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Leftists Argue Government Censorship is the Highest Form of Speech

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The Left will fight to the death for the right of the government to silence you. 

When Judge Terry Doughty issued an injunction in Missouri v. Biden that banned the government from “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression”, all hell broke loose.

Evelyn Douek, a Stanford law professor, formerly of the Knight First Amendment Institute, warned that preventing the government from colluding with corporations to censor citizens would have a “chilling effect on communication between the government and platforms.”

In traditional free speech jurisprudence, ‘chilling effects’ were inflicted by the government, but Douek is worried that free speech might have a chilling effect on government censorship. After advocating, in cases like Lamont v. Postmaster General, that any interference with speech, no matter how odious including, in the aforementioned Supreme Court case, asking recipients of Communist propaganda to affirmatively agree to receive it, entailed a ‘chilling effect’, liberals don’t want to chill the censors, instead they’re worried that civil rights will chill censorship.

Even though it’s the height of summer, chilling effects on censorship were on display.

Liberals who might have once worried about free speech now fret that the government will be inhibited from censoring free speech. According to CNN, “Legal experts say that the order is overly broad and scholars on online misinformation warned that it could have a chilling effect on the government’s efforts to curtail lies about public health emergencies and elections.”

Nina Jankowicz, Biden’s former disinformation czar, popped up to argue that, ”it’ll have a chilling effect on government and academia, ensuring that officials and researchers think twice before trying to counter those spreading conspiracies and false information.”

The axis of concern had shifted from worrying that government action would inhibit free speech to agonizing that judicial interference would prevent the government from inhibiting free speech.

The existence of ‘chilling effects’ in free speech cases testified to the degree to which we protected free speech from even the faintest tinge of indirect discouragement. Now, lefty academics and experts want to not only reverse the polarities of free speech, but they are just as worried that any protection for free speech will interfere with government censorship.

Its new victims are not civilians who engage in political speech, but government censors.

To justify this inversion of civil rights, they have also inverted the concept of censorship so that the true form of free speech is to prevent others from speaking.

According to Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, preventing the government from censoring citizens was… censorship.

Litman told NPR that the injunction “literally prevents the federal government from sending emails to social media companies about their content moderation policies or having meetings with social media companies about taking down speech and posts. And so that prevents speech, really important speech, from ever happening.”

The most important speech is government speech that suppresses the speech of the public.

If government censorship is speech, then any interference with government censorship is a violation of free speech. And the government must be allowed to censor everyone lest its really important speech be restrained from taking place. And then where would we be, except free?

Judge Terry Doughty was attacked by pro-censorship leftists for invoking George Orwell’s 1984 and yet that same faction insists on ‘literally’ arguing that censorship is speech.

Crying censorship has become the last resort of censors who demand the right to censor.

When Gov. Ron DeSantis and other governors signed laws barring Big Tech monopolies from deplatforming candidates for public office, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Amazon, Google and Facebook, sued in the name of free speech.

“We are bringing this suit to safeguard the industry’s free speech,” CCIA boss Matt Schruers claimed. “A digital service that declines to host harmful content is exercising its own First Amendment rights.”

“Section 7 does not chill speech; if anything, it chills censorship,” the Fifth Circuit court replied.

“We reject the Platforms’ efforts to reframe their censorship as speech. It is undisputed that the Platforms want to eliminate speech—not promote or protect it. And no amount of doctrinal gymnastics can turn the First Amendment’s protections for free speech into protections for free censoring.” But that hasn’t stopped the totalitarian gymnastics from going forward.

After arguing that censorship by some of the biggest companies in the world was really speech, lefty legal scholars are arguing that government censorship is free speech, and that when judges prevent the government from censoring, the government’s speech is being violated.

The official Biden administration position is that it is entitled to censor in the event of emergencies.

“We’re not going to apologize for promoting responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic or foreign attacks on our elections,” Sharon Yang, a White House spokeswoman, argued.

