BUCK: We have our friend Raheem Kassam on with us now, editor-in-chief of The National Pulse. Raheem, good of you to join, as always.
KASSAM: Buck, great to be with you, as always.
BUCK: So, we’ve got… I’ve been calling her “Soviet Mary Poppins.” You were on… I know The National Pulse —
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: Clay likes that.
CLAY: It is amazing, yes.
BUCK: Appreciate that. You were on this over at The National Pulse, the site you run, early on. It turns out the disinformation czar not only has a penchant for musical theater but also for disinformation that specifically targets Republicans. What do the folks listening need to know about this one?
And this appointee who is going to, you know, run this operation — out of the Department of Homeland Security, by the way, which kind of gives another dark and murky and Big Brotheresque twist to all of this — well, her name is Nina Jankowicz. And we started to look into Nina Jankowicz because we’ve done so much reporting on who these fact-checkers really are.
And this one I just knew from the start, I know she’s got to have some famous affiliations that all of these other people have had for so long — Big Tech funded, foreign influence, all of that. And sure enough, sure enough once again we learned very quickly that Nina Jankowicz was actually a Wilson fellow — sorry the Wilson Center, which is a foreign policy think tank funded, again, by these big foundations you hear about all the time.
The same Open Societies and Ford Foundations and Rockefellers. So, this is coming from the same swamp. It’s all the same people before — and funnily enough, she was also an adviser to the Ukrainian government. Now, those things you go, “All right. Well, you got somebody here who has different experiences.” I’m not sure what her relationship to journalism and misinformation is, I’m not sure she’s ever been a journalist.
I’m not sure she knows what it takes to write a story, but she’s gonna be the one judging people like me, apparently, on disinformation terms — and then you add in this following. It’s he cherry on the cake. And that is that she herself was peddling misinformation when Hunter Biden’s laptop first came out. And you’ll remember, Buck and Clay, that I was one of the first people to have eyes on that device and find out for myself that it was very real.
And she at the time when it first came out was extremely, extremely interested in saying this is not real, this is “a Russian influence op,” she says. She said 50 former national security issues and five former CIA heads believe the laptop is a Russian disinformation operation. And as you know, no such thing was true. It was all real. And, by the way, we still continue to find interesting information about the Biden family corruption on that hard drive. This is the person that they’re putting in charge of censorship in America.
CLAY: Raheem, appreciate you joining us. For those out there who didn’t hear this ridiculous claim of Nina Jankowicz, the Mary Poppins of Disinformation, I couldn’t believe, Buck, when I saw this that it was real. This is a hundred percent real. Listen.
CLAY: Yeah. This is crazy, right. So Raheem, my question for you is, one of the things that I try to focus on is what kind of…? If they came to me and they said, “Hey, we’ve got four people that were thinking about making the new disinformation czar,” and they said, “One of them pretended to be Mary Poppins; here’s a video of her singing about disinformation,” I would say… (laughing) I’ve done a little bit of hiring in my life, Raheem, with my business.
I would say, “Okay, we’re tossing that one on the scrap heap.” What kind of research do you think…? Leave aside the stupidity of the disinformation job in the first place. Do you think they did any research at all in the Biden administration? I tweeted this out because it does feel this way in some way, Raheem. And I know you’re not necessarily all-in on American sports necessarily.
KASSAM: (laughing)
CLAY: But it feels like the Biden White House is tanking for a top draft pick. When I hear that clip and see that they picked her for this job, I feel like they’re purposely trying to destroy this thing from the outset.
KASSAM: Well, the problem is I think they know that this is a nutjob of the highest order, and they want to set a nutjob loose on us, right? Like, they want this person to be the bane of our existences. And, frankly, I can’t think of a worst person to have to try to, like, answer to. Imagine this. That we may have to answer to this person one day via DHS or whoever comes knocking at my doorway long gun and says you’ve published misinformation.
Come with us, to the gulag. You know? They want this to work us up into a tizzy. But there are so many things like this. I’ll break a little bit of information. You know, I have a Substack as well, and I’m doing another article today on another one of these things. It’s gonna be out later this afternoon, but you guys will hear about it first, right now. The Birds Aren’t Real movement, that parody movement that has been kind of viral?
BUCK: Wait. Can you tell everybody what that is, Raheem, just ’cause a lot of folks listening will be like, what…? Explain a little bit and then tell us about the Substack.
KASSAM: There’s a comedy viral, like, troupe, almost, of thousands of people now around the country, and they go around as if they are really conspiracy theorists holding, “Birds Aren’t Real” signs, and they make the allegation that the U.S. government killed all the birds 50 years ago. But it’s a parody, right? It’s funny. It gets people involved.
KASSAM: Right. Right. Birds are actually drones, they say.
BUCK: Drones.
KASSAM: So they’re in on the joke. But now next month the Poynter Center and the International Fact-Checking Network is hosting their ninth annual fact-checking conference, and the leading voices in those conference — number one Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, somebody who has made excuses for Roman Polanski I will have people remember —
CLAY: And, by the way, sorry to cut you off, Raheem, but for this audience she also was questioned really well by a University of Chicago kid about the Hunter Biden laptop and said, “Oh, it was not interesting to me.” She got destroyed in that exchange.
KASSAM: I remember it well. It’s a couple of weeks ago. It was a fantastic exchange, and kudos to those students. Number two is Joan Donovan on this panel. Joan Donovan has ties directly to the Chinese Communist Party through the think tank she works for. And number three is Peter McIndoe, the founder of Birds Aren’t Real. So I thought, “Why is this guy…? Who’s been doing this conspiracy stuff, performance art for so long, why is he speaking at a fact check conference?”
And it turns out that he is now changing the Birds Aren’t Real movement to become part of the broader fact-checking movement out there and he’s being welcomed into the formed. He’s said that his group is now intervened in anti-abortion rallies to try and make them look stupid by holding up “Birds Aren’t Real” signs in the middle of them. So you’re seeing this now go to, like, this almost disinformation guerrilla warfare. And I expect you’ll see a lot more of those people in that movement trying to infiltrate right-wing events, make a mockery of them, and I think this gonna be a pretty big deal.
BUCK: Just Raheem Kassam on Substack? How do you folks find it, Raheem?
KASSAM: Yeah, you can just go to RaheemKassam.Substack.com or I’ll just link it on my social media which is all just @RaheemKassam.
CLAY: Raheem, fantastic stuff as always. We appreciate the time.
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