Maybe it was the patronising Mary Poppins parody, or the contempt in her writing off of the Hunter Biden laptop story as a product of the Trump campaign, either way, Nina Jankowicz, Biden’s pick for chief thought-police minister, is gone.
The head commissar of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ quit, just three weeks after announcing she was stepping into the role.
Dustin Volz, of the Wall Street Journal, published a statement from Jankowicz on Twitter, confirming that the Orwellian version of Mary Poppins had “decided to leave DHS to return to her work in the public sphere.”
Jankowicz said her reason for leaving was due to the disinformation department’s uncertain future, following a “pause” on the “board’s work.”
The Washington Post projected blame onto conservatives for the “pause”, ‘inferring’ that lies about the department took it down.
WaPo also defended the need for the DGB, arguing the position of the DHS, who said that the department was designed to protect freedom of speech, not enforce censorship.
CNN explained the DHS had paused the department because of a review of the board. Quoting a DHS spokesperson, CNN added,
“The Board has been grossly and intentionally mischaracterized: it was never about censorship or policing speech in any manner. It was designed to ensure we fulfil our mission to protect the homeland while protecting core Constitutional rights. However, false attacks have become a significant distraction from the Department’s vitally important work to combat disinformation that threatens the safety and security of the American people.”
Forbes declared the DGB dead, writing, “It was wrong to begin with.”
Contributor, Jill Goldenziel explained, “The name itself suggests illegal government activity that the American people would never tolerate, regardless of their partisan affiliation. Legally, it is rarely permissible for the U.S. government to be the arbiter of truth.”
Goldenziel added, “The name suggested that it would do just that—despite DHS officials’ protests that it was designed to protect free speech.”
Minus the legacy media newspeak, it’s likely the DHS has been unable to justify the Disinformation Board’s existence, give clarity to its purpose, and answer the concerns of conservatives, who rightly see the department as Leftists weaponization the DHS against their political opponents.
As Caldron Pool has reported in the past, those concerns are well-founded.
In 2016, US intelligence agencies spied on Donald Trump.
In 2021, Tucker Carlson revealed that he was being spied on by the NSA.
Note also revelations last year about the Obama-Biden administration using the NSA to spy on allies in Europe.
Add onto this Joe Biden’s four pillars against Domestic Terrorism, which gives woke leftists the power to transform ordinary mum and dad Americans into “domestic terrorists,” for simply disagreeing with their kids being taught by Drag Queens, or being taught from the alphabet mafias, Queer and Critical Race theory.
With Disinformation Governance Board, more properly termed, the Department of Disinformation, the war on terror could be used to terrorise American citizens, with woke utopians pushing ordinary Americans into the crosshairs of an even bigger government dominated by “progressives.”
There were always going to be problems with the Disinformation Governance Department. Chief among these problems is the Left’s rejection of truth in its absolute forms.
For many on the left, to quote Whoopsie Goldberg’s character, Guinan in Star Trek Next Gen – “truth is in the eyes of the beholder.” So, why and how can “progressives” claim, declare, or police anything as misinformation, or disinformation?
How can a line be drawn between truth and falsehood, if there is nothing to distinguish between falsehood and the truth? If truth is purely subjective, morality fluid, then there is no concrete basis on which leftists can declare anything to be either misinformation or disinformation.
Ergo, their only basis for measuring what is or isn’t either of those two things comes down to whether a person or idea conforms to their prevailing groupthink, party line, and/or approved political narrative.
The enemy, then, is that which does not conform to any of these three.
Thus spoke the late, great Roger Scruton, who said, in the West, we rely on wisdom for stability, “In communist countries, stability of ideas and social purpose is achieved by formal adherence to an officially proclaimed [political] doctrine. Deviation is stigmatized as ‘incorrect’.” (Scruton, citing John Galbraith, 2015. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands)
It stands to reason, that those who cannot define truth, cannot guard truth from misinformation and disinformation.
Simply because the consequence of rejecting objective truths is the inevitable embrace of subjective falsehoods.
So declared Scruton in his seminal work, Modern Philosophy (1994): “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t!”
This isn’t far removed from ex-Communist, Albert Camus, who took French Communists to task for their sugar-coated justifications of the brutal Soviet aggression in Hungary:
“We have a right to think that truth with a capital letter is relative. But facts are facts. And whoever says that the sky is blue when it is grey is prostituting words and preparing the way for tyranny.” (Socialism of the Gallows)
