This last week found a guy with billions of dollars at his fingertips seeking to control the message. No, not Elon Musk — President Joe Biden.
Just as the billionaire entrepreneur moved to take over Twitter, Biden created the Orwellian-named “Disinformation Governance Board,” which (trust us) is going to ferret out misinformation and feed you all the yummy Soylent Green you need. Musk summed up America’s sentiment in a single word: “Discomforting.”
Meanwhile, top U.S. immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci said the U.S. is through the “pandemic phase,” only to be refuted by none other than top immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said, yeah, no. And Biden stumbled into the headlines by telling teachers that children are “yours when they’re in the classroom.” (Will we ever get rid of those pesky parents?!) Oh, Joe.
Here’s your latest installment of Washington Wire.
Biden’s Orwellian Maneuver
President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is working to create a “Disinformation Governance Board” to counter what they determine to be false information relating to national security.
On Wednesday, Politico reported that DHS is creating the board “to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.”
While Russia has certainly been guilty of putting out disinformation around the globe, American intelligence officials have also labeled factual information — like Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” — as Russian propaganda as well. Even the mainstream media now admit that the contents of that laptop were real.
Nina Jankowicz will now reportedly head the new DHS board as executive director. Jankowicz was one of the prominent liberals who appears to believe that the laptop was Russian disinformation.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) responded, saying that the move was “Orwellian.”
“Leave it to Democrats to think free speech is the problem and more government is the solution,” McCarthy said in an exclusive statement to The Daily Wire. “The notion that the same party that spent four years promoting the Russia collusion hoax, suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, and equated parents to domestic terrorists believes it has the credibility to tell Americans what is true is laughable.”
“And it is telling that the person who would run Biden’s Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board is a political activist who has a long history of falling for and spreading disinformation,” McCarthy continued.
“It is easy to imagine this person abusing the term ‘disinformation’ to suppress facts and spin away inconvenient truths about the administration’s many failures, including their failures to secure the border. The idea that the federal government should control speech sounds uncomfortably close to the Thought Police. Biden must immediately abandon his plan to create a modern-day Ministry of Truth,” he said.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) called for the immediate dissolution of the board in a scathing letter directed to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Hawley tweeted screenshots of the letter, dated April 28, on Thursday morning with the following caption: “The Administration that activated the FBI against parents at school board meetings now has created a government Disinformation Board to monitor all Americans’ speech. It’s a disgrace. Joe Biden & Secretary Mayorkas: dissolve this monstrosity immediately.”
And then, billionaire and newly-minted social media mogul Elon Musk weighed in.
“The government is creating a misinformation governance board,” comedian and conservative host Steven Crowder tweeted Thursday. “Who else did something like that? Oh I remember, the Nazi’s. And there’s some data showing some interesting things going on post-[Elon Musk]’s Twitter takeover!”
“Discomforting,” Musk directly replied to the tweet.
Fauci’s Doublespeak
Top U.S. immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci declared last Tuesday that the “pandemic phase” of COVID-19 is over in the U.S.
But that was refuted on Wednesday — by top U.S. immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci.
On Tuesday, Fauci sat down with Judy Woodruff of “PBS NewsHour,” who asked Fauci: “Here we are. It’s the end of April. It’s the spring of 2022. How close are we to the end of the pandemic?”
“We are certainly, right now, in this country out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci replied. “Namely, we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.”
“So, if you’re saying, are we out of the pandemic phase in this country, we are,” he added.
But on Wednesday, Fauci walked it all back.
“We are in a different moment of the pandemic,” Fauci told the Associated Press on Wednesday. While the U.S. has “decelerated and transitioned into more of a controlled phase” of the virus, he added “by no means does that mean the pandemic is over.”
Despite Fauci’s original assertion that the pandemic is over, CNN reported that he has backed out of plans to attend the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Association dinner — which he was scheduled to attend as a guest of ABC News.
“He recently decided to abandon those plans and inform ABC that he would no longer attend because of an individual assessment of his own personal risk,” CNN reported.
In one other COVID-19 development, it turns out most of us have already had it — whether we know it or not.
A new study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that a majority of Americans, both adults and children, have been infected with COVID-19.
Nearly 60% of adults and about 75% of children have coronavirus antibodies, indicating that they had been infected with COVID-19 and its variants, according to data collected from a study of blood samples across the country. That’s a huge rise from December 2021, when just 34% of Americans had COVID-19 antibodies.
The Ministry of (Un)truth
Biden on Wednesday accused conservatives of making teachers a “target of the culture wars” as he honored an Ohio educator who teaches high schoolers about race, gender, and oppression.
“Teaching is one of the hardest jobs in this country,” Biden said. “Today, there are too many politicians trying to score political points trying to ban books—even math books. I mean, did you ever think… that when you’d be teaching you’d be worrying about book burnings and banning books? All because it doesn’t fit somebody’s political agenda.”
“American teachers have dedicated their lives to teaching our children and lifting them up,” he said. “We ought to stop making them a target of the culture wars. That’s where this is going.”
Then Biden went further, repeatedly telling the teachers gathered at the White House that school children are “like yours when they’re in the classroom.”
“They’re not someone else’s children, they’re our children,” he said. “And they are the kite strings that literally lift our national ambitions aloft… Think about it. If you got to do one thing to make sure the nation succeeded in the next two generations, what would you do? I would say, literally, have the best-educated public in the world.”
Biden emphasized that “we have an obligation to help them… reach their potential.”
“You have heard me say it many times about our children, but it is true, they’re all our children. And the reason you are the teachers of the year is because you recognize that,” he said. “They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours when they’re in the classroom.”