These deadly challenges and foreign attacks included a video mocking Jill Biden and a Twitter account impersonating Biden’s granddaughter. Biden officials insisted on having these and many other posts, accounts and materials that they disliked taken down.

Emergencies have never been anything other than an excuse for a broad censorship scheme.

Liberals have abandoned even the pretense of caring about free speech. Laurence Tribe, a lefty constitutional law professor, co-authored an op-ed complaining that the injunction “seems to maintain that the government cannot even politely ask companies not to publish verifiable misinformation.”

What would Tribe’s view be on the Nixon administration “politely” asking the media not to spread lies about the Vietnam War, the Reagan administration “politely” asking the media not to lie about the War on Drugs, and the Bush administration “politely” asking the media not to lie about the War on Terror? Any such suggestions, no matter how mild, were greeted with rabid rage.

“The First Amendment certainly doesn’t prevent them from merely asking,” Tribe contends, and preventing the government from doing so “would turn the Constitution’s protection of free expression in an open society into an obstacle course for some of the most valuable exchanges of information and ideas we can imagine.” The most valuable exchanges of ideas apparently involve asking social media monopolies to take down content mocking the president.

Lefty legal scholars keep arguing that government censorship is the highest form of speech.

After abandoning free speech, lefty legal scholars now celebrate the virtues of censorship in the glowing language once used for promoting reverence for a free exchange of ideas. Forget an open society, a truly valuable exchange of ideas consists of government officials telling huge corporations whom to censor this morning.

None of this is remarkable when you go back to the origins of lefty support for free speech.

In 1934, Roger Nash Baldwin, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the ACLU, quite clearly explained why he was fighting for civil liberties. “I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which worker’s rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever.”

The American Left believes it has gained enough power that it no longer sees any value in maintaining protections for free speech, at least at a federal level, and has publicly switched its enthusiasm from speech to censorship. It now lovingly speaks of the valuable “speech” of government censors and of the ‘chilling effects’ of extremist judges who interfere with them.

There are still select conservative enclaves where the Left pretends to care about free speech. Should parents persuade a middle school library to pull a work of hard core LGBTQ pornography off the shelves, the Left will describe this as an attack on the First Amendment. But otherwise, freedom of speech has been buried in the same unmarked grave as freedom of religion with the bulk of the First Amendment soon set to join the Second Amendment.

Censorship is becoming speech and speech is becoming censorship. The real threat to civil liberties comes from people interfering with the speech of censors telling them to “shut up”.

In a world where governments have rights and people have none, the right to censor is the only right. And if they disagree with you, liberals will fight to the death for the right of the government to silence you.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

RELATED ARTICLE: WRAY LIED: Newest Twitter Files Shows Twitter ‘Immediately’ Took Down Accounts FBI Requested Without Investigation Based on False Charges

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Rep. Jim Jordan Subpoenas Former Head Of Disinformation Board

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The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board Monday.

Nina Jankowicz, who chaired the board from its April 2022 inception to its May 2022 dissolution, promoted a variety of false claims popular among Democrats. She blamed DHS’s decision to shut down the board on right-wing disinformation, asserting that it was part of a broader campaign. The committee’s subpoena requests general information about the board’s formation and goals.

“We have repeatedly sought information from you concerning your official actions and duties as a DHS employee and former Executive Director of the Board, including how the Board intended to define disinformation, how it planned to collect information and from what sources, how it anticipated countering disinformation, and how it proposed to protect First Amendment rights,” committee chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio wrote in a letter to Jankowicz. “To date, however, you have declined to comply voluntarily with our request for a transcribed interview.”

Although DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed that the board would “not infringe on free speech… civil rights [or] civil liberties” because it would have an international focus, documents released by Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Charles Grassley of Iowa showed that the board would focus on issues by topic, not by national origin.

