The Biden administration’s announcement Wednesday that it is setting up a Disinformation Governance Board would be a lot more troubling if the program itself were not such an embarrassing waste of taxpayer dollars. To make matters worse, the nominee chosen to head this project has a humiliating habit of falling for disinformation herself.
Even so, the Department of Homeland Security has no business policing anyone’s speech. So what is really going on here?
The head of the department, Alejandro Mayorkas, confirmed the creation of the new board himself during a Wednesday House Appropriations Committee hearing. He said its focus is on “misinformation aimed at migrants” that has fueled the crisis at the southern border.
“We are very concerned that Haitians who are taking the irregular migration path are receiving misinformation that the border is open,” Mayorkas testified.
But here’s the problem: The border really was open for Haitians for much of 2021. Under President Joe Biden’s catch-and-release policies, tens of thousands of Haitians were drawn to cross the border illegally and were apprehended. Most of them were briefly detained and then allowed to go wherever they wanted in the United States. This fact was shared by the Haitian diaspora in the U.S. and throughout the world. That’s what caused the humanitarian crisis in Del Rio, Texas, in 2021, when 14,000 migrants formed a tent city under a bridge and waited to be arrested so they could be released into the interior of the U.S.
It was only after the shameful images of the squalor in the tent city were beamed worldwide that the Biden administration was shamed into action. It began denying Haitians entry into the country, even flying thousands of them back to their native country. This was a particularly cruel reversal for those Haitian migrants who had already established lives in third countries, such as Chile, before hearing from friends and relatives that the U.S. border was open under Biden.
How exactly will the DHS combat the “disinformation” that the southern border is open? Apparently, this new board will be part of Biden’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program, which funnels money to nonprofit groups that “prevent acts of targeted violence and mitigate radicalization and domestic extremism.”
The panel therefore will be giving money to organizations to lie to people — to tell them that the southern border isn’t open. It is open, and after Biden repeals Title 42, it will be even more open.
So the job of Biden’s disinformation board is just what it sounds like — to spread disinformation.
Biden has found the perfect nominee for such a task, with Wilson Center “disinformation fellow” Nina Jankowicz confirming Wednesday that she has been chosen to head up this new panel. She is famous for promoting British ex-spy Christopher Steele, whose thoroughly discredited Trump dossier was essential in securing warrants to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. She also cast doubt on the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop, telling the Associated Press, who identified her as a “disinformation expert” that “we should view it as a Trump campaign product.” It turns out it was actually just Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Still, for all her failures in properly identifying disinformation, Jankowicz faces an uphill climb. Hundreds of thousands of migrants from around the world already know that Biden is about to throw open the southern border. His DHS just released a 20-page memo on how they plan to let migrants in even faster. Jankowicz’s job is to spread disinformation, telling these migrants to stay home because Biden won’t let them in.
Good luck with that.
