Disinformation is the Big Mama of All Weapons Targeting Our Nation

Floor Speech

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Mr. CLEAVER. Mr. Speaker, our Nation has gone through quite a tumultuous first 15 days of 2020. We marched right up to the brink of war after President Donald Trump authorized the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani. And even though the Iranians did launch a measured attack, it is like the argument that the husband believed he won with his wife. It ain't over yet.

Long before the current crisis with Iran, our peerless intelligence agencies began warning us of robust cyberattacks from Russia, China, North Korea, and, of course, Iran. These nations are all hell-bent on doing damage to us and using bots, an online method of passing disinformation to unsuspecting Americans, with the ultimate goal of turning unsuspecting Americans against each other.

If we do that, we are repeating or allowing the repetition of what the Russians did in 2016, which is to again meddle in our upcoming quadrennial election.

Now, for me, it is difficult to blame our enemies for seeking to exploit the weaknesses in our society, because it is so crystal clear to me that we are doing to ourselves what our enemies have been unable to do in the last 150 years.

Our current extreme political partisanship and reliance on social media--which is, by the way, littered with disinformation--but with that, we have allowed a well to be dug into the soul of American democracy. Our Nation is wounded and it is a wound that our enemies will seek to further infect.

Sadly, I must give some frightening news to our Nation. This, I guess, is a matter of national security information. Russia has designed and advanced the most menacing, yet non-nuclear weapons on Earth. Every American should know that the blast from this bomb can do greater damage to our Nation than the combined marching armies of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo.

Mr. Speaker, I say to my fellow Americans: We are now threatened by the big mama of all weapons. It is called disinformation and the delivery system is called Facebook and other forms of social media.

In many ways, Congress has been complicit in this tribalistic way in which we conduct business in our Nation. We have opened wide the door to a brazen alien incursion into our elections. Some Members of this august body are actually pushing disinformation into the delivery system.

In days gone by, kings and lords built their fortresses around deep wells to provide cool and clear water for those who lived inside the garrison. Strategically, these wells were inside the walls of forts so that at a time of an attack from the enemy, the water supply could never be blocked so that the lifesaving water, in a time of war, would be controlled by those inside the fort. Therefore, the inhabitants would not be at the mercy of invaders.

Here is the point: If our great Republic could be led by our leaders into the babbling, cool waters of internal oneness and toleration, we will not be victims of the kind of vicious misinformation that has been flowing across this Nation now for a number of years. We would not be vulnerable to the whims of those who wish to do us harm.

Mr. Speaker, I close with an ominous note: Most of the great empires throughout the history of the world fell into decline not because of some new military juggernaut, but because of internal fighting and the failure to appreciate the amazing ethnic and racial mosaic that is uniquely ours as Americans.

Will that happen to us? Let me just say that we can only be saved by the well water of civility and decency inside our Nation. We control what is inside our Nation. What we need most is inside our Nation.

Mr. Speaker, I ask that we please accept and remember and meditate on this: Under the right conditions, even the most inspirational democracy in the history of the world can wane.

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