland Security launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters in what new documents show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort before the 2020 election to bolster President Donald Trump’s spurious claims about a “terrorist organization” he accused his Democratic rivals of supporting.
An internal investigative report, made public this month by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, details the findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland attending anti-racism protests in summer 2020 sparked by the police murder of Minneapolis father George Floyd.
The report describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump’s reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars’ worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain.
DHS, which hosts the Border Patrol succubus, has tens of thousands of armed agents across various agencies, and we know that armed agents tend overall to skew toward the brown-shirted point on the political spectrum. Wolf may not have commanded the loyalty of them all, but we’ve seen — all our lives, really — how easy it is to create a threat that the country’s internal security forces can be aimed at.
Back in August, DHS folded their Disinformation Governance Board after months of attacks from Republicans, libertarians and left-ish quarters.2 The board was established to monitor social media and other sources for misinformation and disinformation, and serve as a corrective.
This was a Biden administration initiative, which Biden and other Democrats would rightly have railed against had Trump’s DHS proposed it, but the agency appears to regard monitoring and influencing public communications in the country as a core purpose.3
While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.
Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.
“Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain,” Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS director, in February.
That’s from an Intercept story based on a years-deep trove of leaked DHS documents and emails, along with other sources, spanning several administrations. Even if one accepts a proposition to the effect that a Democratic administration wouldn’t abuse the capacity to influence or in some instances control communications within and without social media, which is an absurd proposition, would we want to present the mechanism to the next Chad Wolf?
We face an endless series of elections in which Democrats attempt, with varying degrees of ineffectuality, to stave off a Republican takeover which could at this point result in the effective end of federal elections. I’m anxious, my comfort music has ended and I’m going away.
Pokey LaFarge, “In the Blossom of Their Shade.”
That, comrades, is all I got. Take care, be well.
Save me having to read the Gizmodo story and tell me if the contention is that DHS was going to try to regulate social media or respond to information on those platforms that was felt to be untrue, or both.