The alarm has been sounded.
Because the Biden administration is “not doing well,” it’s trying to “silence its critics,” warned intrepid Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson opined likewise, saying that Biden knows he “cannot continue to control this country if you have free access to information.” Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt called the administration’s actions “Orwellian” and stated that they should “shock the very core of the American belief system.” The issue?
In the wake of billionaire Elon Musk’s buying of censorial, Big Brother-enabling Twitter and vowing to transform it into a free speech platform, the Empire Strikes Back:
Biden’s federal government has created a “Disinformation Governance Board” (DGB); this entity is designed to monitor Americans’ speech for “lies,” which, critics fear, will simply mean anything the government disagrees with.
The kicker: The board is being run out of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), whose mission when birthed in 2001 was to “secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks.” So many wonder: Is “disinformation” — aka speech not government-approved — being treated as a “terrorist threat”? And how do we deal with terrorist threats?
Note here that the DHS has bought millions of rounds of ammunition and has at its disposal “men with guns” who conceivably can “tell you to shut up,” as Tucker Carlson put it Friday, expressing the fears of many.
The Daily Mail reports on other reactions to this threat:
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has joined the chorus of critics tearing into the Biden administration’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ — headed by a ‘Russia expert’ who said Hunter Biden’s laptop was a ‘product of the Trump campaign’
‘You cannot have a Ministry of Truth in this country. We’re not going to let Biden get away with this one. So we will be fighting back,’ the Republican said on Friday at a news conference.
‘When you’re not doing well, you have two options: You can try to do better. Or you can try to silence your critics. [The Biden Administration] is doing the latter,’ he added.
DeSantis led the uptick in fury as Republican Senator Tom Cotton said he would introduce legislation to have the new ‘Disinformation’ board defunded.
The aforementioned Attorney General Schmitt also pushed back. He said, relates Fox News, “that ‘shadowy’ government programs that promise protection from the ‘bogeyman’ are ‘clumsy attempts by deep-staters to slowly steal our liberties and invade our privacy step by step, while hoping we don’t notice. We are noticing.’”
Schmitt then vowed to “fight this government overreach every step of the way,” as the “future of our republic is at stake.”
Also alarming many is that the Biden administration has tapped one Nina Jankowicz for DGB executive director. An author and a fellow at the Wilson Center, Jankowicz is billed as an internationally acclaimed expert on disinformation, though one could wonder if her expertise lies in spotting it or spreading it.
After all, when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke shortly before the 2020 election, Jankowicz was among a plethora of left-wing voices branding it Russian “disinformation” and repeating the claim — made by dozens of ex-“intelligence experts” — that this likely is exactly what it was. (For those interested, a series of Jankowicz tweets on the matter is here.)
Yet as The New American and other reputable sources reported at the time, the laptop had, in fact, been Hunter Biden’s — and now (a day late and dollar short) this has been confirmed by mainstream media such as The New York Times.
Getting this story wrong was no minor misstep. Polls show that a notable number of Biden voters would’ve reconsidered their support for the cognitively challenged candidate had they known about the laptop affair. And Jankowicz was among those who made sure they wouldn’t.
So is the 33-year-old Jankowicz, like Anthony Fauci, another government official who failed her way to the top? Hardly. Her very job was, and is, to suppress Truth for the purposes of winning power for her benefactor masters.
Some take solace in the idea that, as Carlson put it, all those involved in the DGB are “buffoons.” Jankowicz, for example, is now widely mocked for having created a disinformation song to the tune of Mary Poppins’ “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (below).
Jankowicz actually rendered the tune quite well. But while this only may qualify her for a Saturday Night Live audition, no one should underestimate her dangerousness. Note that some in the 1930s viewed the Nazis as buffoons. A person needn’t possess great intelligence or ability to do great damage — only great power. In fact, the ignorant and unwise are to be feared.
Many believe it’s no coincidence the DGB’s creation was announced following Musk’s Twitter purchase. Consider: With the rise of talk radio and, especially, the Internet and the “citizen journalists” it empowers, the statist-establishment-enabling mainstream media lost its monopoly over information flow. The powers-that-be began seizing this back, however, via GoogTwitFace censorship, which really is a government end-run around the First Amendment using Big Tech as dissent-suppressing proxy.
This characterization is accurate, as Big Government and Big Tech have long been joined at the hip. This is for two reasons. First, GoogTwitFace leadership and employees are almost monolithically left-wing (98.7 percent of Twitter employees’ political donations have gone to Democrats in recent times).
Second, Big Tech knows that Democrats in Congress — epitomizing power lust and statist to the core — will, unlike the GOP, punish them via regulation if it doesn’t do their bidding.
The end result is that GoogTwitFace does the job the feds can’t (directly) do: It censors the public square, acting as Ministry of Truth.
But now Elon Musk has seized one leg of Big Brother’s de facto Ministry of Truth, making himself the Donald Trump of social media. Thus is he being targeted as Trump was — and, perhaps in a government effort to compensate for this censorship-proxy loss, thus are patriotic Americans being targeted with a Disinformation Governance Board. It’s all, comrade, doubleplusgood.
For those interested, Tucker Carlson’s very compelling Friday monologue on the matter is below.
