Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s announcement yesterday that his department is establishing a “Disinformation Governance Board” has elicited concern from conservatives, given the partisan way in which its incoming executive director, Nina Jankowicz, has conducted herself.
It’s worth adding that even before this week’s news, the Department of Homeland Security has taken a questionable approach to countering purported disinformation — particularly when it comes to anti-Asian racism.
DHS, as I reported last October, hosted a virtual conference that featured a panel on “How Misinformation Fueled the Rise in Anti-AAPI Targeted Violence,” which purported to address the causes behind a rise in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
That panel, however, merely laundered progressive narratives on these issues: namely, that policies crafted to counter the Chinese Communist Party, and the language that officials use to discuss those policies, are behind the apparent uptick in crimes targeting Asian Americans.
The premise of this panel was seemingly that the arguments advanced by China hawks amount to dangerous “misinformation.”
That’s no surprise given the group that DHS partnered with for the event. The department co-hosted the forum with The Asian American Foundation, a new, gargantuan nonprofit seeded with an initial $250 million investment spearheaded by Joseph Tsai, the Alibaba co-founder who owns the Brooklyn Nets.
DHS should have steered well clear of any association with a Tsai-backed nonprofit, given the billionaire’s pro-Beijing tendencies. Tsai has previously made comments defending Beijing’s human-rights abuses in Hong Kong and elsewhere. Moreover, ESPN reported recently that Tsai had pushed for Daryl Morey’s firing amid the controversy sparked by the Houston Rockets general manager’s tweet supporting the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
That ESPN report also aptly described the central contradiction that runs through Tsai’s work in China and the U.S.:
In the United States, Tsai donates hundreds of millions of dollars to combat racism and discrimination. In China, Alibaba, under Tsai’s leadership, partners with companies blacklisted by the U.S. government for supporting a “campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-tech surveillance” through state-of-the-art racial profiling.
The other people invited to discuss anti-Asian racism on the DHS panel have played key roles in advancing the narrative that talking about the Chinese party-state’s malign influence and geopolitical ambitions leads to racist attacks. One of the organizations represented at the event, Stop AAPI Hate, has taken a hackish approach to tying conservative rhetoric and Trump-era policies on China to hate crimes.
Reminder that Congress cited hate crime stats from a group that also produces hackish reports blaming GOP politicians for "anti-Asian" policies, such as restricting Chinese state media employees in the U.S.: pic.twitter.com/GTw7EWwFgd
— Jimmy Quinn (@james_t_quinn) April 8, 2022
Another organization represented at the event, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, has worked strenuously to downplay the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party and also advance the idea that the strategies on China advanced first by the Trump administration, then, in a slightly altered form by the Biden administration, are responsible for hate crimes.
Samuel Chu, the founder of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, told me at the time that DHS failed to “do their homework,” by inviting people who “have made clear their perspective and political interested around ignoring and denying” Chinese human-rights atrocities.
DHS has already aligned itself with highly questionable partners in its efforts to counter “misinformation.” That doesn’t inspire much confidence for this new disinformation board.