The Biden administration’s former “disinformation czar,” ousted after an apparent attempt to create an Orwellian ministry of truth within the Department of Defense, has launched a new nonprofit that declares criticism of “disinformation researchers” such as herself as a chief threat to the United States of America.
“The campaign against counter-disinformation work is the greatest threat to freedom of expression and academic integrity since the McCarthy era,” Nina Jankowicz said in a press release, pledging that her group would not “allow it to continue.”
“Once researchers are free to conduct their essential work, the American people will gain a better understanding of the nature and severity of the disinformation threats we face,” she said. “Disinformation knows no political party. Its ultimate victim is our democracy.”
The group, the American Sunlight Project, was announced as a bipartisan advocacy organization founded by Jankowicz that was “launched to expose and oppose efforts to weaponize disinformation in the United States.”
“The organization will investigate the networks and money driving disinformation and educate the public about the threats disinformation poses to their daily lives,” it says. “The first step in the group’s program will involve countering the organized campaign currently challenging the work of disinformation researchers.”
The group’s advisory board consists of Katie Harbath, a former Facebook executive, Emily Horne, a former National Security Council official, Ineke Mushovic of the gay advocacy group Movement Advancement Project, and Ben Wittes of the left-wing Brookings Institution, who was once described as the “bard of the deep state.”
Carlos Álvarez-Aranyos, the group’s co-founder, claims that “organized campaigns are preventing us from researching and understanding the threat of disinformation and organization an appropriate national response,” promising to “break the deadlocks holding us back.”
In 2022, Jankowicz was appointed by the Department of Homeland Security to lead an ill-fated body called the Disinformation Governance Board. An uproar over civil liberties ensued, including from 20 state attorneys general, with the Biden administration ultimately scrapping the idea. Jankowicz says the criticism of the board was, itself, misinformation.
Jankowicz had posted bizarre videos of herself singing about “disinformation,” referring to herself as the “Mary Poppins of disinformation.”
You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation 💁🏻♀️ https://t.co/eGV9lpctYn pic.twitter.com/WVQFA2bPmq
— Nina Jankowicz (@wiczipedia) February 17, 2021
“Misinformation” groups often purport to rate news outlets in the name of transparency, assign failing ratings to center-right news outlets, and then refuse to share their data with journalists who want to check their methodology.
In the past, they have been subsidized by the government, and served to enforce government-sanctioned lines — such as that the coronavirus did not leak out of a Chinese lab — in the media.
Anti-“misinformation” efforts often hold only the barest pretext to being anything other than partisan enforcers, saying they aim to rescue people from early warning signs that they believe could head down a path to extremes — which often amounts to a belief in center-right ideas — while actively advocating for left-wing falsities such as the New York Times’ debunked 1619 Project.
Even as they make a living criticizing others, “misinformation researchers” have played the victim as soon as people do not react to their work the way they hoped.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan called the scrapped Disinformation Governance Board an “un-American, anti-democratic, and a dangerous escalation of the Biden Administration’s embrace of government-endorsed censorship,” and said Americans should not trust Jankowicz to act “as the Biden Administration’s arbiter of truth.”
The new “sunlight” group wrote to the Committee faulting it for releasing excerpts from “misinformation experts” own testimony, saying it has made them “targets for harassment.”
The group lamented that “dozens of AI-generated images of former President Trump posing with Black voters have circulated online” and said the images “are real, present-day threats to American democracy.”