So it turns out the Department of Homeland Security gave up on creating its “Disinformation Governance Board” after the huge public outcry in April — but kept on quietly with its self-imposed “Ministry of Truth” mission. Heads must roll.
Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the feds are still cracking down on the unhindered exchange of ideas and information and seeking to strangle free speech in the name of combating “disinformation,” meaning opinions progressives dislike or information that embarrasses them.
How? One ugly method is via a still-operative portal that lets government and law-enforcement workers directly request content takedowns on Facebook and Instagram.
Plus cozy industry-government relationships such as regular meetings with the top brass of tech firms like Twitter’s just-axed chief censor Vijaya Gadde. (This gives the lie to Twitter’s claim that “We do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions.” Elon, you’ve got a lot of cleanup to do.)
This is why the feds could come to “some folks” at Facebook, per Mark Zuckerberg’s blockbuster Joe Rogan interview, and ask it to stifle our Hunter Biden Laptop story — and get what they wanted despite our reporting being 100% correct.
Jen Easterly, who runs these efforts within Biden’s DHS, actually talks of protecting Americans’ “cognitive infrastructure.” Find that in the Constitution.
But interfering in the 2020 election was not enough for our beneficent overlords. It’s a core part of the DHS strategy for 2024. The docs reveal the agency plans to fight “inaccurate information” on a laundry list of lefty pieties. These include “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” “racial justice” and the “U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
In other words: Don’t dissent from the lefty line on any of these issues — by, presumably, criticizing Biden’s Afghanistan disaster, or arguing for the increasingly likely conclusion that COVID escaped from a Wuhan virology lab, or saying that the George Floyd protests came with out-and-out riots — or you’ll face the combined might of Big Tech and Uncle Sam.
We are America’s oldest continuously published newspaper, part of a major corporation with plenty of lawyers, yet our stories have gotten the repression treatment. What chance does the ordinary Joe have?
This is censorship, pure and simple — albeit with the lefty federal swamp using tech platforms as a cutout. And it’s a far bigger threat to democracy than the fake “disinformation” it purports to target. Which is why DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas, Easterly and every other bigwig involved in this travesty need to go.