You Dingdongs Are Making Me Come Out Of Retirement For This?

It’s nice to be back, actually.

What disinformation looks like. Photo by Elimende Inagella on Unsplash

Hello everybody!

I’m the old/new fish over here at our Wonkette, and I would love to tell you a little bit about myself and what I will be covering before I really get started.

First of all, god DAMN it, I told you all not to fall for disinformation campaigns and what do you do? What? Go stand in the corner and think about what you’ve all done.

Okay. You thinking about it? Great! Hi there! I’m the new West Coast correspondent, so I will be writing about fun times like water rights, and immigration laws, and how everybody in Alaska is named Dan Sullivan. I was a reporter there, so I can confirm that there are a lot more Dan Sullivans in Alaska than you might have been led to believe!

Relatedly, and even more importantly, I will be tackling disinformation campaigns. There was a moment, about five years ago, that everybody pretended they cared a whole bunch about fighting “fake news,” which lasted right up until most of those exact same entities decided that they could use it to get whatever they wanted, and now look at the world!

So I am going to try to clean up the discourse as best as I can, one bad narrative at a time.

But here’s the thing about counterdisinformation. It doesn’t look like the Very Serious People you see on the cable networks correcting one another with delicate butchery and yammering on about mandates and policy. It isn’t weighty, although it deals with weighty issues; it isn’t nonpartisan, because disinformation is used by partisan interests in order to bring about their political aims.

Counterdisinformation, in other words, looks like the most irreverent shit you ever saw in your life — but it’s also informative. Which is why I am here to bring it to you, my darling readers, because I know you care! I’m going to pick apart these creepy-ass claims and show you exactly what narrative they are part of, because they have been circulated for decades just to bring about this exact outcome.

I promise to also make it super weird!

I’ve been at this for a long time, but I didn’t start out this way. First I spent like a million years as a serious journalist. That didn’t get me anywhere at all, except underpaid and negged by terrible bosses!

Then I went on to debunking, which got me lots of places, but they were all kind of bullshit as every corporation on the planet wanted to show how awesome they were at Fighting Fake News (tm). But then every debunker and disinformation expert in the country got "mysteriously" defunded at around the same time (October 2024 through January 2025) and now look at the pickle we’re in.

So here I am, out of Debunker Retirement, with a lot of scores to settle and axes to grind. I’m finished with my serious journalism career, because look what being serious got all of us, and am moving on to what I was born to do: destroying my professional reputation in the most hilarious way possible in the name of fighting fascism and building societal resilience so we can kick the everloving shit out of these far-right power-grabbing freaks, together.

So let’s all fight weaponized narratives together in the funniest way possible. We can see our way through fascism together by the light of the bridges I burn!

Oh, and this is your OPEN THREAD.