The Patriot Post® · Doubling Down on the 'Disinformation Governance Board'

Everyone from the center left to the solid right reacted in expressing near unison shock and objection to the revelation by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last week that Joe Biden’s DHS was creating a Disinformation Governance Board. The announcement of an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” had everyone wondering if this was 1984. Unfortunately, it is all too real — a fact that was made clear when Mayorkas hit the mainstream media outlets in an effort to dispel the indisputable truth that the Biden administration is walking all over the First Amendment.

“It works to ensure that the way in which we address threats, the connectivity between threats and acts of violence are addressed without infringing on free speech — protecting civil rights and civil liberties, the right of privacy,” assured Mayorkas. This is the same Mayorkas who claims that there is no border crisis, all while more than two million illegal aliens have poured into the U.S. in just one year under Biden. Excuse us, Mr. Secretary, if we simply don’t believe you.

Further demonstrating that the Biden administration is playing fast and loose with the truth is the fact that a leftist partisan hack has been tabbed to lead this government-sanctioned “fact-checking” outfit. Based on her extensive social media footprint, Nina Jankowicz is as partisan and anti-Republican as they come. And to make matters worse, she’s a repeated purveyor of disinformation herself, such as the Russia/Trump collusion hoax or Hunter Biden’s laptop being nothing more than Russian propaganda.

When Mayorkas was pressed on this very point as to whether Jankowicz could be trusted to be “politically neutral,” he offered the classic Washington obfuscation answer: She’s “eminently qualified.” When asked if he would have been okay with the creation of a similar board under the Trump administration, Mayorkas showed his hand by avoiding answering the question and then redirecting once again to that old “qualified” canard: “I believe this working group that gathers together best practices, makes sure our work is coordinated, consistent with those best practices, that we’re safeguarding the right of free speech, that we’re safeguarding civil liberties. I think it’s an extraordinarily important endeavor.”

The great irony here is that the Biden administration is doing the exact opposite of “safeguarding civil liberties.” What government officials in the highest offices are seeking to do is trample all over Americans’ First Amendment rights, using a dubious rationale in order to prevent the promulgation of what they claim are objectionable political opinions.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about the DGB, and she further raised eyebrows by stating, “We know there has been a range of [disinformation] out there about a range of topics, I mean, including COVID, for example, and also elections and eligibility.” She then expressed surprise that the DGB would be considered controversial: “It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities. I’m not sure who opposes that effort.”

The problem, as mentioned above, is that this is a direct assault on the First Amendment. The government’s job is to protect the American public from those who would silence them, not to “protect” them from “disinformation” by silencing them. The government cannot become the absolute arbiter of truth. That is a job that only God is qualified to perform. And that is exactly what this effort by the Biden administration boils down to — an effort to take the role of God, to declare to the American public what is and what isn’t “truth.”

No matter how this issue is parsed or sliced, there is simply no way to truly justify it constitutionally. This may be the biggest affront yet to the Constitution from the party constantly lamenting threats to democracy. What bigger threat can there be to the Republic than Big Brother monitoring and censoring speech?