2 weeks Ago
Claim: Rating: About this rating Correct Attribution Context Prior to quoting Goebbels, Self was questioning Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who wrote the 2020 book "How to Lose the Information War" and led the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) during its brief existence in Joe Biden's administration. He asked Jankowicz about her personal beliefs regarding "the role of government in [forming] public opinion" in an attempt to compare her answers to Goebbels' statement. On April 1, 2025, the U.
S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs held a congressional hearing titled, "Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department." During the hearing, Rep.
Keith Self, a Republican from Texas, allegedly quoted Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Nazi Germany, as saying, "It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion." The claim was shared in a video on X by the account of Rep. Julie Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, and quickly went viral on multiple platforms because, well, it purported to show an American politician quoting a Nazi propagandist.
Based on a video of the full hearing uploaded to the House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans YouTube channel, the claim is true — Self did quote Goebbels at the hearing. However, Johnson's post was misleading in that it omitted the context of Self's remark and the reason he quoted Goebbels in the first place. Self replied to Johnson's post the next day: Nina Jankowicz Self's Goebbels quote came at the end of his questioning, which focused on Nina Jankowicz, the CEO of the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit that describes its mission as "increasing the cost of lies that undermine democracy.
" Jankowicz is a disinformation researcher who wrote the 2020 book "How to Lose the Information War," and according to The New York Times, once served as an adviser to Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She founded..
. Jack Izzo.
