The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-26)

THURSDAY, MAY 26 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A23

T

he Department of Homeland Se- curity’s announced “pause” of its Disinformation Governance Board, 21 days after creating it as a “national security” measure, probably is itself disinformation. DHS realizes that its 10-thumbed debut of this boneheaded idea almost doomed it, so the “pause” feigns deliberation while the department plots the DGB’s resurrection. Government pratfalls such as the DGB are doubly useful, as reminders of government’s embrace of even prepos- terous ideas if they will expand its power, and as occasions for progressives to demonstrate that there is no government expansion they will not embrace. Progressives noted approvingly that DHS was putting a disinformation “ex- pert” — a “scholar” — in charge, so science would be applied, including the “science” of sorting disinformation from real information. Homeland Security Secretary Ale- jandro Mayorkas’s short-lived choice as DGB executive director was Nina Janko- wicz. Before becoming, for three weeks, head of the “nonpartisan” (so said the president’s press secretary) disinformation board, Jankowicz had a colorful career chastising “Republicans and other disinformers.” The contents of Hunt- er Biden’s laptop? “A Trump campaign product,” she decreed. Her certitudes are many. To assuage the anxieties of those uneasy about government bestowing the imprimatur of truthfulness on contested propositions, DHS officials said the disinformation board had no “operational authority or capability,” and denounced as a “great misperception” the idea that the board’s mission would involve dispel- ling what it deems unhelpful statements. The White House said the DGB would “prevent” the circulation of disinformation, yet without trying to “adjudicate” truth or falsehood. Barack Obama, commenting on disinformation and offering a sample of it, recently called himself “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist” while fond- ly remembering the Fairness Doctrine (1949-1987) as part of the “framework” that made broadcasting “compatible with democracy.” That doctrine allowed the federal government to require broad- cast entities — all dependent on federal licenses — to be what government con- sidered fair and balanced. Using radio spectrum scarcity as an excuse, even before the Fairness Doc- trine was created, Republicans running Washington in the late 1920s pressured a New York station owned by the Socialist Party to show “due regard” for other opinions. What regard was “due”? The government knew. So, it prevented the Chicago Federation of Labor from buy- ing a station, saying all stations should serve “the general public.” In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration conditioned one station’s license renewal on ending anti-FDR editorials. (Tulane Law School professor Amy Gajda’s new book, “Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy,” reports that earlier, FDR had “unsuccessfully pushed for a code of conduct for newspapers as part of the Depression-era National Recovery Act and had envisioned bestowing on com- pliant newspapers an image of a blue eagle as a sort of presidential seal of approval.”) John F. Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commission harassed conservative radio, and when a conservative broadcaster said Lyndon B. Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 as an excuse for Vietnam escalation, the Fairness Doctrine was wielded to force the broadcaster to air a response. As the Disinformation Governance Board floundered in ignominy, Mayork- as, the DHS secretary, said, “We could have done a better job of communicating what it is and what it isn’t.” It is ever thus: No progressive ideas are foolish or repellant, although a few are artlessly merchandized. But to be fair to DHS, it has more employees (240,000) than Richmond, Va., has residents, and there is enough disinformation in circulation to preoccu- py all of them. The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl offers some examples from the administration that conceived the DGB: President Biden said the $2.4 trillion Build Back Better spending bill “costs zero dollars.” Biden calls today’s infla- tion, which ignited a year before the invasion of Ukraine, “Putin’s price hike.” Speaking in 2021 about his American Rescue Plan, Biden said, “According to Moody’s... this law alone will create 7 million new jobs.” Moody’s actually said the law would add 4 million jobs to the 3 million that would be created without the law. Last year, the Biden administration said Moody’s predicted “19 million jobs” would be created by the American Jobs Plan. Moody’s actually predicted 2.7 million jobs over a 10-year period, with the other 16 million representing the baseline of expected job growth. If — when — the DHS’s “pause” ends and a resuscitated disinformation board buckles down to protecting Americans from falsehoods, it will of course concern itself with only disinformation of foreign origin, the theory being that only this sort threatens national security. The theory will, of course, be disinformation.

