The real reason behind the new Disinformation Board is to control the narratives in minority communities
Government-wide plan advance racial 'equity' across 90 federal agencies requires the support of minorities. Censoring narratives that undermine the 'transformation' agenda is the real goal.
A government plan to advance racial 'equity' across 90 federal agencies requires the support of minorities. But censoring narratives that undermine the 'transformation' agenda is the real goal.
Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has named Nina Jankowicz as the board’s executive director. Mrs. Jankowicz previously held the title of “disinformation fellow” at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank.
Mr. Mayorkas announced the recently formed disinformation panel during his testimony before a House Appropriation subcommittee, in response to a question posed by Rep. Lauren Underwood, Illinois (Democrat) about what the DHS would do to combat misinformation campaigns targeting minority communities.
He said the goal of the Disinformation Governance Board is to “bring the resources of [DHS] together to address” the threat of disinformation, with a focus on the spread of disinformation in minority communities.
The DHS said the board was created to target supposed misinformation linked to key vulnerabilities for the Biden administration — including the border crisis and Russian disinformation threats. This is a head fake to distract from the real purpose of the board, to control the narratives in minority communities for political purposes.
Biden’s agenda is to radically transform America.
The White House recently noted that on his first day in office, President Joe Biden “signed Executive Order 13985, Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities through the Federal Government” that “directed the whole of the federal government to advance an ambitious equity and racial justice agenda” focused on creating “prosperity, dignity, and equality” for underserved communities.
Ryan Girdusky, founder of 1776 Project PAC, a non-profit focused on electing school board members opposed to any curriculum inspired by critical race theory, told The Daily Wire that the Biden administration’s “plan towards equity is race-based Marxism with a different word.”
“The entire program is set to lower standards, dilute meritocracy, and have the first large-scale government-supported laws that discriminate against people based on their race since before Eisenhower was President,” Girdusky added.
Indeed, the Department of Energy explained in its equity action plan released last week that it has already started considering factors other than technical merit when doling out financial assistance via a pilot program through its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).
Starting in March 2021, applicants seeking research and development funding from EERE have had to issue diversity, equity, and inclusion statements for their projects on their applications.
The purpose of such statements is to explain how their project would help and include “underserved communities” — meaning, minority, non-white, non-heterosexual, and non-male groups —to be considered for the taxpayer-funded grants.
DOE plans to incorporate that program across all of its funding opportunities and will also focus on “increasing the diversity of merit reviewers.”
Beginning in the fiscal year 2022, all applicants seeking funding opportunities through the agency “must include at least one DEI-specific program policy factor” in a move that “will allow DOE to prioritize equity-related factors in awarding financial assistance.”
“Program policy factors allow the selecting official the flexibility to consider factors other than technical merit,” the Energy Department explained.
In other words, America’s top scientists and engineers must now incorporate ‘progressive’ ideas about race, sexuality, gender, and other factors into their business models and scientific research plans to be considered for tax-payer-funded money. Furthermore, it would appear those plans must show they will benefit non-white or minority groups to fulfill the goals of the equity action plans.
The plan notes that this new guidance “will ensure that when all other aspects, such as technical merit, are considered equal, programs can select applications that broaden the diversity of institutions and individuals who are awarded DOE R&D funding.”
Under that framework, the government will prefer research and development applicants to be equally mediocre in their energy innovations while having quality DEI statements rather than a handful of exceptionally innovative applicants without DEI statements.
The more exceptional applicants in that scenario will be discriminated against because they refused to submit a DEI statement.
Thus, as Girdusky pointed out, the diluting of merit in America comes to fruition in Biden’s America and will continue for years to come.
Stanford professor Victor Davis Hanson explained to The Daily Wire that the transition to “equity” away from “equality” is intended to increase government power and advance a Leftist ideology.
“Equality is an American idea of equality and fairness in opportunity,” Hanson explained. “Equity is a French revolutionary idea of equality of a result mandated by a coercive government.”
“Equity is the code for an elite professional and bureaucratic class to gain more influence, money, and power by forcing all people to be equal no matter their circumstances or behavior,” he added.
As explained by the Department of Energy, Biden has initiated the “total transformation of the government into an entity that centers the concerns of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and underserved communities.”
As for what that entails for the American people, Hanson explained that “it simply means that in reductionist fashion, any inequality is due to racism or bias and the government must have the wisdom and morality to punish perceived victimizers and redistribute to supposed victims.”
“All else does not count—not merit, not tragedies, not health, not class, not work ethic, not family structures, not culture, not anything—except the elite in charge will always be exempt from the ramifications of their equity ideology,” he explained.
Altogether, it is clear that the equity action plans are covert vehicles for implementing critical race theory in a way that would fundamentally alter the American way of life.
“CRT’s ‘equity’ demands race-based discrimination,” a recent Heritage Foundation guide to identifying critical race theory explained.
