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A Harris-Walz Administration Would Be A Nightmare for Free Speech


By Jonathan Turley | August 12, 2024

Read more at https://jonathanturley.org/2024/08/12/a-harris-walz-administration-would-be-a-nightmare-for-free-speech/

Below is my column in The Hill on why a Harris-Walz Administration would be a nightmare for free speech. A long-standing advocate for censorship and other speech controls, Vice President Kamala Harris just added an equally menacing candidate to her ticket for 2024.

Here is the column:

The selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as the running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris has led to intense debates over crime policy, war claims, gender identity policies and other issues. Some attacks have, in my view, been inaccurate or overwrought. However, the greatest danger from this ticket is neither speculative nor sensational. A Harris-Walz administration would be a nightmare for free speech.

For over three years, the Biden-Harris administration has sustained an unrelenting attack on the freedom of speech, from supporting a massive censorship system (described by a federal court as an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth“) to funding blacklisting operations targeting groups and individuals with opposing views.

President Biden made censorship a central part of his legacy, even accusing social media companies of “killing people” for failing to increase levels of censorship. Democrats in Congress pushed that agenda by demanding censorship on subjects ranging from climate change to gender identity — even to banking policy — in the name of combatting “disinformation.”

The administration also created offices like the Disinformation Governance Board before it was shut down after public outcry. But it quickly shifted this censorship work to other offices and groups.

As vice president, Harris has long supported these anti-free speech policies. The addition of Walz completes a perfect nightmare for free speech advocates. Walz has shown not only a shocking disregard for free speech values but an equally shocking lack of understanding of the First Amendment.

Walz went on MSNBC to support censoring disinformation and declared, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Ironically, this false claim, repeated by many Democrats, constitutes one of the most dangerous forms of disinformation. It is being used to convince a free people to give up some of their freedom with a “nothing to see here” pitch.

In prior testimony before Congress on the censorship system under the Biden administration, I was taken aback when the committee’s ranking Democrat, Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), declared, “I hope that [all members] recognize that there is speech that is not constitutionally protected,” and then referenced hate speech as an example.

That false claim has been echoed by others such as Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who is a lawyer. “If you espouse hate,” he said, “…you’re not protected under the First Amendment.” Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean declared the identical position: “Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.”

Even some dictionaries now espouse this false premise, defining “hate speech” as “Speech not protected by the First Amendment, because it is intended to foster hatred against individuals or groups based on race, religion, gender, sexual preference, place of national origin, or other improper classification.”

The Supreme Court has consistently rejected the claim of Gov. Walz. For example, in the 2016 Matal v. Tam decision, the court stressed that this precise position “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”

As the new Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Walz is running alongside one of the most enthusiastic supporters of censorship and blacklisting systems. In her failed 2020 presidential bid, Harris ran on censorship and pledged that her administration “will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms, because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.”

In October 2019, Harris dramatically spoke directly to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, insisting “This is not a matter of free speech….This is a matter of holding corporate America and these Big Tech companies responsible and accountable for what they are facilitating.” She asked voters to join her in the effort.

They didn’t, but Harris ultimately succeeded in the Biden-Harris administration to an unprecedented degree with a comprehensive federal effort to target and silence individuals and groups on social media.

In my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I detailed how President Biden is the most anti-free speech president since John Adams. Unlike Adams, I have never viewed Biden as the driving force behind the massive censorship and blacklisting operations supported by his subordinates, including Harris. That is not to say that Biden does not share the shame in these measures. He was willing to sacrifice not only free speech but also institutions like the Supreme Court in a desperate effort to rescue his failing nomination.

The substitution of Harris for Biden makes this the second election in which free speech is the key issue for voters. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams, in large part based on his pledge to reverse the anti-free speech policies of the prior administration, including the use of the Alien and Sedition Acts to arrest his opponents.

