Morning Wire - Disinformation Board & Chicago Crime | 5.19.22

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

The Biden administration’s new Disinformation Governance Board is on pause after backlash, Chicago imposes strict curfews for minors, and the role of drug trafficking in America’s fentanyl crisis. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Disinformation Governance Board has been paused, and its leader, Nina Jenkowitz, has resigned. The departments work across several administrations to address disinformation that threatens the security of our country is critical, and that will indeed continue. What comes next for the controversial board? I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire, editor-in-chief, John Bickley. It's Thursday, May 19th, and this is Morning Wire. A shooting in Chicago's tourist-heavy Millennium Park has led to a curfew for unaccompanied, How is social media contributing to Chicago PD's growing crime problem? And deaths from synthetic drugs like fentanyl are skyrocketing in America,

and drug trafficking at the southern border is a major contributor to the crisis. Who's behind the deadly trafficking and what's being done to address it? Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. This show is sponsored by Tessa Maze. Looking for a great way to bring amazing flavor to your meals? Tessamaze is the number one organic salad, dressing company in the country because they put quality and flavor above all else.

Founded by three brothers with their mom's recipe, Tesaamaze has changed the standard for great tasting, healthy dressings. Go to tessamase.com, that's T-E-S-E-M-A-E-S dot com, and use promo code Wire to check out all of their amazing products and join the Tesa-M-M-A-S family today. Use promo code Wire to get 20% off your purchase. Following weeks of criticism, the Biden administration is backing away from plans to launch a Disinformation Board as part of the Department of Homeland Security. The Washington Post revealed Wednesday that their sources say, the board has been placed on indefinite hold,

and Nina Jenkowitz, the woman nominated to lead it, has resigned. Here to tell us how the controversial effort fell apart as Daily Wire Culture Reporter Megan Basham. So Megan, it feels like from the get-go the administration was fighting an uphill battle to get this project off the ground. What happened here? Yeah, it did. You know, there were a lot of reasons for that.

And to start with the administration's nominee to head up that board, Nina Jankowitz, well, she presented plenty of controversy. So the ostensible purpose of this board was to fight the spread of misinformation and disinformation, especially online. Yet Jankowitz herself shared erroneous claims on social media. She retweeted numerous posts related to the Trump-Russia collusion story. Those have since been debunked. She also posted claims casting doubts on the veracity of the New York

Post's Hunter Biden laptop reporting. She called that a Trump campaign product. Well, that story turned out to be true. So she really didn't have the best track record on disseminating factual information herself. But critics also point out that these posts all ran in one political direction against Republicans. So there were a lot of questions over whether she would be politically neutral enough for a job like that. Right. And some of her ideas for how misinformation.

could be combated also raised eyebrows. She suggested, for instance, that verified Twitter users could edit other users' tweets if they found them misleading. Among the people who were critical of that notion was Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has a deal pending to buy Twitter. He called it disconcerting. This was pundant Douglas Murray on Fox News last week, offering some pretty typical criticism. So she's wildly inadequate for the job, but effectively no,

should have the job. It shouldn't be a job that should exist in America to tell us at government level, what is true and what is not. So it appears that Murray's larger point there is that he doesn't actually think the board should exist at all. Right. And while Jen Goet's made a lot of headlines, that was really the broader issue. The board's mission was, as we said, to target misinformation and disinformation that could, quote, affect border security, American safety during disasters, and this was the big one, public trust in our democratic institutions. Well, that allows for some pretty broad power who decides what undermines public trust in democratic institutions.

Right. So that's what critics like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul focused on, likening it to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984. You know, just hearing some of that language, it seems that DHS could have been facing a string of lawsuits over this board. Yeah, exactly, especially given that a big part of the national discussion we've been having over the last couple of years is whether big tech's content moderation counts as censorship because it's being done by private companies.

So some of those arguing that it does point to pressure the government has brought to bear on social media platforms, essentially arguing that they're acting on behalf of the government. They particularly point to former White House press secretary, Jen Saki, making comments about the government working with big tech. In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken or we're working to take, I should say, from the federal government. We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. So the disinformation board would have acted as a further extension of that. But constitutionally, it posed a much more clear-cut problem because it would, in fact, have required the government itself to play a direct role in censoring and suppressing online speech.

So two attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana had already filed a lawsuit against the administration, arguing that it is, quote, directly colluding with social media platforms to censor disfavored speakers and viewpoints in violation of the First Amendment. So if the board is just on hold, do we have any sense yet if plans could be revived? Short answer, given that its rollout was kind of a debacle, I doubt it. And you never want to say never about these things. But given that even DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that the administration could have done a better job of communicating what it is, it sounds to me like they're throwing in the towel. Yeah, I can see why that would be the case.

Thanks for that story, Megan. That was Daily Wire culture reporter, Megan Basham. Coming up, violence erupts. when hundreds of teens gather in Chicago's Millennium Park, causing Mayor Lori Lightfoot to take drastic action. The value of your IRA or 401K has likely ballooned thanks to the longest bull market run in U.S. history, but every bull run is followed by a recession.

