After Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, independent journalist Glenn Greenwald predicted that Democrats would use the force of the government to crack down on conservative reporting under the guise of combatting “national security” threats.
Now President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security is reportedly 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.”
Nina Jankowicz will now reportedly head the new DHS board as executive director. Jankowicz was one of the prominent liberals who appeared to believe that the device was Russian disinformation.
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 admits that the contents of that laptop were real.
In March 2021, Jankowicz tweeted that the intelligence community “has a high degree of confidence that the Kremlin used proxies to push influence narratives, including misleading or unsubstantiated claims about President Biden, to US media, officials, and influencers, some close to President Trump.”
“A clear nod to the alleged Hunter laptop,” she posited.
It is unclear what she was suggesting was misleading or unsubstantiated — with regard to the laptop — when she sent that tweet. Various media outlets at that time had not dug into the veracity of its contents. The media and Jankowicz, appeared to accept at face value the intelligence community’s false report that it was Russian disinformation. Twitter also infamously blocked the story from its site based on information from intelligence community members.
Consider also that on November 16, 2020, former President Barack Obama stated that a “combination of government regulations and corporate practices” was needed to control the internet.
“There is no question that Democrats are gearing up to use their new power to apply far more pressure than ever on Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. to censor any views they deem ‘threatening,’” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted at the time, The Daily Caller noted.
“Please look at what is going here,” Greenwald added. “Democrats are defining whoever opposes them not as adversaries but as national security threats, fascist terrorists, etc. — all to justify blocking them from the internet using their influence with Silicon Valley.”
Likewise, in late April of this year, Obama announced that believed that “some democratic oversight” is needed on the internet to supposedly-protect democracies from disinformation. “I believe we should use every tool at our disposal to secure our greatest gift – a government of, by, and for the people – for generations to come,” he added.
Considering that in 2020, Twitter took extra efforts to censor any mention of Hunter’s laptop story off its platform while citing national security concerns, it is not unreasonable to assume that in the future, Biden’s “disinformation governance board” could “use every tool” at the government’s disposal by working with big tech censor future stories that they incorrectly deem to be a threat to American democracy.
If the disinformation board is ever given actual teeth to enforce censorship to allegedly protect national security — or if companies willingly comply as Obama has called for to happen — Big Tech sites and our own federal government could prevent Americans from easing accurate stories that might affect how voters choose to cast their ballots.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.