From the left: People Can Win
In the wake of the Twitter Files, the Department of Homeland Security has shut down its MDM subcommittee — short for Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation — and Racket’s Matt Taibbi dances on the grave. The MDM group was “behind the asinine plan the Biden administration announced last April to institute a ‘Disinformation Governance Board,’ which was to be headed by Nina Jankowicz, a self-styled Mary Poppins of digital rectitude.” Yet “America took one look at Jankowicz and at most a few fleeting moments considering” the DGB “plan before concluding, correctly, that it was a beyond-loathsome expression of aristocratic arrogance that needed shutting down.” The MDM folks were “a group of self-described experts in an utterly fictitious ‘anti-disinformation’ discipline who were so sure it was okay for them to tell you whom not to vote for, one of them sang about it.” Now “people are losing their fear of departing from the orthodoxy such types would like to impose, and pushing for a return to normalcy, which for the first time in ages feels within reach.”
Ukraine watch: Why the War Helps Putin
Russian President Vladimir “Putin is likely to continue the war in Ukraine,” predict Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Erica Frantz at Foreign Affairs, “not because it is in Russia’s interest but because it is in his personal interest.” Why? “Wartime autocrats rarely lose power” — “since the end of World War II, only seven percent of personalist authoritarians have been unseated,” likely because “being at war shuts down avenues” to challenge them. But about “half of all leaders who lose a war also lose power.” Which means “the most promising path to stop the war, then, is through greater U.S. and European support to Kyiv” to “help Ukraine win a decisive military victory.” “Until Putin faces a credible threat, he will have every reason to continue the war.”
From the right: Dominion’s Dangerous Defamation Suit
“If the applicable law is faithfully applied” in voting-system company Dominion’s suit against Fox News, “the facts completely upend” any defamation claim, argues William P. Barr at The Wall Street Journal. Good: “a ruling against Fox would be a major blow to media freedoms generally.” “The theory advanced by Dominion is profoundly dangerous to the media industry as whole” since it would subject “news outlets to the prospect of outsize liability whenever they report on newsworthy allegations” — in this case claims of vote fraud — “that turn out to be false.” And the left, too, “should think twice about cheering for Dominion” because “a weapon unsheathed by one side today can be turned against it the next.”
Conservative: Media Blackout on Biden China $
Back on March 16, House Republicans revealed bank records on $1.3 million in 2017 payments to multiple Bidens from a Chinese energy firm. Yet, fumes The Hill’s Joe Concha, “When finally asked about the payments, President Biden said they never happened. Reporters asked no follow-up questions,” then Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in turn “refused to answer.” And the topic’s gone untouched on the ABC-NBC-CBS-CNN prestige weekend-talk shows, “a complete blackout. That’s what media observers call the bias of omission — when news organizations ignore a newsworthy story.”
Eye on elex: DeSantis’ Rope-A-Dope Strategy
By going directly at Donald Trump’s entanglement with Stormy Daniels, Ron DeSantis’ “response says something new about him,” cheers Charles Lipson at Spectator World, “or at least about his approach to the coming campaign.” He knows it doesn’t pay to play nice with Trump because “Trump will come after him sooner or later.” And, at best, the attacks will “remind voters of Trump’s worst qualities.” In his Piers Morgan interview, “the Florida governor differentiated himself from Trump and went after the former president’s obvious vulnerabilities.” In doing so, DeSantis has been able to show “he shares the voters’ priorities” and “has the track record in government to actually fulfill his promises” — and “the more Trump fumes, the more he highlights his own defects.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