With the addition of Walz, Democrats now have arguably the most anti-free speech ticket of a major party in more than two centuries. Both candidates are committed to using disinformation, misinformation and malinformation as justifications for speech controls. The third category has been emphasized by the Biden-Harris administration, which explained that it is information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

Walz has the advantage in joining this anti-free speech ticket without the burden of knowledge of what is protected under the First Amendment.

With the Harris-Walz ticket, we have come full circle to the very debate at the start of this republic. The warnings of the Founders to reject the siren’s call of censorship remain tragically relevant today. Free speech was and remains our “indispensable right.”

As Benjamin Franklin warned, “In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech….Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man.”

With her selection of Walz, Harris has decided to put free speech on the ballot in this election. It is a debate that our nation should welcome, as it did in 1800. The Biden-Harris administration has notably toned down its anti-free speech efforts as the election approaches. Leading censorship advocates have also gone mostly silent. If successful, a Harris-Walz administration is expected to bring back those policies and personalities with a vengeance. That could be radically enhanced if the Democrats take both houses of Congress and once again block investigations into their censorship programs.

The media has worked very hard to present Harris and Walz as the “happy warriors.” Indeed, they may be that and much more. The question is what they are happy about in their war against free speech.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon and Schuster).

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Why CISA’s Censorship and Election Interference Work Is The ‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’


BY: M.D. KITTLE | MARCH 05, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/05/why-cisas-censorship-and-election-interference-work-is-the-most-insidious-attack-on-american-democracy/

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West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner last month eviscerated the Big Brother censorship operation known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” the election integrity champion told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired’s Eric Geller. While Geller did his best to defend the federal agency — under the suggestive headline, “How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security” — its history of censorship and election interference validate Warner’s concern.

The agency’s work, particularly the extracurricular business CISA has conducted in recent years, has been rightly criticized for its massive overreach. A report released last fall by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government details just how CISA “Colluded With Big Tech And ‘Disinformation’ Partners To Censor Americans.”

“Although the investigation is ongoing, information obtained to date has revealed that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—an upstart agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries,” the congressional report states. 

The report goes on to assert that the shadowy agency has “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.” 

‘Platforms Have Got to Get More Comfortable With Gov’t’

Launched in 2018, CISA was supposed to be “an ancillary agency designed to protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats,” the report notes. By 2020, the agency was “routinely” targeting what CISA officials claimed to be “disinformation” on social media. A year later, the agency had established a formal team devoted to what it decided was “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the latter of which CISA defines as “information based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In other words, factual information that is problematic to the Biden regime. 

CISA’s parent agency DHS launched the much-ridiculed and ultimately disbanded “Disinformation Governance Board” in 2022, to streamline the work of colluding with social media providers to shut down speech the government didn’t like or found inconvenient. 

A federal lawsuit filed by then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, uncovered troubling conversations between the Biden administration and private companies about the pathways for removing information the government deemed false or misleading. A federal judge in a ruling last year barred the Biden administration from its censorship work, although the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the injunction when it took up the case.

Leaked documents obtained by The Intercept show that Microsoft executive and former DHS official Matt Masterson texted CISA director Jen Easterly in February 2022, saying “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”

But it seems Big Tech was getting pretty comfortable with the Biden administration’s puppet enforcer. The Intercept report showed, among other alarming revelations, that Facebook operated a portal where Homeland Security could report allegations of “disinformation.”  CISA also has worked in concert with the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project, which is accused of conspiring with state, local, and federal government officials to trample the First Amendment rights of social media users, according to a class-action lawsuit. 

“But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created ‘in consultation’ with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students,”  The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland wrote in May. 

‘Only a Matter of Time’ 

Facing more public outrage over its unconstitutional actions, the CISA audaciously insisted it merely plays an “informational” role. 