“Because systemic racism has produced disparities between the races and because the system will only deepen these disparities by rewarding the ‘wrong’ criteria, the government must treat individual Americans unequally according to skin color to forcibly produce equal outcomes,” Heritage said in its explanation of the tents of CRT and equity.” Advocating equity over equality is part of CRT.
This abandons the idea that Americans should be treated as individuals by the government. Now, more than 90 federal agencies under Biden have sought to institutionalize this form of discrimination.
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The Biden-Harris administration unveiled recently a massive government-wide plan to advance racial equity across 90 federal agencies with more than 300 strategies and commitments laid out by government leaders.
The announcements from dozens of federal agencies are the start of fulfilling an executive order signed by President Joe Biden on his first day in office to advance racial equity across the federal government.
From the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to the Department of Education (DoE) to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), each federal agency released its action plan to advance racial equity to close the many gaps in services available to underserved communities.
Susan Rice, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, led the administration’s racial equity apparatus to ensure that all U.S. departments adhered to President Biden’s order to evaluate their agencies and implement strategies to ensure that their services reached communities that have been historically underserved and underrepresented, including Black, Latino, LGBTQ+, Tribal and rural populations.
Rice noted that President Biden’s budget request would “ensure that the maximum Pell Grant is twice as large as it was when he took office.”
The Department of Energy is also focusing on other areas, such as ensuring that Black and Brown communities are better prepared for the effects of climate change, including home weatherization, which means upgrades to protect houses from the weather and reduce energy consumption.
The department’s Office of Economic Impact and Diversity also released its criteria for identifying communities under the Biden Administration’s touted Justice40 initiative, which commits 40% of federal investments in climate and clean energy to underserved communities.
SBA Administrator Isabel Guzman said her department’s goal is to increase the number of federal contracts for Black and Brown small businesses.
“I believe wholeheartedly that this is such a unique opportunity for the SBA, more of a known entity than ever before, to be able to build bridges to communities, underserved communities, especially for people of color who have not been able to overcome those historic barriers to capital access in which SBA specializes,” Guzman said. “We’re just really looking forward to the push of this equity agenda and strengthening our actions as a result.”
Marcia Fudge, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said that her department’s equity action plan “is an important milestone.”
HUD, which recently announced new efforts to end racial bias in home lending and home appraisals, said on Thursday that it would also invest in staff capacity and issue guidance and new rules to safeguard against housing discrimination, make improvements to its Homeless Response System by partnering with other agencies to “reduce entry into homelessness from foster care, the criminal justice system, and other institutions, and to improve the collection of gender identity, race, and ethnicity data.”
Free speech is under attack by the far-left progressives.
Jonathan Turley sums up the risk:
Many politicians and pundits are in full panic over Elon Musk’s threat to restore free speech values to Twitter. While Hillary Clinton has called upon Europeans to step in to maintain such censorship and Barack Obama has called for U.S. regulations, the Biden Administration has created a new Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Homeland Security. It appointed an executive director, Nina Jankowicz, who is pitch-perfect as an advocate for both corporate and state censorship.
It would have been hard to come up with a more Orwellian name—short of the Ministry of Truth. However, the DGB needed a true believer to carry out the monitoring of political speech in the United States. It found that person in Janowicz, long an outspoken anti-free speech advocate.
Indeed, Jankowicz put her extreme views to music and posted them on TikTok in a rendition of Mary Poppins’ “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
What is clear is that Jankowicz has a far better hold on the musical scale than constitutional values. With what is a remarkably impressive singing voice, Jankowicz croons that “You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation.”
It was a poignant and prophetic line.
Jankowicz was selected by the Biden Administration after years of pushing on the left while calling for censorship of the right.
Jankowicz previously argued that Congress should create new laws to block mocking women online by reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and including “provisions against online gender-based harassment.”
Jankowicz testified before the UK parliament[GAJ1] last year about “gender misinformation” being a “national security concern” and a threat to democracy requiring government censorship.
She has demanded that tech companies and government should work together using “creativity and technological prowess to make a pariah of online misogyny.”
On the Hunter Biden laptop, Jankowicz pushed the false narrative that it was a false story and that “we should view it as a Trump campaign product.” She continued to spread that, including tweeting a link to a news article that she said cast “yet more doubt on the provenance of the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story.” In another tweet, she added “not to mention that the emails don’t need to be altered to be part of an influence campaign. Voters deserve that context, not a [fairy] tale about a laptop repair shop.”
She even cites the author of the Steele Dossier as a guide on how to deal with disinformation. In August 2020, Jankowicz tweeted “Listened to this last night – Chris Steele (yes THAT Chris Steele) provides some great historical context about the evolution of disinfo. Worth a listen.”
She also joined the panic over the Musk threat to reintroduce free speech values to Twitter. In an interview on NPR, she stated “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities.”
Pitch perfect. Indeed, in seeing how we all “measure up,” Nina Jankowicz “is practically perfect in every way.”
