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The Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) is a working group within the Department of Homeland Security with a stated function to “disseminate guidance to DHS agencies on combating misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation that threatens the security of the homeland.” However, only three weeks after its creation, the task force — led by the controversial Nina Jankowicz — was paused. Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten explains why the DGB was such a poor idea to begin with:
Recently-released documents obtained from a whistleblower by Senators Chuck Grassley and Josh Hawley demonstrate the danger posed by the “paused” but by no means abolished DGB, and the regime that created it. The documents show the intent of the Deep State to deputize Big Tech on its behalf as America’s unofficial domestic speech police, violating the First Amendment by proxy.
The documents also illustrate the duplicity of those who claimed the DGB was another government task force with little power or ambition, raising questions about what else our national security apparatus is doing in pursuit of its War on Wrongthink.
When the American people first found out about the DGB and grew outraged over the fact the Biden administration had created a Ministry of Truth, and put a serial spewer of disinformation in charge of it, it strained to suggest the DGB would combat disinformation threatening the homeland from foreign actors—notwithstanding the DGB was housed in the domestic security apparatus.
It claimed to target rumors being spread by traffickers supposedly lying about America’s open borders, or Russian disinformation propagated on the heels of the coming midterm elections. But the planning documents for the DGB tell an entirely different story.
In a memo to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas titled “Organizing DHS Efforts to Counter Disinformation,” DHS officials wrote that disinformation threatens homeland security, beginning with two types of it: “Conspiracy theories about the validity and security of elections” and “Disinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks.” The drafters said they were concerned that “domestic violent extremists” would amplify phony narratives based on this disinformation to drive “racially or ethnically motivated and anti-government/anti-authority violence.”