Biden administration officials expressed particular concern about “conspiracy theories about the validity and security of elections,” “disinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks,” and “falsehoods surrounding U.S. government immigration policy,” in one document released by the senators.

Republican elected officials also expressed concern with DHS’s decision to tap Jankowicz to lead the board. A former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Jankowicz repeatedly accused GOP officials and activists of spreading disinformation. She claimed that opponents of Critical Race Theory are  engaging in “disinformation for profit,” and that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Republican “campaign product.”

“There’s never been any indication that Hunter Biden was involved in anything untoward,” she said of Hunter Biden’s Burisma Energy board position. “It certainly has nothing to do with Joe Biden’s policies toward Ukraine.”

Jankowicz registered in November 2022 as a foreign agent lobbying for a British firm. The Centre for Information Resilience describes itself as a “non-profit social enterprise dedicated to countering disinformation, exposing human rights abuses, and combating online behaviour harmful to women and minorities.”

AUTHOR

MICHAEL GINSBERG

Congressional correspondent.

RELATED ARTICLE: DHS Says There’s ‘No Need’ For Disinformation Board

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Disinformation Czar Resigns, Board On ‘Pause’ Following Criticism She Spread Disinformation

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The Department of Homeland Security put a “pause” Monday on its disinformation board after the truth czar, who resigned Wednesday, came under fire for spreading disinformation herself, The Washington Post reported.

DHS shut the board down Monday and Nina Jankowicz, who was tapped to lead the department, drafted a resignation letter Tuesday, according to The Washington Post. Jankowicz was reportedly pulled into a meeting late Tuesday night, however, with officials giving her the chance to stay on as the department determines whether to move forward with the highly polarized board. Jankowicz formally resigned Wednesday, according to The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz.

The decision comes as Jankowicz faced extreme backlash for pushing disinformation.

Jankowicz attempted to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “Trump campaign product” while speaking to ABC News in 2020. During the second presidential debate, Jankowicz posted that President Joe Biden cited “50 former natsec officials and 5 former CIA heads that believe the laptop is a Russian influence op.”

The laptop was authenticated by several outlets including the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Jankowicz also claimed the now-discredited Steele Dossier was funded by Republicans in a 2017 tweet.

She also expressed concern about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and what would happen if “free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms.”

Jankowicz also said in 2021 the GOP is made up of “disinformers” who “have seized on” issues like Critical Race Theory to spread “disinformation.”

A DHS spokesperson defended Jankowicz in a statement to The Post.

“Nina Jankowicz has been subjected to unjustified and vile personal attacks and physical threats. In congressional hearings and in media interviews, the Secretary has repeatedly defended her as eminently qualified and underscored the importance of the Department’s disinformation work, and he will continue to do so.”

The DHS announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board in April to counter what it considers misinformation and disinformation, particularly disinformation coming from Russia and misleading rhetoric about the U.S.-Mexico border. DHS Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas has fended off criticism of the board, recently saying the “board does not have any operational authority or capability.”

AUTHOR

BRIANNA LYMAN

Reporter. Follow Brianna on Twitter

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘These Are Not Bright People’: Bill Maher Rips Nina Jankowicz, ‘Disinfo Governance Board’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

EXCLUSIVE: No, Jen Psaki, Trump Didn’t Start The DHS ‘Truth Ministry.’ That’s Literal Disinformation

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White House press secretary Jen Psaki has spread disinformation repeatedly from the podium while speaking about the Disinformation Governance Board, claiming its “work” was present under the Trump administration.

Psaki’s go-to defense of the establishment of the board under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a continuation “of disinformation-related work that began under the prior administration.” One of the key bodies countering disinformation founded under former President Donald Trump, the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF), was renamed by the Biden administration when he came into office the Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation (MDM) and was modified to focus on domestic rather than foreign threats, two Trump DHS officials told the Daily Caller.

