Brief meditation on weaponized use of language: “DEI” and “disinformation”

I’m not quite sure why the “equity” in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) has suddenly become a hot topic in the conservative punditry.  It seems to have erupted in the last 72 hours.

But the eruption is a nice opportunity to drop a few observations on the use of language entailed in the DEI formulation.  I had occasion to tweet this weekend about the same use of language with the term “disinformation,” as it is deployed by Western cultural planners today, so I’m including that in the discussion.

I commend to you the discussions of others.

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New Year 2023

There is light in the darkness, TOC friends.  Don’t be daunted by the storm clouds, lightning, and noise.  The arc of history bends toward the light, and we here in these living generations are witness to history’s great show.

Why is this so? Because we’re the ones who are here.  We are only inadequate to the moment if we choose to be.  Regular correspondents know where I think the choice about that lies.  Our sufficiency is not of ourselves.

World crisis: Raiders of the lost files

Those who identify the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago as a crisis of the Republic are quite correct, and I am gravely concerned it’s a bigger crisis than anyone is thinking. 

The reason for that is what ensued a few hours after the raid, which reportedly occurred in the “pre-dawn” hours of 8 August 2022 in Palm Beach.

Numerous TV news commentators pointed out Monday evening that nothing like this raid on the former president’s home has happened before in U.S. history.  Americans aren’t the only ones who know that.  We’re also not the only ones who know that proper procedure was ignored by the raiding team, according to witnesses.  The FBI team should have allowed Trump’s lawyers to be present everywhere items were seized, but didn’t (the lawyers were reportedly excluded altogether);

The fetid swamp of “integrity”: The initiative that scurried from the spotlight

The recent articles showing that erstwhile U.S. Administrator of Truth Nina Jankowicz was connected with the shadowy, government-funded British group Institute for Statecraft (and its offshoot Integrity Initiative project) have reopened a can of worms far too numerous to herd into a single post.

Indeed, they’re so numerous it’s hard to keep track of them from one online search to the next.

So this won’t be an in-depth treatment of “IfS/II” and its squirming, hydra-headed mass.  Rather, it’s a few notes on what Ms. Jankowicz was doing in the period when an IfS/II document reflects a connection to her.  Plus some bonus observations about IfS/II.

As far as I’ve discerned at this point, one document out of quite a few – all of which were hacked and exposed by Anonymous in 2018 and early 2019 – identifies Jankowicz as explicitly linked to the Integrity Initiative’s “UK Cluster.”*

A work-in-progress timeline surrounding Feb 2017 Daniel Jones meeting, including the ‘Trump’s insurance broker’ angle

With a great deal happening, it’s important to move some things out there before they are fully developed and analyzed, largely because some of the event dates are remarkably coincident with known events from the Spygate timeline. 

The anchor point for this rough-condition timeline is early February 2017, when on successive days Michael Sussmann met with officials at the CIA to urge on them his trove of purported Alfa Bank-Trump data (9 February 2017), and John Podesta met with Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, along with former Dianne Feinstein staffer Daniel Jones (on 10 February 2017), who in the same timeframe started a non-profit that hired Fusion to continue its anti-Trump work from 2016.

These dates are of particular interest, and not only because John Durham has discussed the Sussmann-CIA meeting in his court filings in the Sussmann false-statement case.