Winning: DHS Dismantles ‘Ministry of Truth’ Advisory Boards

I for one have not yet grown tired of all the winning. And I suspect our readers have a second wind for more, too. Especially when this win means we all get to stay in the game rather than have the federal government shut us down. 

The win this time came at the Department of Homeland Security, which is days away from getting newly appointed Secretary Kristi Noem installed. Word has reached DHS that the new sheriff is in town anyway, and this one plans to put an end to government censorship via politicized “fact checks.” The acting DHS head has put an end to the last of the Ministry of Truth functions pushed by the Biden administration:

Donald Trump’s acting Homeland Security chief has ordered the dismantling of all the department’s advisory boards to guard against “misuse of resources” after the Biden administration’s disastrous attempt to create a Big Brother-style “Disinformation Governance Board,” The Post has learned.

In a memo dispatched Monday evening, Benjamine Huffman mandated the “termination of all current memberships on advisory committees with DHS, effective immediately.”

“Future committee activities will be focused solely on advancing our critical mission to protect the homeland and support DHS’s strategic priorities,” the memo went on.

Nina Jankowicz hardest hit! And don’t think for a moment that the New York Post won’t take its victory lap over the erstwhile Official Censor of the Joe Biden Administration:

Adding fuel to the firestorm as the fact that board’s director, Nina Jankowicz, had repeatedly cast doubt on The Post’s reporting about former first son Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Majorkas quietly discontinued the board weeks after it was announced, leaving Jankowicz to find other employment as the head of a nonprofit that as of April 2024 was insisting that Russia had “interfered in our democracy” during the 2016 election.

In fact, some may be surprised to hear that these advisory boards still operated at all. Alejandro Mayorkas assured Congress that the Biden administration had ended its efforts to police speech through DHS, although Mark Zuckerberg would strenuously dispute that now. It raises this question: What would Biden — or whoever was behind the Weekend At Bernie’s act at the White House — have done with those boards in a second term?

Luke Rosiak provided the answer last April. The self-professed ‘Mary Poppins of Disinformation’ had set up her own censorship shop and was looking for ways to work with the federal government to continue violating the First Amendment and suppressing dissent and debate:

The Biden administration’s former “disinformation czar,” ousted after an apparent attempt to create an Orwellian ministry of truth within the Department of Defense, has launched a new nonprofit that declares criticism of “disinformation researchers” such as herself as a chief threat to the United States of America.

“The campaign against counter-disinformation work is the greatest threat to freedom of expression and academic integrity since the McCarthy era,” Nina Jankowicz said in a press release, pledging that her group would not “allow it to continue.”

“Once researchers are free to conduct their essential work, the American people will gain a better understanding of the nature and severity of the disinformation threats we face,” she said. “Disinformation knows no political party. Its ultimate victim is our democracy.”

We haven’t heard much from Jankowicz since then. One has to wonder whether her Democrat allies told her to pipe down, given the fact that Mayorkas hadn’t yet actually ended the earlier effort — and of course Joe “Sharp as a Tack” Biden was handling the “cheap fakes” PR effort at the White House. Too bad, though; that disinformation really did threaten democracy, although Jankowicz would no doubt have pushed hard to shut down any sense that Biden was cognitively suspect and far too gone to handle another four months on his own, let alone four years.

Of course, DHS wasn’t the only locus for the Joe Biden Big Brother-Big Tech Industrial Censorship Complex. Some of those efforts came out of the State Department, notably the Global Engagement Center, which Antony Blinken just tried to hide by dispersing it into the bureaucracy. Hopefully, Marco Rubio will act soon to fire not only the GEC’s Winston Smiths but also the State Department officers that tried playing hide-and-go-seek with the censorship efforts. Health and Human Services also played a big role in leveraging government power to force social media platforms to suppress debate and dissent, and Robert Kennedy Jr will have to deal with that too — assuming he wins confirmation. 

This is still a good start, and worth celebrating. But we can’t feel safe until every government agency repudiates its Big Brother boards and projects. And thanks to our VIP members, we can feel safe even while others like Jankowicz attempt to intimidate advertisers into de-platforming speech they don’t like.