Remember the Biden Administration's Ministry of Truth? Almost exactly two years ago, Joe Biden attempted to launch a "Disinformation Governance Board" within the Department of Homeland Security. The mission would focus on correcting what the Biden administration's bureaucrats considering 'disinformation' and demand that tech platforms intervene to remove it. 

Biden appointed supposed expert Nina Jankowicz as the "disinformation czar" to run the board, and ... hilarity almost immediately followed. A quick search of Nina Jankowicz' social media feed turned up her efforts to spike the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020, calling it "a Russian influence op," a "fairy tale," and suggested six months later that it was part of a Kremlin election-influence operation. The next day, John dug up several videos of Jankowicz singing her way through various claims, among other oddities. 

Within a week, Republicans in the Senate called this idea of speech control "un-American" and vowed to defund it. A fortnight or so later, Biden threw in the towel -- and threw Jankowicz out, too. The very next day, coincidentally or not, NBC News reported that the Hunter laptop was real and spectacular. 

After a brief bout of claiming victimhood over right-wing attacks, Jankowicz disappeared from the national scene. Now Jankowicz is back to reclaim the mantle of Big Sister, Luke Rosiak reported late yesterday at the Daily Wire, and wants to silence all critics in her new role, too. Because democracy depends on shutting down criticism, or something:

The Biden administration’s former “disinformation czar,” ousted after an apparent attempt to create an Orwellian ministry of truth within the Department of Defense, has launched a new nonprofit that declares criticism of “disinformation researchers” such as herself as a chief threat to the United States of America.

“The campaign against counter-disinformation work is the greatest threat to freedom of expression and academic integrity since the McCarthy era,” Nina Jankowicz said in a press release, pledging that her group would not “allow it to continue.”

“Once researchers are free to conduct their essential work, the American people will gain a better understanding of the nature and severity of the disinformation threats we face,” she said. “Disinformation knows no political party. Its ultimate victim is our democracy.”

The group, the American Sunlight Project, was announced as a bipartisan advocacy organization founded by Jankowicz that was “launched to expose and oppose efforts to weaponize disinformation in the United States.”

Got that? Criticism of government policies is a threat to democracy. Dissent is a threat to "freedom of expression," which means we can't be free to criticize the American Sunlight Project, or they will not be "free to conduct their essential work." Academic integrity requires that no one research the researchers. 

War is peace! Censorship is freedom! Dissent is patriotic until we say it isn't! Rosiak's reference to Orwell is no exaggeration. 

On one level, this is almost comically arrogant. Why wouldn't Jankowicz' researchers be "free to do their essential work"? They apparently will have private funding, and can formulate any political arguments they want. We can also debate, criticize, and reject those findings. No one is telling them to shut down as a private entity. 

Jankowicz' statement implies that the issue isn't whether they can conduct "research." What Jankowicz wants is to impose their findings on Americans and dictate what they can write, say, and think, and to be prevented from resisting their conclusions. Not at all coincidentally, that's what Jankowicz and DHE planned to do through the "Disinformation Governance Board," as we found out after the Biden White House beat a retreat.

In December 2022, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) published memos that made clear that DHS intended the Disinformation Governance Board to censor debate and dissent in partnership with Big Tech platforms -- which happened anyway through other agencies, notably the State Department and its "Global Engagement Center." Last September, a FOIA demand from Americans for Prosperity laid bare the ambitions of the DGP. Jonathan Turley took note that the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency absorbed the effort and planned a very wide range of Big Tech censorship:

New documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) argued that the agency could regulate speech related to “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” as well as “irregular immigration.”

Those subjects stretch across much of the “space” used for political speech in the last few years.

Notably, within DHS, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” I testified earlier on this effort.

So DHS asserted the authority to target viewpoints on racial justice, Ukraine, and other political subjects, including views based on fact but viewed as misleading in context.

"Cognitive infrastructure" means our brains. DHS asserted jurisdiction over our thoughts as well as our speech, a breathtakingly totalitarian claim that one suspects has not yet been relinquished. In fact, it would not surprise me in the least if Jankowicz' American Sunlight Project turns into a DHS contractor for that very purpose, especially in this administration, or as an advisory panel for the Big Tech platforms to extend their punitive actions against people who dissent from Big Brother's official line.

Or Big Sister's.

I'll skip over the big VIP pitch here, since I had one earlier. But this does show how tenuous our public square is, and how authoritarians still want to claim jurisdiction over the "cognitive infrastructure" of American citizens. We need to fight against that, and the only way to do that is to support independent platforms and buffer us from the Big Brother/Sister Government Censorship Complex. Become a HotAir VIP member today and use promo code CENSORSHIP to receive a 50% discount on your membership.