There’s virtual anarchy on our southern border — costing U.S. servicemen their lives — and what is Homeland Security’s priority? Policing free speech. In news almost too impossible to believe, the man presiding over the collapse of our immigration system, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, testified Wednesday that while millions of illegals stream into our country, destroying property and preying on local communities, his focus will be “countering misinformation” before the midterm elections. “The goal is to bring the resources of (DHS) together to address this threat,” Mayorkas said. What threat? The biggest one to the Left’s control: the truth.

Days after Elon Musk bought Twitter, vowing to turn it into the First Amendment platform it was meant to be, Democrats are frantically trying to relocate their censorship operation to Washington, where they can keep their information blackout alive. Without Twitter to silence uncomfortable facts for the Left, the president thinks he can use the full force of government to maintain his party’s chokehold on speech — and make the taxpayers he’s silencing pay for it!

Reaction poured in from all sides, but especially conservatives, who’ve dubbed Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board a real-world “ministry of truth.” One of the loudest critics, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), couldn’t believe that Democrats would actually weaponize DHS against open debate, calling on the president to dissolve the board immediately. “The administration that activated the FBI against parents at school board meetings has now created a government Disinformation Board to monitor all Americans’ speech. It’s a disgrace.”

Other Republicans can’t help but note the timing of the announcement. “The libs spent the last weeks planting the seeds for the back-up plan in case the Twitter deal actually happened,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) tweeted. “Today’s news of a Biden backed ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ is dystopian. They can’t afford to let the truth be anything but what they say.” Obviously, Elon Musk threatened their control over the narrative, other Republicans fumed, so the administration panicked. Adding to the GOP’s fury, the president’s new “anti-speech czar,” radical Nina Jankowicz says she “shudders” at the thought of Musk controlling anything on social media.

Musk, who spent $44 billion dollars to wrestle Twitter out of the hands of the woke thought police, has vowed to make the platform a true free-for-all again, opening the door to real conversations on COVID, abortion, education, transgenderism, election reform, and so many other topics that were routinely blacklisted because they hurt the Democrats’ cause.

Apparently, Mayorkas doesn’t care about helping his own cause at DHS, which is suffering mightily in the steady stream of horror reports from the U.S.-Mexican lines. Kidnapping, extortion, sex trafficking, drug abuse, gang violence, looting, crime — it’s all skyrocketing as more than a million illegals disappear into American neighborhoods under this president. According to estimates, the taxpayer burden of caring, feeding, schooling, sheltering, and incarcerating these migrants is up to $143.1 billion dollars a year. That’s what Mayorkas calls “effectively managing” the border crisis?

And yet, while the border burns, Biden will fiddle — inventing new reasons to seize control of Americans’ fundamental rights. Because, as his party knows, any battle of ideas they fight fairly will lose. The Left’s ideas are so outrageous, so unscientific, so contradictory to the country’s values that the only real chance they have is shoving people who might refute and expose them out of the virtual public square. What else explains why murderous tyrants still have platforms, but a congresswoman who says men aren’t girls is banned? If Twitter can ban Donald Trump, liberal Slate wondered, shouldn’t the world’s dictators be next? “If Trump’s behavior on Twitter was grounds for a permanent ban, why are officials from autocratic governments allowed to continue using the site to spread propaganda, justify repressive violence, and promote conspiracy theories?”

Simple: because they don’t pose a legitimate threat to the Left’s power. Conservatives, who are eating into the Democrats’ core constituencies, do. The Left’s decision to force their woke madness on education, sports, gender, corporate America, and so much more has the party hemorrhaging support from parents and other demographics they used to take for granted. That’s why this new board is focused on groups like “Hispanic communities,” where — not-so-coincidentally — Biden is at record disapproval (26 percent). Information control is their only hope for salvaging 2022, 2024, and beyond.

While the Left’s censorship can hide the facts from Americans, no amount of censorship can stop them from feeling the failures of the Biden administration’s policies. Against the pain at the pump and the grocery, even the Disinformation Governance Board is powerless.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.