As the congressional report notes: 

  • CISA is “working with federal partners to mature a whole-of-government approach” to curbing alleged misinformation and disinformation.
  • CISA considered the creation of an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” capable of physically deploying across the United States. 
  • CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded non-profit after CISA and the Biden Administration were sued in federal court, implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional.
  • CISA wanted to use the same CISA-funded non-profit as its mouthpiece to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”  

The agency’s advisory committee, according to the report, worried that it would be “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” Incidentally, the advisory committee created a “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee whose members included Vijaya Gadde — Twitter’s former chief legal officer who was “involved in censoring [the New York] Post’s Hunter Biden laptop” story. Gadde was also “behind the decision to permanently ban former President Trump from Twitter.”

‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’

Geller’s Wired piece took aim at Warner, West Virginia’s outspoken secretary of state who is making a run for governor. At last month’s secretaries of state meeting, Warner “lambasted” CISA and FBI officials for “what he said was their agencies’ scheme to suppress the truth about US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the 2020 election and then cover their tracks,” Geller wrote, as if he is not privy to the same public documents and testimony confirming Warner’s assertions. In Geller’s account, the FBI was merely advising Twitter and Facebook to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation.

But how do you square the intelligence community’s “advisory” role after learning Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign prompted a former acting CIA director to “help Biden” by leading 50 colleagues to sign a letter spreading the false claim that damning emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop — published by the New York Post — were Russian disinformation? And all of that just weeks before the election.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the FBI and CISA officials did not respond to Warner’s charges and the meeting quickly went on, Geller reported before he quickly attempted to establish Warner as a dreaded “election denier,” noting that the secretary of state “attended an election-denier rally after Biden’s 2020 victory.” 

But Warner is no conspiracy theorist. The West Point graduate served nearly a quarter century in the U.S. Army and then worked with the State Department in Afghanistan, according to his bio. Warner knows about security threats. 

CISA’s activities are “the most insidious attack on American democracy that I know of in U.S. history,” Warner told The Federalist in an interview last week. He called the targeting and censoring of state-defined “disinformation” a “psychological operation against the American people” that is “as bad as it gets.” 

Warner said he has spoken to CISA officials multiple times but that they have yet to heed his calls for an after-action report on the 2020 election — to truly find out what went right and what went wrong. 

A Warning

It appears most state elections officials don’t want to deal with the actual threat of the Biden administration’s disinformation and political silencing campaign. 

“They know they will be lambasted by mainstream press,” Warner said. No one wants to be hit with the “election denier” label so effectively applied by the accomplice media. “It’s not easy, not politically expedient for them.”

Warner is one of the few speaking out against CISA and pulling away from involvement with the agency. But Geller worries Warner’s conservative colleagues will join him in breaking ties with CISA, as conservatives in Congress work to cut the budget of the abusive agency.  

“It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA,” Geller wrote. 

“But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution,” he added. 

They need only look at CISA’s record and its rhetoric in the agency’s brief existence to know that Warner’s warnings aren’t merely the stuff of a “right-wing controversy.” 

“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA director Jen Easterly said at 2021’s RE:WIRED conference.

Apparently running roughshod over the First Amendment isn’t warning enough. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

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Government Officials Have a Special Portal to Flag Facebook Posts for Censorship


By MICAELA BURROW, REPORTER | October 31, 2022

Read more at https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/31/dhs-portal-flag-disinformation-censor-facebook/

US-FACEBOOK
(Photo by CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images)

The Department of Homeland Security has left open a special feature that allows government officials to flag Facebook posts for misinformation after scrapping a controversial advisory board tasked with developing guidelines for social media censorship, the Intercept reported Monday.

DHS announced plans for a Disinformation Governance Board 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,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in May, according to The Hill. While DHS shuttered the initiative after an onslaught of bipartisan opposition decrying the potential censorship, the Intercept found through an analysis of public and leaked documents that government efforts to police tech companies goes on.

Those activities include a Facebook portal only accessible by government and law enforcement representatives to formally request the platform kill or label alleged misinformation, according to the Intercept. A leaked set of slides contains instructions on how to operate the system, and the URL to access the site — facebook.com/xtakedowns/login — was still active at the time of publication.

“Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain,” a DHS official told a Microsoft representative in February, according to the Intercept. (RELATED: GOP Senators Release Documents Showing Biden Admin Lied About Disinfo Board)

The U.S. government has for years discussed the scope and scale of online content moderation the government should engage in, as well as how to compel social media platforms to flag or remove “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation,” the Intercept reported, citing meeting minutes and records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt.

The department now considers rooting out misinformation online as a critical element of its overall mission, according to a draft of the 2022 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review reviewed by the Intercept.

While the document highlights counter-terrorism as DHS’s primary objective, it acknowledges that “misinformation and disinformation spread online” can exacerbate terrorist threats from “domestic violent extremists,” according to the Intercept. It calls for DHS to use advanced computer analytical software and hire experts “to better understand how threat actors use online platforms to introduce and spread toxic narratives intended to inspire or incite violence.”

However, DHS has defined the “critical infrastructure” threatened by domestic terrorists to encompass trust in government, public health and election security, according to the Intercept.

“No matter your political allegiances, all of us have good reason to be concerned about government efforts to pressure private social media platforms into reaching the government’s preferred decisions about what content we can see online,” Adam Goldstein, the vice president of research at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told the Intercept.

Agencies under DHS — Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Science and Technology Directorate and the Secret Service — all have directives to combat misinformation online, the Intercept reported, citing a DHS Inspector General report from August.

Meta and DHS did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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The Clownish Disinfo Czar Got The Boot, But Biden’s ‘Ministry Of Truth’ Hired Monster Replacements


REPORTED BY DIANA GLEBOVA, ASSOCIATE EDITOR | May 19, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/the-clownish-disinfo-czar-got-the-boot-but-bidens-ministry-of-truth-hired-monster-replacements-2657354306.html/

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(Photo by Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit),(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hired the co-author of the PATRIOT Act, arguably the harshest crackdown on civil liberties in modern American history, and an official under former President Bill Clinton to head the Disinformation Governance Board during its “pause.”

The DHS shut the board down Monday after just several weeks and its head, Nina Jankowicz, wrote a resignation letter Tuesday, according to The Washington Post. Jankowicz was scrutinized for pushing disinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the now-discredited Steele Dossier, which Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA officer, said was possibly “part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot.” She also called Republicans who criticize critical race theory (CRT) “disinformers.” Videos of her singing as the “Mary Poppins of disinformation,” “fucking her way to the top” and satirical, sexualized renditions of Harry Potter themes have also raised eyebrows.

The department announced Wednesday former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former U.S. Deputy Secretary General Jamie Gorelick under Clinton “will lead a thorough review and assessment” of the board that was “grossly and intentionally mischaracterized.” (RELATED: White House Responds To Disinfo Board Being ‘Paused’)

Chertoff reportedly pushed disinformation about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, claiming Russians were behind the emails found inside, according to the Free Beacon. Chertoff served as the secretary of the DHS from 2005-2009, investigated the 9/11 attacks and co-authored the PATRIOT Act, which gave the government authority to tap phones to surveil for terrorism and conduct searches without a warrant.

Gorelick worked for the Clinton administration and was a member of the 9/11 Commission. She was also reportedly rumored to be failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s top choice for attorney general, and has worked for a wide range of clients, including Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, BP after its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and Duke University after three lacrosse players were falsely accused of rape.

The review of the Disinformation Governance Board will determine how the board can monitor disinformation while “protecting free speech, civil rights, civil liberties and privacy” and how it can increase “transparency” with the public. It will be conducted by the “bipartisan Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC).”

