The Biden administration is now instituting a speech police program that sounds straight out of George Orwell’s dystopian 1984. Republicans on Capitol Hill are right to try to quash it.
Biden’s secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, has created a Disinformation Governance Board, putatively to “focus” on disinformation coming from Russia and on alleged misinformation from human smugglers about U.S. border policies. To head the new board, Mayorkas has appointed “disinformation expert” Nina Jankowicz. Alas, Ms. Jankowicz’s record indicates she is as likely to spread disinformation than to counter it, all while she works to curb freedom of speech.
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var _bp = _bp||[]; _bp.push({ "div": "Brid_51262209", "obj": {"id":"27789","width":"16","height":"9","video":"818515"}t}); rnrn","_id":"00000180-76e5-d180-a989-ffe7e6df0000","_type":"2f5a8339-a89a-3738-9cd2-3ddf0c8da574"}”>Video EmbedBoth in conception and in the appointment of Jankowicz, this board is an appalling threat to liberty. It is far from clear where the administration finds the statutory authority to set up or pay for the operations of such a board. Nineteen House Republicans led by Kentucky’s James Comer, the ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, have quite justifiably written to Mayorkas to ask for the source of his legal authority, the chain of communications about the board’s creation, and “all documents and communications regarding any DHS definition of or criteria for determining what constitutes ‘disinformation,’ including a list of employees authorized to make a determination as to whether a particular claim constitutes ‘disinformation.’”
With good reason, these members wrote that they fear “the conversion of DHS’s resources into a political advocacy arm of the Biden campaign, as well as the potential implications for freedom of speech in our country.” They said the record so far indicates that “in most circumstances, the Administration’s definition of ‘misinformation’ is any fact or opinion that is critical of its abysmal policies and decisions.”
And, really, why is there any reason to believe otherwise? This is, after all, the administration that conspired to label ordinary parents asking questions about policies at their children’s schools as “domestic terrorists.”
As the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy has reported, Jankowicz is an especially galling choice for deciding what constitutes disinformation. She herself is a noted purveyor of lies and has railed against what she calls “free speech absolutists.” Long after former spy Christopher Steele, the compiler of the ludicrous and discredited “Russian dossier” against former President Donald Trump, was proved to be at best a careless loon, Jankowicz was praising him and recommending him as a source against disinformation. She also pushed the false claim that the Steele dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, actually “began as a Republican opposition research project.”
Jankowicz also was one of the leading proponents of the idea that reports about horrid details on presidential son Hunter Biden’s laptop were disinformation from Russia or from the Trump campaign and that the whole story about the laptop’s provenance through a repair shop was a “fairy tale.”
In short, with not a single shred of evidence, she spread an outright and rather obvious lie in order to spike a story thought damaging to the Bidens. Jankowicz is a dishonest hack, no more trustworthy than the old TV character Joe Isuzu.
Then again, Jankowicz seems like the perfect person to run a board the name of which echoes so closely 1984’s “Ministry of Truth.” After all, it was primarily through that ministry that “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