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) has declared Musk’s pledge to restore free speech values on social media as threatening Democracy itself. She has promised that “they are going to rule” to block such changes. She is not alone. Former President Obama has declared that “regulation has to be part of the answer” to disinformation. For her part, Hillary Clinton is looking to Europe to fill the vacuum and called upon her European counterparts to pass a massive censorship law to “bolster global democracy before it’s too late.”
“A brave new nightmare.” Those words from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich described the threat created by Elon Musk’s bid to restore free speech values by buying Twitter.
Yet, despite warnings that censorship is necessary “for democracy to survive,” neither the Tesla CEO and billionaire nor ordinary citizens appear to be sufficiently terrified of free speech. Twitter confirmed Monday that Musk will acquire the company in a deal worth $44 billion. Once the deal is complete, Twitter will become a privately held company.
Progressives, in the meantime, have adopted a dangerous shift in their strategy of calling for corporations to censor speech.
Last week, former President Barack Obama made this shift clear in his much-covered speech at Stanford University. Just days after Musk re-enforced his bid for Twitter with the support of many in the free speech community, Obama warned that social media was “tilting us in the wrong direction.” He called for more censorship of disinformation while calling himself “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist.”
Obama has never been viewed as an ally of free speech by those of us who have been attacked for our “absolutist” views. Moreover, calling for censorship as a free speech absolutist is like claiming to be a vegetarian while calling for mandatory meat consumption.
Obama favors free speech only if it does not include disinformation, including what he considers to be “lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, racist tracts, and misogynist screeds.”
However, it was notable that Obama called himself “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist,” not a free speech absolutist. The point became clear later in the speech when Obama noted that the First Amendment does not restrict private businesses from censoring speech. The First Amendment is not the full measure or definition of free speech, which many consider a human right.
For years, the First Amendment distinction has been the focus of liberals who discovered a way to circumvent constitutional bans on censorship by using companies like Twitter and Facebook. Now, that successful strategy could be curtailed as shareholders join figures like Musk in objecting to corporations and media acting as a surrogate state media.
Faced with that prospect, Democrats are falling back to their final line of defense – and finally being honest about their past use of corporate surrogates. They are now calling for outright state censorship. Obama declared: “This is an opportunity, it’s a chance that we should welcome for governments to take on a big important problem and prove that democracy and innovation can coexist.”
He is talking about imposing “standards” on companies to force them to censor “lies” and “disinformation.”
As is often the case, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stripped away any niceties or nuance. Clinton called for the European Union to pass the Digital Services Act (DSA), a measure widely denounced by free speech advocates as a massive censorship measure. Clinton warned that governments need to act now because “for too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability. The EU is poised to do something about it.”
Clinton’s call for censoring disinformation was breathtakingly hypocritical. President Obama was briefed by his CIA Director John Brennan on “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” The intelligence suggested it was “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
Moreover, her call for censorship came just weeks after special counsel John Durham offered more details about the accusation that her campaign manufactured a false Russian collusion theory. One of Clinton’s former lawyers is under indictment for the effort. Clinton personally tweeted out the disinformation that is the subject of the federal prosecution. And the Federal Election Commission recently fined her campaign for hiding the funding of the Steele dossier.
Given that history, it would be easy to dismiss Clinton’s calls as almost comically self-serving. However, the 27-nation EU just did what she demanded. It gave preliminary approval to the act, which would subject companies to censorship standards at the risk of punitive financial or even criminal measures.
If implemented, it might not matter if Musk seeks to restore free speech values at Twitter. Figures like Clinton are now going to the EU to effectively force companies to continue to censor users.
Faced with liability across Europe, the companies could be forced to base their policies on the lowest common denominator for free speech.
Countries like Germany and France have spent decades criminalizing speech and imposing speech controls on their populations. That is why the premise of the DSA is so menacing.
European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager was ecstatic in declaring that it is “not a slogan anymore, that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.”
Sound familiar? Freedom is tyranny, and democracy demands speech controls.
Under the DSA, “users will be empowered to report illegal content online and online platforms will have to act quickly.” This includes speech that is not only viewed as “disinformation” but also “incitement.”
Academics have increasingly echoed the call for such censorship. Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods have called for Chinese-style censorship of the internet, stating in The Atlantic that “in the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”
A glimpse of that future was made clear by Twitter last week when the company declared that it would ban any ads disagreeing with its view of climate change. Previously, Democratic senators demanded that Twitter expand censorship to include blocking disinformation on climate change as well as an array of other areas.
The push to pass the DSA brings many U.S. politicians full circle but also exposes the true motivation of what is euphemistically called “content moderation.” Democrats turned to corporate allies to impose censorship programs that they could not impose directly under the First Amendment.
Now that Musk’s potential purchase of Twitter could blow apart that unified corporate alliance, they are seeking to use the EU to reimpose censorship obligations. Again, such restrictions would not trigger the First Amendment because they are being imposed by foreign governments.
The result would be a delicious victory for the anti-free speech movement. Musk may buy Twitter only to find himself forced to curtail free speech against the wishes of his customers and his new company.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University.