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As with many issues, Revolver News has been at the bleeding edge of exposing the disinformation censorship industry and the major players who operate in it. Our pieces on Brandy Zadrozny, Nina Jankowicz, Renee DiResta, and Rick Stengel, just to name a few, are classics in the genre. Thanks principally to Elon’s acquisition of Twitter, the exposures of the Twitter Files, and Donald Trump’s historic victory, the censorship industry, which reached a high-water mark in 2020, is now in substantial retreat, at least domestically. Many of the premiere censorship think tanks like the Stanford Internet Observatory are on the chopping block, as are many censorship NGOS, and of course the major global public square media platform Twitter is under new, free-speech aligned management.
We were thrilled to see expert Mike Benz—without question the world’s authority on this subject—on the Joe Rogan show to offer a master class in exposing the censorship cartel and further accelerate the demise of our would-be censorship class.
Nonetheless, there are some remnants of the censorship industry during this lame duck period of Biden’s presidency (we suppose it was always lame duck in a way). One of these remnants is schoolmarm archetype Jessica Brandt, an alleged AI expert who currently runs the so-called Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC) housed within the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI).
What is the FMIC exactly? Its website at the DNI tells us the following:
FMIC is led and staffed by a diverse team of professionals from across the IC focused on mitigating threats to democracy and U.S. national interests from foreign malign influence.
FMIC serves as the primary U.S government organization for integrating intelligence pertaining to FMI, which entails managing the IC’s collection resources, building partnerships, and advancing strategic analysis, while protecting the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.
FMIC also houses the Election Threats Executive (ETE), which serves as the IC’s coordinating and integrating authority on all election security activities, initiatives, and programs. In this role, FMIC leads the IC’s efforts to identify and assess foreign malign influence and interference in U.S. elections.
“Threats to democracy,” “foreign interference,” and “election threats” are all censorship predicates with which we’re intimately familiar by now. Recall the now-notorious censorship agency CISA, housed within the DHS, that used its mandate to protect election infrastructure as a pretext to censor free speech of American citizens.
It’s worth remembering that while the DNI does not have an enormous budget or control of personnel the way that many national security bureaucracies do, technically speaking, it does sit on top of the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States. Thus the FMIC is formally speaking at the very top of the pecking order when it comes to managing the disinformation censorship scam for the entire intelligence community.
Need proof it’s a scam? We thought you’d never ask. Let us take a tour through the Director Jessica Brandt’s scholarship in the field of “artificial and emerging technology”—her alleged area of expertise while at the left-wing Brookings Institution before being given her perch as glorified censorship czar.
A quick look at Brandt’s publications reveals that her work conforms to an all-too-familiar pattern among so-called disinformation experts—nearly every single thing she published at Brookings is designed to suggest that popular pro-Trump American journalists are somehow engaging in Russian disinformation.
Consider, for instance, the following piece, suggestively titled “U.S. Podcasters Spread Kremlin Narratives on Nord Stream Sabotage.”
Brandt begins her piece with the dubious assumption, presented without evidence at all, that Russia itself was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline—a critical piece of Russian infrastructure central to Russia’s economy and geopolitical objectives in Europe. According to Brandt, American citizens who dared to question the completely illogical notion that Russia destroyed its own pipeline were engaging in Russian disinformation efforts. Chief among these accused Russian disinformation agents are popular pro-Trump voices such as Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and Dan Bongino.
By spreading the idea that the United States was in fact responsible for the explosions, several leading U.S. podcasters have advanced the Kremlin’s preferred narrative while staying under the radar of researchers—until now.
[…]
the explosions occurred on Monday Sept. 26, and the same day only two episodes linked the United States to the incident. But after a Tuesday Sept. 27 episode of Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, in which the television host laid the blame on Washington, podcasters picked up the narrative. The remaining 16 episodes in our data set that discussed the role of the United States in the incident all aired after the Tucker Carlson segment, suggesting that some leading political podcasters may be taking cues about which stories to cover from the Fox News pundit.
