Should the federal government take it upon itself to tell Americans how to sort out truth from falsehood? Such an enterprise would be fraught with peril, as we would be at the mercy of the people who were chosen to determine what exactly the truth is and is not. After 51 of the nation’s premier intelligence experts assured the world that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was “Russian disinformation,” anyone who still thinks this would be a good idea must either be terminally blinkered or want to be one of the censors.
But back in the heady days of the Biden regime, the people in power were certain that government oversight of the means of communication was a capital idea. And so was born what was simultaneously one of the most ridiculous and most comical sideshows of the Biden regime: Old Joe appointed one Nina Jankowicz to be the chief of the Biden regime’s ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board, which was ominously part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and was widely demonstrated to be an Orwellian exercise in policing the speech of Americans that strayed from the line of the establishment left.
Jankowicz herself suggested this, however inadvertently, by calling herself the "Mary Poppins of disinformation" and singing a dotty song about the dangers of disinformation from the likes of Rudy Giuliani, while never coming close to denouncing real disinformation, such as the claim that Hunter’s laptop was fake. Even now, long after the whole censorship enterprise crashed and burned, Jankowicz is still licking her wounds, complaining about how she was mistreated, and, yes, still calling for restrictions on speech. As the sage philosopher Bob Dylan once said, “You know, some babies never learn.”
On Saturday, WRVO, an NPR outlet in central New York, published a lengthy interview of Jankowicz in which she railed against the efforts of Russia, China, and other hostile states to poison the American public discourse with disinformation, and mocked the idea that the nation was dealing adequately with this threat. She said that when she started working on countering disinformation back in 2016, “the United States was not taking seriously the information war. We thought, oh, surely our systems are resilient enough, our democratic infrastructure is resilient enough that we can deal with this, right? That, you know, people will be able to suss out fact from fiction. And here we are, you know, eight years later, nine years later, and I think the problem has only gotten worse.”
It has gotten worse because, you see, Americans don’t have the privilege of learning from her how to sort out what’s true from what’s false, and this is a major problem: “I think it's important,” she said grandly, “to characterize it as a war, because it can have very real costs, and we tend to discount what goes on online as just, oh, words that people say on the internet. But really, it does have impact in the offline world, in real life, as the kids like to say, IRL.”
This is why we need controls that will tell us what’s true and what isn’t. Jankowicz says: “And so I think people need just a little bit of heuristics for how to navigate this increasingly complex, polluted information environment and we haven't invested in that as a country.” Alas, we never got these mechanisms for evaluating the news, because the dastardly Republicans stepped in and started spreading disinformation about Jankowicz’s heroic and herculean struggle against disinformation. Among their dirty tricks was “the narrative, and I will just preface this by saying it is not borne out by any of the evidence or data, is that, you know, researchers colluded with government to pressure the tech platforms to censor conservative content online, and that's just not true, right?”
Related: Leftists Claim the Free Speech House Is On Fire, But Who Was the Arsonist?
Now wait a minute. It was less than three weeks ago that Google admitted to the House Judiciary Committee that the Biden regime put it under “repeated and sustained” pressure to censor dissenting voices. Mark Zuckerberg admitted much the same thing about Facebook last January. And yet after all that, the Biden regime’s disinformation expert claims that it’s “just not true” that the regime worked with the tech giants to censor patriots.
That in a nutshell is what’s wrong with Jankowicz’s central claim, that the government can and should sort out truth from falsehood. It is also a warning: these people must never get close to having that kind of power again. If they do, our fundamental freedoms will be under imminent and serious threat.