“The CFITF was focused on foreign influence – particularly as it related to elections. The current MDM description from DHS takes the word ‘foreign’ out of the title. It’s clear that MDM, as it’s currently defined, is also looking at domestic communication,” Chad Wolf, former acting secretary of the DHS, told the Daily Caller.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), was created in 2018 under Trump to counter cybersecurity threats. In May of 2018, “a Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF) was established within CISA’s predecessor agency,” according to CISA’s website, and was tasked with “helping the American people understand the risks from” MDM.

CFITF was modified by the Biden administration in 2021 to officially change its name to MDM, and its “mission evolved to reflect the changing information environment,” according to its website.

The Biden-era DHS, its assistant press secretary and the CFITF did not respond to several requests from the Daily Caller to say why the name change was necessary, and what the new “mission” of the MDM is.

The MDM is now “charged with building national resilience to MDM and foreign influence activities,” the website reads. It also mentions that MDM campaigns are waged by both “foreign and domestic threat actors.”

A “Disinformation Stops With You” resource listed on the website states disinformation can be spread by “foreign states, scammers and extremist groups.” An election MDM resource states “Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state-sponsored elements, as well as domestic extremist groups,” are the primary culprits of spreading MDM.

President Joe Biden stated May 4 the “MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history, in recent American history.”

“When it comes to disinformation, it’s clear that DHS, under President Biden, is making this a core responsibility – to include in the domestic context. They are also politicizing the issue as they have established a Disinformation Governance Board in the Secretary’s office. They have taken control of combating foreign influence away from operating components, where decisions were largely made from career civil servants, and moved that power to the Secretary’s office. On top of that, they have appointed a highly controversial and partisan individual to head that board” Nina Jankowicz, Wolf continued.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Disinformation Governance Board, which he first mentioned April 27 in a Senate hearing, wants to “develop guidelines, standards, guardrails to ensure that the work that has been ongoing for nearly 10 years does not infringe on people’s free speech rights, rights of privacy, civil rights and civil liberties.” He echoed Psaki in saying that the “work” was being done under Trump, and claimed that the board will focus on foreign surveillance, not domestic.

A DHS spokesperson told the Daily Caller “the Disinformation Governance Board is an internal working group that was established with the explicit goal of ensuring … Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy,” noting that the group has no “operational authority or capability” and that Psaki has said the DHS has worked to address disinformation “for years and throughout multiple administrations.”

Acting Deputy Chief of Staff for the DHS under Trump, Lora Ries, told the Daily Caller that the Biden administration’s DHS focuses on “content” rather than harmful “foreign adversaries,” and that Trump would have never started a Disinformation Governance Board.

Former Deputy DHS Secretary Ken Cuccinelli told the Daily Caller that the board “is an entirely new creation of their own making,” called it the “Ministry of Truth,” and said there is “no way” the Democrats will operate the board “well.” “It is one of the most philosophically alarming things produced by this administration,” he added.

“The Biden Administration has changed the focus from foreign adversaries seeking to harm American cybersecurity and infrastructure to focus on content. This paved the way for this Disinformation Governance Board that will surely be weaponized against Americans. The government should not be the arbiter of truth or ‘misinformation.’ We Americans have learned the hard way that ‘misinformation’ is often just information the left doesn’t like,” Ries said.

“Instead of focusing on foreign terror threats and securing the homeland, particularly the border to prevent such threats from entering the U.S., the Biden Administration appears more interested in using the national security state to target concerned parents at school board meetings and Americans rightly skeptical about government’s own coronavirus disinformation. This administration prioritizes the wrong things. Secretary Mayorkas, like the Biden Administration, has turned inward – away from foreign threats and against Americans, in particular political opponents, who they label as ‘extremists,’” she concluded.

The newly appointed leader of the Disinformation Governance Board, Jankowicz, who will be in charge of determining what disinformation is, has been criticized for spreading disinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop. She also supported the Steele Dossier, which Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA officer, said was possibly “part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot.”

