The Former Disinformation Governance Board Chief Wants Your Help
BY ROBERT SPENCER
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Nina Jankowicz is back, and she’s mad. Jankowicz, you’ll no doubt recall, was the chief of the Biden regime’s ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board, which was ominously part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and was widely reported to be an Orwellian exercise in policing the speech of Americans that strayed from the line of the establishment Left. But Jankowicz insists that the Disinformation Governance Board was nothing like the way it was portrayed. She claims that Fox News’ negative coverage of it spread lies about her, endangered her life as she was inundated with death threats, and even interfered with her ability to bond with her newborn son. (Yeah, she is really throwing the kitchen sink into this one.) Jankowicz has published a video, “Help Nina Fight Fox,” asking for donations to help her sue the beast that ruined her life.
The slickly produced video starts with Jankowicz, looking sober and professional (in a sharp departure from her notorious Mary Poppins-based musical tribute to fighting “disinformation”), saying, “I’m asking for your financial support of a lawsuit I want to bring against Fox News for their malicious, reckless lies against me.” Then the earnest music starts, as Jankowicz continues to talk over a series of videos and still images. She had a “lifelong dream” of entering public service, and finally realized it when she became head of the Disinformation Governance Board.
Jankowicz asserts that this entity, complete with its sinister name, was entirely benign. “My role was to make sure different entities across DHS were coordinated, to bring the latest research to bear in the department, and to help the department ensure that its policies about its existing counter disinformation work were grounded in American values: privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. That’s all the board was. It didn’t have the ability or the authority to act on its own.”
But then, enter the black-hatted hatemongers of Fox, spreading “baseless claims that the board was an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” Jankowicz insists that “the board had nothing to do with arbitrating or restricting speech.” Nonetheless, she charges on her GoFundMe page that the fiends at Fox “made over 500 scaremongering statements about my role, my views, and my personal life over the next nine months—an entirely disproportionate disinformation and smear campaign against a person who simply took a job to serve her country within her area of expertise.” The video gets more melodramatic as it goes on, featuring nightmarish images of dozens of Fox broadcasts all allegedly maligning Jankowicz, causing her to be inundated with death threats and upsetting her to the extent that she has not been able to establish the proper relationship with her newborn.
That’s a shame, if true, but its truth can’t be taken for granted. Leftists love to claim that speech that is critical of them has gotten them death threats. The obvious unspoken corollary is that this speech should be silenced. This never works, however, for patriots who get death threats (I’ve gotten hundreds myself) from Leftists and their allies; no one ever calls for the curtailing of the criticism of foes of the Left, no matter how much they’re threatened. And Jankowicz doesn’t have a stellar reputation for honesty. The Daily Caller noted Thursday that she has been caught “spreading disinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop, the debunked Steele Dossier, and former Trump advisor Carter Page.”
What’s more, Jankowicz’s claim that the Disinformation Governance Board was never going to be about “arbitrating or restricting speech” contradicts early statements from Biden regime officials. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on April 28, 2022, “We have just established a mis-,and disinformation governance board in the Department of Homeland Security to more effectively combat this threat not only to election security but to our homeland security.” And when Jen Psaki defended the board, she added, “We know there has been a range of [disinformation] out there about a range of topics, I mean, including COVID for example, and also elections and eligibility.” Psaki also said that “the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities.” How could this alleged disinformation have been fought without restricting speech?
Related: At Last We’re Getting Some (Chilling) Hints About What the Disinformation Chief Wants to Do
Jankowicz herself abetted the impression that the board would be restricting speech with her statements in a video that surfaced in May 2022, in which she spoke about how Twitter should allow “trustworthy” people to add “context” to other people’s tweets. As Elon Musk moved to take over Twitter, Jankowicz said that she “shuddered” at the thought of “free speech absolutists” taking over more social media platforms.
So Jankowicz should pardon Fox and her other critics for not mistaking her for one of those free-speech absolutists. The best outcome would be if this trial became the linchpin for the release of solid information about why the Biden regime decided to set up Jankowicz’s board, and exactly how they intended it to operate. In the meantime, we can just be glad that Jankowicz is whining on a YouTube video and not heading it up.