The Left is Hitting Back

Elon Musk plans to make the internet into a new public square where everyone can talk. Biden's administration responds with a horrifying proposal.

New head of Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowics

This Wednesday, President Biden announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security. It says its goals are stopping misinformation aimed at migrants by human traffickers and smugglers, as well as stopping Russian misinformation regarding the war in Ukraine. This new board, however, will serve nothing except for the bureaucrats it will employ and government officials that want to silence their opponents. 

“Disinformation expert,” Nina Jankowicz, will be leading the new team. She has studied Russian disinformation tactics and harassment strategies carefully. The DHS said in their official  statement that Mrs. Jankowics and the new board will “protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.” 

The mere thought of the government becoming literal arbiters of truth should scare everyone. Our elected officials are usually not any smarter than you or I am, and often they are dumber. As Elon Musk once tweeted, free speech is essential to any functioning democracy. This is not what the left believes anymore. According to Pew Research Center, 40 percent of millennials think the government should punish people who say offensive things to minorities. (Note: A majority of people think it is morally wrong to say racist things, including me.)

If you break it down by party, only 60 percent of Democrats agree that government censorship is bad, compared to 77 percent of Republicans. Free speech is not a value that the new, progressive left shares with the rest of the country anymore. They have been censoring conservative voices for years online. Now that Musk has bought Twitter and will end those practices, they are scrambling to try and stop him by whatever means necessary. 

In a reply to Ben Shapiro, Musk said that he was being attacked “primarily by the left” after his deal to buy the social media giant was completed. He also said he was trying to please the 80 percent of the population that he deemed rational, not the extremes of either side. What he has experienced anecdotally is very consistent with the data from Pew. While both sides of the political spectrum obviously have extremes, progressivism and other far-left ideas have moved to the forefront of the Democratic party. 

This new governance board just represents the latest attempt by the Democrats to continue to silence conservative and moderate voices online. The Soviet Union, modern-day Russia, the Nazis, the Chinese Communist Party, and North Korea all have or had similar government boards. None of them have benefited the citizens of their country, and have caused death and suffering for millions of people. 

We should not be so eager to invite the state into our conversations and give them the power to regulate them. Especially when trust in our public officials is at an all-time low. Congress is more unpopular than it’s ever been, our current president does not know where he is half the time and is currently overseeing numerous foreign and domestic policy disasters, and people are turning off cable news channels more than ever before. Why on Earth would you want the people who you say are corrupt and evil to decide what is ok to say and what is not?

Biden should immediately dissolve this new board and release Jankowics from her duties. While he definitely will not do this, I think it would go a long way in restoring trust in our nation’s leadership. The best decision our government can make in any situation is to allow individuals to make their own. This is true of ideas and news too. Even the best and smartest among us will be wrong sometimes, as Jankowics was when she called the Hunter Biden laptop story “Russian misinformation.” What would happen now if she banned it from public discourse? We would never have learned that it was true and Russia had nothing to do with it. We would never know the extent of Biden’s corruption. 

The consequences of this decision to form a new board mean that we can now say our current administration does not respect freedom of speech. In 2022 and 2024, let’s make sure we find candidates who will fight against this latest push from the Biden administration and ensure that even those who we disagree with can continue to talk.