GEORGE F. WILL

Watch for a

return of the

ignominious,

notorious DGB

A

ustralia sent the democratic world some useful messages in its recent election. The most important: that democracy can stay healthy even when voters are disgruntled, and even when they have problems with the two major parties. Our friends Down Under could do this partly because they have an electoral system that requires everyone to vote and allows voters to cast ballots in a nuanced way. Preferential voting, in which voters rank their choices, means that voters can say more about how they think than a single marking next to one candidate or party can convey. And with turnouts approaching 90 percent, the will of the people really is the will of the people. The moderation that Australia’s inclu- sive system encourages is also one reason that a conservative government under then-Prime Minister John Howard was able to push through a tough gun-control law after a 1996 massacre at Port Arthur in Tasmania. The headline news this week i s the victory of the Labor Party, led by new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Think of Alba- nese as a 59-year old Joe Biden, a main- streamer with the common touch and long experience — he’s been in Parliament since he was 33. Albo, as he is known, ran down the middle, even though he began his political life on the left. He is a shrewd negotiator and a careful tactician, and possesses an inner toughness that comes from being raised in what we would call the projects. The son of a single mother on a disability pension, he used his victory speech to express hope that “there are families in public housing watching this tonight” so parents could tell their children that “no matter where you live or where you come from, in Australia the doors of oppor- tunity are open to us all.” The new prime minister has a bit of a chip on his shoulder — “I’ve been underes- timated my whole life,” he said at his moment of triumph — but he was not wrong in alluding to doubters. And staunch progressives were unhappy about his no-big-promises “small target” campaign, designed to give his conservative foes as little to shoot at as possible. Albanese correctly calculated that he could win simply by making the increas- ingly unpopular and divisive incumbent, Scott Morrison, the issue. Morrison head- ed Australia’s conservative coalition, a long-standing alliance of the Liberal and National Parties. (Yes, the Australian Lib- erals are the conservatives.) Labor unexpectedly lost the 2019 election, and party moderates saw a bold list of policies — including strong action against climate change — as the culprit. So Alba- nese took a more cautious stand in general, and especially on climate. His environmen- tal goals were bolder than Morrison’s but not so sweeping as to endanger Labor in industrial and mining areas. While Morrison performed well during the pandemic — certainly compared with Donald Trump — his importation of as- pects of American-style cultural right- wing politics (his backing of an anti-trans candidate, for example) did not go down well with moderates, including some members of his own party. Many of the dissenters were women. They got their revenge in the Liberal Par- ty’s upper-middle-class suburban heart- land as one seat after another fell to a group of female candidates. Financed in the main by corporate figures committed to climate action, they were known as “Teal Independents,” their color a combination of green, for their forceful climate stance, and blue, the color of traditional, pro- b usiness Liberal Party supporters. They will also press the new government for a strong anticorruption commission. The Teal revolution mattered. With sev- eral seats still undecided, the Sydney Morn- ing Herald’s count on Tuesday showed Lib- erals losing 10 seats to Labor but six to Independents and one to the Greens. The Greens were the other big winners, taking three seats in the lower House, and they could end up with 12 seats in the Senate. The Green and Teal surge reflected the urgency of the climate issue in Australian metro areas and a revolt against both parties — Morrison for his skepticism about climate action and Albanese for soft-pedaling it. The role of women in this anti-party revolt mattered, too, especially after the uproar created by a devastating 2021 report on a toxic culture of sexual harassment in the Australian Parliament. When all the votes are finally tallied, Labor is likely to have a bare majority of 76 seats (and possibly one more) in the 150-seat House of Representatives. But the two parties were on track for the lowest combined share of first preference votes in history, the Coalition with just under 36 percent and Labor just under 33 percent. Labor’s share was depressed by loyalists who backed Teal candidates in seats Labor could never win. But because of a preference system that lets voters back third parties without fear of electing the party they like least, Australians were able to send a message to both major parties that they would like a different kind of politics. Albanese has been given a chance to “end the climate wars,” one of his core promises, and to push moderately progressive policies that include universal child care. It also falls to this proud veteran of the old party system to usher in the new style of politics Australians seem to yearn for.

E.J. DIONNE JR.

Australians’

big message

on climate

and politics

T

his week is spirit week at my daughter’s elementary school. For Wednesday, the school advised cheerily: “Wear your favorite colors or tie-dye shirt.” So on Sunday, we laid out her outfit — a long-sleeve neon tie-dye shirt with matching pants. Then we excitedly added her silly hat, cat sunglasses and pipe cleaners to the pile, for the rest of the week’s celebrations. But Wednesday morning, just hours after 19 children were killed at their elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., my thoughts turned morbid: In the event of a shooting, would her bright outfit make her more of a target? This is the sick calculation I must now make for my 6-year-old. The one all parents in this country must make. And it’s just one of many I have to consider every day as I attempt to exert some control or power during an epidemic of gun violence. I’d already decided that I would never buy her light-up shoes, despite her many requests — because, whether fact or fiction, I once read that they could make her or her classmates targets if they had to huddle in a classroom. Lights off. No sound. Pink lights flashing from a corner. How about a bulletproof back- pack? Should I buy her one of those? She already has such a small frame; it would probably be too heavy, especially when you take into account that she sometimes brings home a laptop because of school closures related to covid-19 — a totally different epidemic.