WASHINGTON – JANUARY 3: U.S. President George W. Bush (C) with (L-R) Montana U.S. Attorney Bill Mercer, New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesiais, Oregon U.S. Attorney Karen Immergut, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, U.S. Attorney for Eastern District of New York Roslynn Mauskopf and U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Debra Wong Yang participates in a meeting on the Patriot Act in the Roosevelt Room of the White House January 3, 2006 in Washington, DC. While on vacation at his ranch, Bush signed a one-month extension of the Patriot Act and is pushing Capitol Hill to make the law permanent. (Photo by Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)

A number of Republicans raised the alarm about the establishment of the board and Jankowicz’s past of being partisan to conservatives. Former DHS officials under the Trump administration agreed, saying the board was unneeded and “politicized” battling disinformation. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Blackburn, Trump Intelligence Officer Warn Biden’s Disinformation Board Will Come After Conservatives)

“The creation of the ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ in the Secretary’s office is unneeded and politicizes the Department’s mission. There is no operational reason to take this responsibility from largely non-political operating components and move this mission to the Secretary’s office filled with political appointees, including a politically charged individual with no government experience. The move represents a further politicization of the Department under this Administration,” Chad Wolf, former acting secretary of the DHS, told the Daily Caller.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that there was “no question” that they “could’ve done a better job at communicating” what the board does when it was announced. (RELATED: ‘I Was Not Aware’: Mayorkas Says He Didn’t Know About Truth Czar’s Viral Videos)

The rollout of the board was “half-baked” and that the DHS got “ahead of themselves when they mentioned it in” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ testimony April 27, a congressional staffer told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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


REPORTED BY DIANA GLEBOVA, ASSOCIATE EDITOR | May 13, 2022

Read more at https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/13/trump-dhs-truth-ministry-disinformation-governance-board-jen-psaki/

Jen Psaki Delivers Daily White House Briefing
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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.

WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 04: U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas arrives to testify before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, on Capitol Hill on May 04, 2022 in Washington, DC. Mayorkas will address the budget request for fiscal year 2023 for the Department of Homeland Security. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

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

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco


A.F. Branco Cartoon – Scary Poppins

A.F. BRANCO | on May 3, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-scary-poppins/

Left-wing hack and propagandist Jankowicz is now heading Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board.

Jankowicz Misinformation Czar
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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DHS creates ‘disinformation governance board,’ appoints leader who peddled disinformation about Hunter Biden laptop, Trump dossier


Reported by CHRIS ENLOE | April 28, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/dhs-creates-disinformation-governance-board/

The Department of Homeland Security was criticized Thursday over the creation of a new department whose mission is to combat the spread of “disinformation.” According to Politico, the DHS has established the Disinformation Governance Board, which will “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.”

The agency appointed Nina Jankowicz as executive director of the board.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed the board’s creation on Wednesday after Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.) asked him what steps the DHS is taking to combat the manipulation of black Americans and Hispanics, including migrants, through “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

Making matters worse, Jankowicz is by no measure an objective leader. In fact, the Washington Examiner reported that Jankowicz disseminated information contained in the debunked Christopher Steele dossier and repeatedly downplayed the Hunter Biden laptop story with claims that it was part of a foreign interference campaign. She even described the laptop hard drive — which has been repeatedly authenticated — as a “Trump campaign product.” Jankowicz even appears to oppose free speech. Last week, she told NPR that she “shudder[s] to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms.”

The announcement generated a wave of backlash, both against the creation of the board itself and against Jankowicz as its leader. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has already sent Mayorkas a letter demanding that the board be dissolved immediately.

“I confess, I at first thought this announcement was satire. Surely no American Administration would ever use the power of Government to sit in judgement on the First Amendment speech of its own citizens,” Hawley said. “Sadly, I was mistaken. Rather than protecting our border or the American homeland, you have chosen to make policing Americans’ speech your priority. This new board is almost certainly unconstitutional and should be dissolved immediately.”

Meanwhile, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt (R) described the board as the “ministry of truth,” aka the government’s own propaganda office.

“I’m also going to let a cat out of the bag — you’re about to get a lesson in federalism because the free state of Missouri will NEVER let you administer a federal Ministry of Truth. Buckle up!” Schmitt said.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said, “During the worst border crisis in history, Biden’s DHS is creating an Orwellian ‘disinformation governance board’ led by a partisan Democrat who herself spread disinformation. What a disgrace. When Republicans take control, we will fix this.”

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