Biden DHS creates unit to police speech

(Pixabay image)
(Pixabay image)

The Department of Homeland Security is establishing a board to counter “disinformation” that will be headed by a former adviser to the government of Ukraine who declared that Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop was  a “Russian influence” operation.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified to a House panel on Wednesday that the board will be tasked with countering disinformation regarding homeland security, particularly related to Russia and illegal immigration.

Politico reported Nina Jankowicz, who previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank, will head the board as executive director.

Just before the 2020 election, reported Human Events editor Jack Posobiec, Jankowicz highlighted on Twitter the evidence-free claim by 51 former national security officials that the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop, belatedly verified last month by the New York Times, was a “Russian influence” operation.

In another tweet, Oct. 22, 2020, Jankowicz said the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop “don’t need to be altered to be part of an influence operation.”

“Voters deserve that context,” she said, “not a fairy tale about a laptop repair shop.”

Mayorkas told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Wednesday that “the goal” of the new board “is to bring the resources of the department together to address this threat” of disinformation.

The co-chairs of the board are the State Department’s undersecretary for policy, Rob Silvers, and the principal deputy general counsel, Jennifer Gaskell.

Jankowicz confirmed the appointment via Twitter.

“Cat’s out of the bag: here’s what I’ve been up to the past two months, and why I’ve been quiet on here,” she tweeted. “Honored to be serving in the Biden Administration @DHSgov and helping shape our counter-disinformation efforts.”

Posobiec also pointed out that Jankowicz was the overseer of Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute, a Washington non-profit.

In a Jan. 13, 2021, tweet, Jankowicz commented on President Trump’s speech regarding the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol in which the president said, “I unequivocally condemn the violence that we saw last week.”

She said the speech “is definitely the most presidential thing he’s ever done, but still missing a disavowal of disinformation and conspiracy theories.”

“And once again for the people in the back: the ‘free speech vs censorship’ framing is a false dichotomy,” she wrote.

Jankowicz lamented that earlier this year, Twitter stopped limiting speech about the 2020 presidential election.

“Considering the long-term damage these lies do to our democracy,” she said she was “dismayed about this decision.”

Elections are “an inflection point” rather than an “end point,” she said, and social media companies “need to reflect that” in their governance of speech.

Obama’s disinformation tour
Former President Barack Obama currently is engaged in a campaign against “disinformation.”

The New York Times reported last week ahead of an appearance at Stanford University that “in many private meetings and public appearances over the last year, the former president has waded deeply into the public fray over misinformation and disinformation, warning that the scourge of falsehoods online has eroded the foundations of democracy at home and abroad.”

In his Stanford speech, the paper said, he was “expected to add his voice to demands for rules to rein in the flood of lies polluting public discourse.”

It was under Obama that the Justice Department and the FBI pursued the now debunked Trump-Russia collusion allegations adopted by establishment media as the unassailable truth. In his probe of the Obama investigation, special counsel John Durham has presented evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign peddled disinformation from Russian sources to try to win the 2016 election.

Last week at Stanford, in a direct appeal to the Silicon Valley tech giants to censor “misinformation” on social media, Obama unwittingly affirmed the contention of critics of the COVID-19 vaccines that the fact that clinical trials have not been completed makes the people who have received the shots part of an experiment.

“Despite the fact that we have now essentially clinically tested the vaccine on billions of people worldwide, around one in five Americans is still willing to put themselves at risk, and put their families at risk, rather than get vaccinated,” he said in a speech at Stanford University.

“People are dying because of misinformation.”

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