The Department of Homeland Security announced plans for a “Disinformation Governance Board,” and you are forgiven if you read the name and initially thought it was a board designed to govern the Biden administration’s disinformation.
In theory, this proposal doesn’t have to be a terrible idea, in that is allegedly designed to rebut “human smuggling organizations peddling misinformation to exploit vulnerable migrants for profit,” as well as monitoring messages from terrorist and extremist groups. Wherever you stand on illegal immigration, we should all oppose coyotes and human smugglers taking advantage of people. And since at least 2014, the U.S. has been bedeviled by the perception in some Central American countries that the United States is offering “permisos” for children who cross the border illegally — a rumor that picked up steam after President Obama announced he would not deport children who had come into the country illegally with their parents. If this new DHS group spends its time publicly declaring that there are no special, secret, or little-known loopholes for migrants who wish to enter the U.S., it will do some good.
But it is not reassuring that the person running the effort, Nina Jankowicz, the executive director of the DHS’s planned Disinformation Governance Board, doubted the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop and shared the assessments of others that it was Russian disinformation. She recently tweeted that her views on the laptop from that time are being oversimplified.
The number of migrants coming to the U.S.-Mexico border dramatically increased in early 2021 and has remained high; it sounds as if everyone watching the border expects this summer to be even worse. Considering how the administration has spent a lot of time insisting the situation at the border isn’t that bad — “it happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year” – it is hard to begrudge conservatives for feeling suspicious about a new special DHS group issuing reports denouncing “disinformation” about migration and the border. It is easy to envision the “Disinformation Governance Board” turning into just another Biden administration spin effort, insisting that the circumstances aren’t as bad as the administration’s critics are saying.
Finally, the notion of a federal agency “Disinformation Governance Board” sounds uncomfortably close to the Obama-era “Attack Watch,” which encouraged Americans to contact them and report unfair attacks on President Obama. But at least “Attack Watch” spurred this hilariously over-the-top parody.