If only Old Joe Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board had been in place to protect the Disinformation Governance Board! The ardently partisan Biden wonk who had been all set to be crowned America’s Disinformation Czarina, Nina Jankowicz, appeared on MSNBC’s “All In” Wednesday to lament that the coronation has now been “paused,” and it’s all the fault of those evil right-wingers who had the temerity to be concerned that a government agency dedicated to combating “disinformation” could all too easily become a tool of authoritarians who wished to quash dissent. Jankowicz is shocked, shocked, that anyone could have thought that at all, and finds it “ironic” that disinformation killed the Disinformation Board. If only it had been up and running to silence and punish the miscreants.
Jankowicz said: “All these sensationalized narratives about what people thought the board was going to do was completely wrong.” Now wait a minute: How could people have ever gotten any “completely wrong” ideas about what the Board’s duties and activities were going to be, when no one connected with it ever fully or clearly explained what the Board was actually going to do? Politico noted on April 29, two days after it announced the existence of the Disinformation Governance Board, that “information on the Biden administration’s war on disinformation proved scarce. When the Associated Press asked DHS for an interview for details, the department stiffed them, according to the AP’s April 28 story.” If Jankowicz and the other Disinformation honchos had really wanted to ensure that “sensationalized narratives” didn’t spread, they could have gotten ahead of them early on by explaining clearly and in detail what the Board was going to do.
In a sense, it’s reassuring: maybe if the Disinformation Governance Board had gotten up and running, it would have been so inefficient and inept that it never would have severely threatened the First Amendment anyway. Maybe. But what did happen was that Biden officials gave vague and differing explanations of what the Board’s duties were going to be. When Politico first revealed the Board’s existence, it said it would be “countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.” Then DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas went further, saying it would “combat this threat not only to election security, but to our homeland security.” Jen Psaki then suggested that it would be dealing with supposed disinformation about “COVID for example, and also elections and eligibility.” Under fire over this brazen assault on the First Amendment, Mayorkas claimed that the Board would not be dealing with the statements of American citizens at all.
Jankowicz, the Disinformation Board’s actual czarina, maintained a serene and regal silence, and never offered any explanation at all of what the Board was planning to do. But now, only now, with her organization on “pause,” whatever that actually means, she is full of explanations, and annoyed at the “disinformation” peddlers who drew the obvious conclusions about the dangers of the Board for the freedom of speech.
“It was a coordinating mechanism,” she says, and now don’t you feel silly for getting all upset about a simple little “coordinating mechanism”? “It was meant to make sure,” Jankowicz claims, “that the very large agency that is the Department of Homeland Security, that people were talking to each other within it.” Why didn’t she say this before?
Related: Will the Freedom of Speech Survive?
Jankowicz continued: “Let me give you an example: FEMA, the agency that handles disasters and environmental issues, would often encounter misinformation about natural disasters. Let’s say an adversary like Iran or China would put out a false narrative, like ‘this is how you get out of the city,’ or ‘this is where you can find disaster aid.’ That could put people really into danger, their lives into danger. That’s the sort of disinformation and misinformation that we were looking to support the department in addressing, to make sure they had best practices, and most importantly, to protect Americans’ freedom of speech, civil liberties, and privacy while we are doing all that work.” See? It would have protected the freedom of speech, not destroyed it!
Behind Jankowicz’s bland ex post facto explanation, however, is the fact that Biden administration officials, the ones who claim “white supremacists” are the nation’s biggest terror threat and angry parents at school board meetings are terrorists, would be deciding what constituted the “disinformation” they needed to stamp out to protect your freedom of speech.
But Jankowicz says the “disinformation” worked this time: “So, every characterization of the board that you heard up until now has been incorrect, and frankly, it’s kind of ironic that the board itself was taken over by disinformation when it was meant to fight it.” Yes, if only she had been able to get the “disinformation” peddlers sent to the gulag! Not that she ever would have done such a thing, oh no: “I’ve been a really nuanced, reasonable person, again, as I said, I briefed and advised both Republicans and Democrats. I admired some of steps even the Trump administration took to combat disinformation.” So why are we only hearing about that now?
Jankowicz concluded semi-coherently: “To say that I am just a partisan actor wildly out of context.” Well, let’s see. She has said: “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms.” She warned of “disinformation” from Rudy Giuliani and Trump. A “partisan actor”? You bet your life. And dangerously anti-free speech. We can only hope we won’t hear about her in connection with government jobs in the future. But we almost certainly will.
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