Mayorkas and Psaki have defended Jankowicz, calling her an “expert” in disinformation.

Republican senators have questioned Mayorkas, exposing that he did not know about Jankowicz’s TikTok videos, nor about her Hunter Biden claims before she was appointed.

Wolf concluded by calling on the DHS “to provide the American people transparency as to what the Board is and was planning to do, and why the Department chose to put on an overtly partisan individual in charge who could easily be accused of spreading disinformation herself prior to her government service.”

AUTHOR

DIANA GLEBOVA

Associate Editor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden’s Disinformation Board Top Dog Claims Leftists, not Pro-Freedom Voices, are Censored on Social Media

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Don’t believe your lying eyes, believe Nina Jankowicz, the Disinformation Governance Board czarina.

There is a huge list of freedom fighters and patriots who have banned from Twitter (here is a list of some of them, along with some people who are not admirable at all, including David Duke and others), and absolutely no prominent Leftists who have been likewise banned, but just ignore that.

Nina Jankowicz is the arbiter of truth.

And she wouldn’t ever lie to us, now, would she?

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Durham Builds Case On Clinton Disinformation Factory As Biden Launches ‘Disinformation Governance Board’

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Just as the Biden administration was gearing up to announce the head of its new “Disinformation Governance Board,” Special Counsel John Durham was busily working toward one of many clear conclusions: the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign was central to the spread of harmful disinformation throughout the media.

To truly gauge the level of harm the Clinton disinformation factory caused would be a difficult task, but it did contribute in some ways to locking the FBI up in a costly and lengthy investigation that ultimately found no Trump/Russia conspiracy. It also resulted in a series of corrections and reckonings at media outlets already struggling with national trust.

As it happens, the new head of Biden’s disinfo board – dedicated to tackling misinformation and disinformation as the 2022 midterm elections loom – Nina Jankowicz herself promoted a piece of disinformation Durham recently concluded to be an outright fabrication by Clinton-hired researchers. Jankowicz, a self-styled “globally recognized” expert on disinformation, also propped up former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier that one former CIA Moscow station chief described as likely “a part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot.”

“Listened to this last night — Chris Steele (yes THAT Chris Steele) provides some great historical context about the evolution of disinfo. Worth a listen,” Jankowicz wrote in one 2020 tweet.

Russian-born Igor Danchenko – allegedly Steele’s top source for the dossier, according to the Washington Examiner – was charged in 2021 as part of Durham’s inquiry for “making false statements to the FBI.”

On other occasions, Jankowicz pushed misleading claims surrounding the dossier. In one instance, she claimed that the Republican Party “funded the dossier first.” Her tweet was in response to Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s question of whether there was “collusion between DOJ and Fusion GPS to use Democratic funding dossier for political and legal purposes.”

“You’re probably aware that [the Steele dossier] began as a Republican opposition research project,” Jankowicz wrote in a separate tweet in 2020, according to The Washington Examiner.

The conservative Washington Free Beacon, which initially hired Fusion GPS, said in 2017 it “had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier.”

“The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele,” the Beacon’s editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti and chairman Michael Goldfarb wrote in a statement at the time, according to NPR.

In fact, the Steele dossier came about after he was hired by an opposition firm in 2016. That firm, Fusion GPS, was hired in part by the general counsel for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Examiner noted.

With Jankowicz prepping to lead the administration’s “disinformation” board, Durham’s court filings have served as insight into another apparent disinformation push.

Durham noted in one April 2022 court filing that the CIA determined data from former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann surrounding Russia-Trump organization links was “user created” and not “technically plausible.”

Sussmann was charged by Durham last year with lying to the FBI during a 2016 meeting.

Durham more recently alleged that Fusion GPS sent hundreds of unverified claims regarding Trump to journalists, The Washington Times reported. The hundreds of emails, according to Durham, resulted in various news articles tying together Trump and Russia.

