A government disinformation board led by a person fearful of free-speech ‘absolutists’ is a step toward tyranny.
A government disinformation board led by a person fearful of free-speech ‘absolutists’ is a step toward tyranny.
F or years, liberals have justified online censorship with the argument that the First Amendment does not apply to private companies. We’ve been told that Twitter, Facebook, and Google are free to silence conservatives, enact speech codes, and separate “truth” from “falsehood” because they are not “the new town square.”
Now, Elon Musk’s pledge to allow more speech on Twitter has those same liberals up in arms. It’s a display of blatant hypocrisy, but the Left is undeterred. If corporations won’t do their censoring for them, perhaps the government will. Under the guise of homeland security, the Biden administration is setting up a new “Disinformation Governance Board” with the potential to do just that.
To maintain their grip on power, authoritarians must control the spread of thoughts and ideas. Discrediting speech that threatens the ruling class is one way to establish that control — and what better way to do that than labeling it disinformation?
It’s why the Chinese Communist Party created an online platform to “refute rumors” and overrule dissent with “real” news (i.e. propaganda from state-owned and party-controlled media). It’s why the Cuban regime criminalized protesters as terrorists guilty of circulating “misinformation and cyber lies.” And it’s why Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega did the same in 2020.
For President Biden to take America down the same path as these dictatorships is alarming.
Administration officials say their disinformation board is necessary to protect American democracy. However, federal censorship is no guarantee against real disinformation.
Washington bureaucrats’ track record at discerning fact from fiction is dismal, and Biden’s new censorship czar, Nina Jankowicz, is no exception. In 2020, she dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “Trump campaign product.” Now, President Biden’s son is under official investigation — even the New York Times acknowledges the story was true. Doesn’t this make Jankowicz guilty of spreading disinformation herself? She has yet to issue a full retraction of her claim, however, raising concerns that she is even more partisan than the legacy media.
Similarly, in the early days of the pandemic, liberals railed against those who suggested that Covid may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory. Social-media censors, left-wing reporters, and the government itself — in the person of Dr. Anthony Fauci — called the lab-leak hypothesis a racist conspiracy theory and banned the topic from public discussion. Today, our intelligence community considers it to be as likely as not that the lab-leak hypothesis is correct.
Biden’s new government censorship board will only make things worse, not least because it will set up Marxist radicals in the administration as the final arbiters of what is true.
Marxism is known as an economic ideology, but at its core, it is about achieving total social control. Like their parallels in Beijing, Havana, and Managua, American Marxists want to use the government to repress dissent and impose their doctrines on the entire population. This new censorship bureau gives them a powerful tool to do it.
I have lived my entire life around people who fled from countries ruled by Marxist dictators. They came to America because it is a free country, as their homelands once were. Theirs is a cautionary tale, and we are fooling ourselves if we think that can’t change.
A government disinformation board led by a person who “shudder[s]” at the thought of “free speech . . . absolutists” is a step toward tyranny. It must be stopped. It has to be defunded. And I will do everything I can to ensure that this assault on our freedom does not stand.