April 29, 2022

The right is super mad about the appointment of Nina Jankowicz to a DHS job on disinformation. Why should the government stop disinformation peddlers from lying? What about muh free speech?

I'm going to post the entire bio of Nina Jankowicz, as written by, um, the Pulitzer Center, of which she is a "grantee."

Nina Jankowicz studies the intersection of democracy and technology in Central and Eastern Europe and the US as the Disinformation Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is the author of How To Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict (Bloomsbury/IBTauris), a New Statesman 2020 book of the year. Ms. Jankowicz has advised the Ukrainian government on strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship. Her writing has been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others. She has testified before Congress on multiple occasions and is a frequent television and radio commentator on disinformation and Russian and Eastern European affairs.

Prior to her Fulbright grant in Ukraine, Ms. Jankowicz managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. She sits on the advisory boards of the Centre for Information Resilience and Zinc Network's Open Information Partnership, and regularly briefs and advises Members of Congress and representatives of allied governments. She received her MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, and her BA from Bryn Mawr College.

Jankowicz also "has lived and worked in Russia and Ukraine, and speaks fluent Russian and proficient Polish and Ukrainian."

In other words, she is eminently qualified to talk about disinformation and help the Department of Homeland Security fight that weapon used against the US by Russia and other nations.

Fox and Friends and the rest of the right-wing media ecosphere are super mad she's already called BS on their Hunter Biden laptop smear. Because it IS disinformation.

But that's not all, we also get a lovely nugget of misogyny on parade, as stupid employee Brian Kilmeade spews an opinion about DHS hiring pregnant women.

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): By the way, she's eight months pregnant. I mean if you're going to take over a brand new bureau, shouldn't you not need maternity leave the first few weeks in? Just saying. The other problem is she doesn't seem to have much credibility.

Watching Brian Kilmeade whine about "credibility" and maternity leave makes my head hurt.

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