Individuals tied to Clinton’s presidential campaign have argued that research from Fusion GPS should be protected, citing attorney-client privilege. They’ve also claimed the opposition firm’s work was to supply legal services, The Washington Times reported.

Durham responded in court filings by noting that, if true, Fusion GPS would have taken more care with its unverified allegations prior to spreading them around to journalists.

“If rendering such advice was truly the intended purpose of Fusion GPS’s retention, one would also expect the investigative firm to seek permission and/or guidance from [the Clinton campaign] or its counsel before sharing such derogatory materials with the media or otherwise placing them into the public domain,” Durham wrote, according to The Washington Times.

On Wednesday, Durham saw his latest small win when the judge presiding over Sussmann’s case agreed to do a review of records being withheld by Clintons’ presidential campaign, the Washington Examiner reported.

AUTHOR

SHELBY TALCOTT

Senior White House correspondent. Follow Shelby on Twitter

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Mayorkas claims he ‘wasn’t aware’ of Disinfo Board top dog’s TikTok video cheering censorship

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He wasn’t aware of this, but Alejandro Mayorkas is a busy man with weighty responsibilities. He can’t be expected to be aware of every last detail. But you can be absolutely certain that he and Nina Jankowicz will be perusing a complete dossier on you if you state publicly that “the 2020 election was stolen” or “Islam is not a religion of peace.”

DHS Mayorkas ‘wasn’t aware’ of disinformation chief’s TikTok videos

GWN, May 4, 2022:

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted on Tuesday that he was unaware that President Biden’s disinformation chief uploaded “early” TikTok videos before his appointment to the disinformation committee.

“When the department cast her, did the department know about her TikTok video?” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Mayorkas during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.

“They’re really, really precocious,” Kennedy added of the Nina Jankowicz videos.

“I was not aware of these videos,” admitted Mayorkas.

In a newly discovered video, Jankowicz used TikTok to impersonate her male trolls.

“Women should not be involved in government. They cannot be trusted,” she said in imitation. Jankowicz said in another clip, “The real reason she’s mad is that no Chad would hit it and stick with it.”

Jankowicz has also dubbed herself the “Mary Poppins of Misinformation” on TikTok to alert individuals to “atrocious” content. The video shows her singing a song with the air of Mary Poppins.

Mayorkas was not only aware of Jankowicz’s use of Tik-Tok, as he was also unaware that she was suggesting that Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” was Russian disinformation.

“I don’t know about those statements,” Mayorkas replied Thursday to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) asking whether or not he was aware of Jankowicz’s political stance on Hunter Biden’s authenticated laptop….

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden: ‘MAGA crowd’ is ‘most extreme political organization’ in ‘recent American history’

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Half-Baked’: DHS Admitted Some Stunning Details About Its ‘Disinformation’ Board To Congress

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  • The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told congressional staffers that the agency’s Disinformation Governance Board lacks a charter and has yet to hold its first meeting.
  • The board has come under scrutiny, with members of Congress fearing that it could infringe on the rights of American citizens.
  • Conservatives, including Republican lawmakers, are also concerned with DHS’ pick to lead the board, Nina Jankowicz, who has spread misinformation herself.
  • One congressional staffer described the board as “half-baked,” adding that DHS seemed to have gotten “ahead of themselves when they mentioned this in the secretary’s testimony.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told congressional staffers Friday that its Disinformation Governance Board had yet to hold its first meeting, according to two congressional staffers familiar with the discussion, who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

One congressional staffer told the DCNF that the board appeared “half-baked” and said DHS seemed to have gotten “ahead of themselves when they mentioned it in the secretary’s testimony.” DHS also admitted the board lacks a charter during Friday’s call, the two congressional staffers told the DCNF.

The congressional staffers elected to speak on background, with one telling us they don’t want to compromise their ability to work with DHS, and the other telling us their office only confirms details of this nature on background.