[…]
On his Wednesday show, the podcast host Dan Bongino mused, “Is the Biden Administration crazy enough to do this to light a spark that might cause World War III? The answer is, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised, and I bet neither would you.’”
[…]
The most prolific disseminator of Nord Stream content between September 26 and October 3 was Charlie Kirk, who devoted four segments to furthering the unfounded theory linking the U.S. to the explosion. In one of these four episodes, Kirk directly implicated the U.S. government as the culprit, asking. “So who did it?” Kirk asked. “I know this sounds cynical, but…the American Washington, DC war machine stands to benefit from this.” Kirk has previously been a disseminator of Russian propaganda.
In yet another article and interview ominously titled “The American Far Right’s Russia Embrace,” Brandt yet again singles out popular pro-Trump media figures Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino (we’re beginning to see a pattern). This time, Carlson and Bongino are accused of Russian sympathies for daring to report on the possibility of biolabs in Ukraine—a topic that the Biden regime, given its family corruption ties in Ukraine, looked upon with disfavor.
Some of the loudest voices trumpeting the Russian government’s line right now are in the United States — on the far-right and on TV.
Example: Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov says the U.S. is helping Ukraine develop bioweapons.
“Those laboratories are created by the United States all over the world. Ukraine is probably the biggest project for the Pentagon,” Lavrov said.
Then, Tucker Carlson picks it up.
“Secret biolabs? Like the secret biolabs Ukraine definitely doesn’t have? Ukraine has those? Yes, it does,” Carlson said.
Journalism fact checks and formal denials from the United States government make no difference. Influential voices on the far-right still say:
“They reported that this story about these bio research facilities in Ukraine was a conspiracy theory. When USA Today and Snopes say it’s … a hoax, you almost know it’s true,” Dan Bongino said.
Today, On Point: The American far-right and its tight Russian embrace.
When it comes to Brandt’s cheap attempts to censor right-wing journalists under the guise of fighting “Russian disinformation,” we’ve seen this movie before, and we will spare the readers more examples of Brandt writing essentially the same article over and over again ad infinitum. It is, however, worth pointing out that, likely because the “disinformation scam” has been exposed and fallen out of favor, Brandt instead seems to market herself as an “artificial intelligence” and “emerging technology” expert—cleverly latching onto the AI fad to lend a false sense of legitimacy and tech-savvy to her schoolmarm censorship efforts. There is nothing in Brandt’s record to indicate even a basic familiarity or background in artificial intelligence or emerging technologies.
What’s really interesting, however, is that Jessica Brandt’s moonlighting as an AI expert by incessantly accusing right-wing American journalists of engaging in Russian disinformation comes to an abrupt end once we go back in time to early 2019. Before early 2019, there was not even a pretense of Brandt being involved with technology, AI, or even “disinformation.” Just as nearly every single article Brandt wrote after February 2019 was some version of a disinformation censorship plea, nearly every article she wrote before February 2019 was some call for open borders policy with respect to refugees, particularly demonizing Trump for his so-called “travel ban.”
And there’s more…
and more…
We could go on and on. The first takeaway from this is to emphasize what a fake field disinformation studies is, much less Jessica Brandt’s attempt to brand herself as an AI expert. Her singular passion was opening American borders to endless refugees, and somehow in early 2019 she became an “AI expert,” focusing on censoring pro-Trump voices in American media. Jessica Brandt’s dubious and fake career, more than any other, singularly instantiates the utter absurdity and artificiality of the disinformation censorship pretext, as well as the malicious political agenda behind it.
Although cretins in Congress tried to sneak in a continuation for the State Department’s censorship outfit Global Engagement Center, it looks like Trump, Elon, and others have caught the issue in time, and the GEC will be disbanded (we hope). But Jessica Brandt’s tenure in the DNI’s Foreign Malign Influence center is a sober reminder that this hydra has many heads, and all must be dealt with in order to quell the censorship beast. Getting rid of Jessica and getting rid of or radically reforming the FMIC should be a day 1 task for incoming DNI head Tulsi Gabbard.
We will keep readers posted on how this story develops.
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