The most interesting fact, to my mind, about the Disinformation Governance Board is the silence that surrounded its creation. Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas announced it this afternoon at a Congressional hearing on his department’s budget for fiscal year 2023 in response to what I assume was a planted question from a Democratic representative. The new board obviously wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment idea. It has already hired an executive director, Nina Jankowicz, who tweeted after the secretary’s announcement:
Cat’s out of the bag: here’s what I've been up to the past two months, and why I’ve been a bit quiet on here.
Honored to be serving in the Biden Administration @DHSgov and helping shape our counter-disinformation efforts.
We may safely assume that DHS didn’t decide that it needed a disinformation board on Day 1 and start talking to potential staff on Day 2.
The media reaction has also been interesting. Except for a paragraph buried far down in this morning’s Politico Playbook, I haven’t been able to find a word about it anywhere except on right-leaning sites. The Daily Mail and Fox News have stories. Unless Google is falling behind, the news didn’t immediately interest the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. (As regular WSJ readers know, the news operation is distinctly left-wing; I imagine, though, that the editorial page will have something to say tomorrow morning.)
One might have thought that a governmental body with a mandate to combat “disinformation” would arouse a modicum of interest on the Left. Do progressives recall the House Committee on Un-American Activities or the Defense Department’s thankfully short-lived “Total Information Awareness Program”? One fears that they do, but as models rather than warnings.
No doubt Secretary Mayorkas and Executive Director Jankowicz are certain in their hearts that the Disinformation Governance Board will be entirely benign, but they can’t have thought that their opinion would be universally shared. The fact that they kept the DGB under wraps is strong evidence that they wanted to keep this venture into manipulating opinion out of the public eye until it was ready to roll.
The new executive director, by the bye, doesn’t seem particularly skeptical of disinformation that supports her prejudices. As the Daily Mail report observes, she was sure that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a “Trump campaign product”. She also swallowed without reservation reports that Russia was paying the Taliban bounties for killing American soldiers, an implausible tale (did the Taliban need incentives to do that?) to which the U.S. intelligence agencies eventually assigned “low to moderate confidence”.
The idea that the government has a legitimate role in identifying false statements about political issues and cleansing them from the public square has nothing to recommend it. I’d like to think that, somewhere in the recesses of their minds, Alejandor Mayorkas and Nina Jankowicz and the serried ranks of left-wing journalists sense that. Their silence may be a sign of guilty consciences. Unfortunately, guilt may not be a sufficient deterrent to crime.
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