As the news spread Tuesday after- noon, I anxiously texted my daughter’s father, who was picking her up from school. I didn’t need to see or hear from her. I just needed reassur- ance that someone had eyes on her and could confirm she was safe. And what about my commute to work? Usually, I take the Metro. But on Wednesday I thought, maybe I should drive, never mind absorbing the price of tolls, gas and parking. At least I’d be able to respond quickly if something were to happen at my daughter’s school. At the office, a colleague men- tioned — as a group of us huddled tearfully, discussing the Uvalde shooting — that her daughter had pridefully worn sleeves of removable tattoos to school. My colleague’s thought: This was the sort of thing that could be used to identify her daughter’s body. I wondered whther I should even send my daughter to school on Wednesday, fearing copycats. Some lone gunman entering her school, looking for “soft targets.” Even that consideration is one that many families in Texas no longer get to make. Does any of this even matter? I don’t know. In the face of an armed intruder, outfitted with body armor, high-capacity magazines and a will to kill, any child’s chances are slim. The chance of any legislative action seems even more grim. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., which left 20 children and six adults dead, a bill to expand background checks — a basic, reasonable safety measure, supported by former representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), herself a

survivor of gun violence — was defeated in the Senate. If such a bill, supported by such a woman, couldn’t be passed, what will it take? With inaction by our elected officials, who offer only “thoughts and prayers,” the burden has been placed on our children: practice drills, stay vigilant. As for their parents — what can we do but fret? What can we do but take whatever small, seemingly trivial precautions we can to keep our children safe? Rationally, I know that my daughter’s chances of dying by gunfire in school is 1 in 10 million. But that means nothing to me. I’m worried about the statistic of one. Last night, I let my daughter sleep in my bed, a rare instance that wasn’t lost on her. “I thought you said I couldn’t sleep with you on a school night,” she said. In that moment, I had to make yet another calculation: Do I tell her about the many families who are grieving? Do I explain that I needed to have her close because dozens of parents hundreds of miles away didn’t have that luxury? Should I conclude by once again explaining the impor- tance of listening to her teacher, especially during those “special” drills? No. Instead, I lied and made up an excuse about how great she’d been lately and deserved a treat. Honestly, I will probably make another excep- tion and excuse tonight. And as I attempt to float off to sleep, I will start my calculations for the next day of spirit week: “Dress in your favorite sports team colors!” I hope the orange in her Chicago Bears shirt isn’t too bright.

NANA EFUA MUMFORD

I just want to know: How can

I protect my 6-year-old?

SERGIO FLORES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST R obb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on Wednesday — the day after 19 children and two adults w ere killed.

N

obody’s going to do anything, right? I’m betting you already know, in the wake of the deaths of 19 children at an elementary school in Texas, that nobody is going to do a single thing. Oh, yes, for a while, people will stand behind microphones. Some will be sin- cere. There will be a vigil, maybe many vigils. Perhaps some balloons will be released into the air. But no one will do anything substantial about the reality that, in the United States, you can pick up a gun and mow down people for no reason. The fact of the matter is that nobody has done anything since Columbine in 1999, or Virginia Tech in 2007, or Sandy Hook in 2012, or Parkland in 2018, and there’s virtually no chance that anyone is going to do anything now. It doesn’t matter that it’s children we’re talking about again. Nothing happened after innocent children were slaughtered the last time, or the time before that, and nothing is going to be done now. Nothing happens after it occurs in elementary schools, or grocery stores, college campuses or churches. Instead, we always defer to those whose fears outweigh others’ right to continue living. The gun is a holy relic in America. A sacred talisman. More important than life itself. We are living in a twisted version of “The Lottery,” the classic short story by Shirley Jackson. In the story, the residents of a small fictional town hurry about their day preparing for a big

ceremony, which is slowly revealed to be a ritual human sacrifice. Death by stoning. Each year, someone is chosen at random to die, for the good of the town. So that the rest of the townspeo- ple can feel safe. Perhaps so that their god can be appeased, or good crops can be enjoyed. That’s where we live now. We live in a culture where human beings are ran- domly chosen to die so that those who feel unseen or who fear the unknown or just love guns don’t have to feel afraid. But our sacrifices aren’t yearly. They’re daily. One right after the other. Unlike the characters in Jackson’s story, the people who die in our tale lost their humanity long ago and are immortal- ized only as statistics. Numbers to be

added up. Those of us who survive get to shake our heads and ask “Why?” while secretly just feeling lucky that it wasn’t us or someone we love who had to pay the price. This is also why nothing will be done. Because it didn’t affect us. We can push it out of our minds and say what a great tragedy it is. But we don’t have to do much else. We won’t do anything because those among us who think their fears and their rights are the same thing hold all the cards. Because those who believe a boogeyman is lurking around every corner have agents walking the halls of our government to ensure that these shootings change nothing. We rarely note that most of these shooters are men who are angry and antisocial. And, unless we come up with a cure for angry and antisocial men and boys, these mass murders will continue. We won’t do anything about this problem because we are not the land of the free and home of the brave that we think we are. We have that backward: America is the land of the fearful and trapped. We don’t feel our children are safe. We don’t think we can change this dreadful landscape. But we’ll watch politicians make speeches. We’ll see all the memes on social media and read all the opinion pieces from people like me. But, in the end, we’ll move on until there are new human sacrifices to make us forget about the old ones. Because it’s important that the fearful feel safe. And we’re all fair game to be sacrificed.

BRIAN BROOME

Why nothing will change after Uvalde

MARCO BELLO/REUTERS Gov. Greg Abbott (R) addresses Texans after the nation’s deadliest school shooting in nearly a decade.

The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-26)

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