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restrictions on teens hanging out in the park, a decision that was slammed by some critics. Daily Wire investigative reporter, Marade Allorty, is here with the details for us. So, Marade first, what prompted these new restrictions? Yeah, so these restrictions were a response to another tragic Saturday in Chicago last weekend, where a 16-year-old was fatally shot in Millennium Park. The shooting happened on the early side of the evening around 7.30 p.m. after hundreds of kids swarmed the park after hearing about a meetup on social media. This was part of a phenomenon called trends where kids circulate information about meetups in public places. Basically, it's like a party where hundreds of kids show up at once, and the bean in downtown Chicago has become a popular location. for these events. According to police, the scene was complete chaos, with crowds of teens

spilling out into the surrounding streets. Apparently, this particular trend became deadly when one teen shot another teen in the crowd. Police were called and 26 juveniles were arrested and seven guns were recovered. In response to these so-called trends and their potential for violence, Lightfoot announced that unaccompanied teens will no longer be allowed in the park past 6 p.m. from Thursday through Sunday. Now, I want to be clear. It gives me no. pleasure to impose these rules and restrictions. But having exhausted every other opportunity, every other tool and remedy, we've got to go to this next step to make sure that our jewel of Millennium Park is available and open to everyone.

Miners must be accompanied by, quote, at least one responsible adult, Lightfoot said. She said the policy will be strictly enforced and violations will be dealt with swiftly. The city already had a general 11 p.m. curfew for minors on weekends, but Lightfoot announced she's pushing it up to 10 p.m. She encouraged parents to be aware of the rules and talk to their children about them. Also, Lightfoot called on the Chicago Police Department to crack down on tracing guns found in the hands of minors and criminally charging adults who have given guns to kids. Okay, so it sounds like Chicago already had a curfew in place. Has that strategy been shown to be effective? Right. Well, Chicago has actually had an 11 p.m. curfew for minors on the weekends. since 1992, but the city still has one of the nation's highest murder rates.

According to research from Purdue and the University of Virginia looking at crime in D.C., there's not strong evidence that curfews reduce crime. In fact, they may actually be counterproductive. Now, it seems like it would also be very hard to enforce a selective curfew for teens, especially in a place like Millennium Park. I mean, that's a tourist attraction, and 6 p.m. is quite early for summer evenings. Right, and critics have pointed that out. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union of Chicago criticized the move saying that the new curfew on rules for teens in the park will lead to more police encounters with teens and that it will disproportionately punish minority kids.

Well, Marade, thanks so much for reporting. Thanks, Georgia. That's Daily Wire investigative reporter, Marade Allardy. Deaths from synthetic drugs are soaring in America. The CDC reported more than 100,000 deaths from drug overdoses between April 2020 and April 2021, an increase of 20,000. 29% from the previous year. About two-thirds of those deaths involve synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. Many components of these lethal drugs come from China to Mexico, where they are assembled by drug cartels who then traffic them across the southern border. Here to discuss is Kerry Sheffield,

senior policy analyst at Independent Women's Voice. So, Carrie, what have you heard from analysts on this issue? Well, thanks for having me, Georgia. So in 2021, Customs and Border Protection, the CBP, reported that the number of fentanyl seizures along our southern border, they spiked from 596 seizures in fiscal year 2016 all the way up to 11,201 last year. Here's some sound from Derek Maltz. He's a former senior official with the Drug Enforcement Administration. It started out with the direct exports from China to America on mail services through the dark web, the internet. But then the Chinese got smart because the Trump administration put a lot of pressure on them. And they started conducting.

controlling fentanyl analogs. Then they started forming the alliance and the partnership with the cartels. And the cartels are about making money. Julio Rosas, a former U.S. Marine, an author who writes extensively about the U.S. border, told me that the level of brutality and military sophistication of the Mexican cartels has grown immensely in recent years, particularly the one called the Halisco New Generation Cartel. Now, just to give you an example of the kind of brutality he described. This vicious gang has been known to cannibalize some of its victims. Now, when you say military sophistication, what do you mean? Are these groups in possession of military-grade technology? Yes, exactly. Sergio de la Pena, the former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary

of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs, he is warned that the CCP, the Communist Party of China, wants to create what he calls a reverse opium war as part of a geopolitical play. He said that China has America in its crosshairs and is acting to purposefully destabilize free society through this chaotic drug trade. So what kind of defensive action has the U.S. taken up to this point? Well, the CPB port director for the Laredo Port of Entry down in Texas, he recently told the press that his agents are testing out what they call multi-energy portals. Now, this is a new scanning technology. It allows agents to scan trailer trucks without drivers having to leave the caps. CPB says that if this system is approved, this would increase the percentage of trucks being screened from 15% to 90%, which would be a game changer in detection.

That said, most experts say that we're whaled behind the A ball at this point. In fact, Maltz and others have urged Congress to officially recognize the geopolitical threat inherent in the drug trade, and they wanted to declare Mexican drug cartels as terrorists. Well, that would be a pretty significant move. Yeah, it would. So if they designate the cartels as terrorist organizations, this would broaden the toolbox, basically, available to the U.S. government in this fight. And the Trump administration actually did consider taking this step in 2019. That was after the brutal murder of nine U.S. citizens in a Mormon community in Mexico.

But Trump soon halts the plans at the request of the Mexican president. Now, I do have to say that there is also some pushback from some border control experts who say that applying the terrorist label on these Mexican cartels, would make it easier for illegal immigrants to claim asylum, and that's going to be even more challenging as Title 42 expires. Right, there are definitely some competing priorities to weigh at the border. Carrie, thanks so much for reporting. That was Carrie Sheffield, senior policy analyst at Independent Women's Voice. Thanks for listening to Morning Wire.

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