The board is new under the Biden administration, according to the aforementioned staffer who said DHS doesn’t “really have direction for this board.” The staffer also said Nina Jankowicz, the head of the board, kept referring to the board as “visionary,” adding that it appeared that there’s “no concrete structure to it yet.”

Jankowicz has recently come under scrutiny for having a history of promoting misinformation, such as discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop story

The staffer said they requested a copy of the charter and that DHS agreed to share it when it’s ready. The board is also looking to add two co-chairs to work under Jankowicz, according to the staffer.

The other staffer told the DCNF that they were told the board hasn’t met yet and hasn’t approved a charter.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told lawmakers on April 27 that the agency had formed the board to tackle misinformation and disinformation targeting minority communities.

Mayorkas said Sunday that Jankowicz is “eminently qualified,” adding that the board will only monitor foreign misinformation and disinformation and not American citizens.

On Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the board is “a continuation of work that began at the Department of Homeland Security in 2020, under former President Trump,” adding, “For anyone who’s critical of it, I didn’t hear them being critical of the work under the former president, which is interesting to note contextually.”

A DHS spokesperson didn’t address whether the board was newly formed or what was discussed on the call, telling the DCNF that DHS agencies have long worked to tackle “disinformation.”

DHS has been working for years to address disinformation, the spokesperson said, pledging DHS’ commitment to upholding “Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy.”

The board doesn’t have any operational authority or capability, the spokesperson added.

AUTHOR

JENNIE TAER

Investigative reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: Disinformation And Wizard Rock: Meet Biden’s New ‘Minister Of Truth’ At DHS

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House Republicans Introduce Legislation To Defund Biden’s Disinformation Board

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Republican Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson will introduce legislation Tuesday that would defund the Department of Homeland Security’s new “Disinformation Governance Board,” which is set to be led by Nina Jankowicz.

The Daily Caller first obtained the legislation spearheaded by Johnson, which has 50 cosponsors. The bill would completely bar federal funding for the DHS’ “Disinformation Governance Board,” something Johnson said the Republicans will do if President Joe Biden does not get rid of the board.

“The Biden Administration’s decision to stand up a ‘Ministry of Truth,’ is dystopian in design, almost certainly unconstitutional, and clearly doomed from the start,” Johnson told the Daily Caller before introducing the legislation. “The government has no role whatsoever in determining what constitutes truth or acceptable speech. President Biden should dissolve this board immediately and entirely. If he won’t then Republicans will.”

READ THE BILL HERE: 

(DAILY CALLER OBTAINED) — … by Henry Rodgers

Jankowicz attempted to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story in the past and is now in charge of the DHS disinformation board. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson sent a letter April 27 to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, saying Jankowicz is a “beacon of misinformation online” and mentioned that she has published multiple tweets “furthering the false media narrative” about the Hunter Biden laptop.

Both The Washington Post and The New York Times noted the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop in March 2022, more than a year after the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) first verified it on Oct. 29, 2020. The DCNF obtained a full copy of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2020 and had the emails forensically verified as real.

Just days before the DCNF verified the authenticity of the laptop, Jankowicz tweeted about the laptop, saying it “is a Russian influence op.”

During the second presidential debate, Jankowicz sent out a tweet which said that Biden cited “50 former natsec officials and 5 former CIA heads that believe the laptop is a Russian influence op.”

In a tweet from December 2017, Jankowicz also claimed the Steele dossier, which has been totally discredited, was funded by Republicans. Christopher Steele, the dossier’s author, was never funded by Republicans. The Washington Post reported in October 2017 that Marc E. Elias, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and DNC, and his law firm, Perkins Coie, hired Fusion GPS last April to investigate Donald Trump — something Jankowicz failed to mention.

Jankowicz is currently a fellow at the Wilson Center. On her website, she calls herself an “internationally-recognized expert on disinformation and democratization.”

AUTHOR

HENRY RODGERS

Senior Congressional correspondent. Follow Henry Rodgers On Twitter

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