Experts are calling for President Joe Biden and his administration to appoint a task force led by a “reality czar” focused on dictating and mitigating the dissemination of certain types of information, and the New York Times is eating it up.
In an article published on Tuesday, one Times author made it his goal to seek out experts who could “help fix our truth-challenged information ecosystem” filled with “hoaxes, lies and collective delusions” created by people such as QAnon supporters, One America News watchers, and YouTube conspiracy theorists.
One of the solutions proposed by the professors and employees at anti-extremist activist organizations is for the Biden administration to take action following the deadly Jan. 6 mob riot at the U.S. Capitol to establish a “truth commission” to investigate the siege. Other experts, the author wrote, took it further, proposing that Biden and his team appoint a “reality czar,” a term that some pointed out is very similar to George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, to oversee a committee on the quest for general truth instead of just focusing on the riot.
“Several experts I spoke with recommended that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar,’” the New York Times author wrote. “It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant. But let’s hear them out.”
This ultimate-truth official who would work for the government, the author suggested, would be responsible for dictating and mitigating the spread of information in the United States and could engage with the ever-truth-wielding Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and Google to implement new policies and evaluate which information should be disseminated.
“This task force could also meet regularly with tech platforms, and push for structural changes that could help those companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems,” the author suggested, completely ignoring the fact that these same Big Tech overlords already coordinated to censor and deplatform certain people, groups, and companies that they deemed “dangerous,” such as former President Donald Trump.
Involving these internet oligarchs in a government-led crackdown on “disinformation,” the author excitedly suggests, “could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.”
Collusion with Big Tech or the establishment of a government-controlled veritas, however, “could not bring back the millions of already radicalized Americans” by themselves, the Times writer warned. A federal intervention that spurs people to “community-based activities that could keep them engaged and occupied” and the creation of ads “targeting high-risk potential violent extremists with empathetic messages about mental health and mindfulness” might do the trick, though.
“Enact a ‘social stimulus,’ and fix people’s problems,” the Times subhead reads.
