With honor and integrity, we will safeguard the American people, our homeland, and our values.

That’s the mission of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — a mission “born from the commitment and resolve of Americans across the United States in the wake of the September 11th attacks,” as the language just beneath it on the DHS website makes clear. “In those darkest hours, we witnessed true heroism, self-sacrifice, and unified resolve against evil. We rallied together for our common defense, and we pledged to stand united against the threats attacking our great Nation, fellow Americans, and way of life.”

Given its clear-cut foundational focus on terrorism and other external threats, it seems clear to us that DHS has lost its way. Either that, or this heavily armed 220,000-employee organization has grown too big and is simply looking for things to do. How else to explain Wednesday’s announcement by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that the Biden administration has created its own Orwellian Ministry of Truth? How else to explain this brand-new deep state organization called the “Disinformation Governance Board”?

Apparently, we here in our humble shop aren’t the only ones who are, er, puzzled. Take Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley, for example: “The Administration that activated the FBI against parents at school board meetings now has created a government Disinformation Board to monitor all Americans’ speech,” he tweeted. “It’s a disgrace. Joe Biden & Secretary Mayorkas: dissolve this monstrosity immediately.”

Hawley’s brief missive was accompanied by a longer one — a two-page woodshed of a letter to Mayorkas that included this barb:

I confess, I at first thought this announcement was satire. Surely no American Administration would ever use the power of Government to sit in judgment on the First Amendment speech of its own citizens. Sadly, I was mistaken. Rather than protecting our border or the American homeland, you have chosen to make policing Americans’ speech your priority.

Regardless of their rationale for creating this abominable board, it’s clear that the Democrats want to stake out territory as The Party of Truth™. Good luck w'that. This, after all, is not only the party that, as Senator Hawley points out, sicced the feds on concerned American parents. It’s also the party that insists COVID-19 came from a bat rather than a Chinese virology lab located within a stone’s throw of the initial outbreak. And it’s the party that assured us Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. And the party that tells us concerns about Joe Biden’s undeniable cognitive decline are Republican disinformation. And the party that insists serious questions about how Joe Biden got 81 million votes while losing 18 of 19 bellwether counties and without hardly ever having ventured out of his basement are, well, pro-Trump disinformation.

This last point might also help explain the creation of this Ministry of Truth: All Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats have is January 6. It’s the only issue they can use to pummel Republicans. They can’t run on the economy, nor inflation, nor gas prices, nor immigration, nor crime, nor COVID policy, nor foreign policy, nor anything else. The January 6 riot is a dead hand to every convincible American voter, but Joe and Nancy and Chuck are gonna play it out. Thus, the creation of this special board — so they can remind us all of the “disinformation” in Trump’s repeated claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, while assiduously avoiding Hillary Clinton’s repeated claims that the 2016 election was stolen from her.

Disinformation is thus defined as anything that Democrats say it is.

And what does the new owner of Twitter think of all this? In a word, said Elon Musk, it’s “discomforting.”