The Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security is establishing a Disinformation Governance Board and placing Nina Jankowicz at its head, DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed earlier this week.
Jankowicz, who will serve as executive director of the new agency, is a fellow at the Wilson Center, where she studies “the intersection of democracy and technology in Central and Eastern Europe,” and the author of two books: How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict and How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back.
In her first book, published in 2020, Jankowicz, who has also served as an adviser to the Ukrainian government, “journeys into the campaigns the Russian operatives run, and shows how we can better understand the motivations behind these attacks and how to beat them.” At stake in this fight, she submits, are “the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself.”
In her second book, published this year, Jankowicz concludes that “all women in politics, journalism and academia now face untold levels of harassment and abuse in online spaces,” and purports to have written “one of the definitive reports on this troubling phenomenon.”
“Drawing on rigorous research into the treatment of Kamala Harris — the first woman vice-president — and other political and public figures, Nina also uses her own experiences to provide a step-by-step plan for dealing with harassment, abuse, doxing and disinformation in online spaces,” reads the Amazon description of How to Be a Woman.
In her introduction to the book, Jankowicz imagines a situation, among other scenarios, in which a stranger on the subway mentions to her that he went to a bachelor party in Ukraine, before offering, “It’s a shame about the civil war, but this is probably the first time a young, pretty thing like you is hearing about it, I guess.”
In the ensuing pages, Jankowicz suggests that, if the aforementioned scenario played out in real life rather than online, the police might have been called and arrests might have been made.
Both Jankowicz’s record and online behavior have come under scrutiny since the announcement of her new post, as she’s made plain both her disbelief in the since-confirmed Hunter Biden laptop story and her affection for Christopher Steele, the author of the discredited dossier on former president Donald Trump that helped launch the Mueller probe into his 2016 campaign.
In a series of 2020 tweets, Jankowicz sought to discredit the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop, promoting an article that she said cast “doubt on the provenance of the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story” and arguing: “The emails don’t need to be altered to be part of an influence campaign. Voters deserve that context, not a [fairy] tale about a laptop repair shop.” She also referenced the “laptop from hell” during one of the 2020 presidential debates and appeared to endorse an open letter, written by former intelligence officials, making the case that the contents of the laptop were part of a Russian disinformation campaign, despite the fact that the signatories acknowledge they had no evidence to support the claim.
Jankowicz told the Associated Press that the story should have been considered “a Trump campaign product.”
She also tweeted, about a podcast featuring the dossier’s author: “listened to this last night – Chris Steele (yes THAT Chris Steele) provides some great historical context about the evolution of disinfo. Worth a listen.”
On Thursday, the new member of the Biden administration defended her record, arguing that at least one of her tweets was taken out of context.
For those who believe this tweet is a key to all my views, it is simply a direct quote from both candidates during the final presidential debate. If you look at my timeline, you will see I was livetweeting that evening. https://t.co/nI7ZgBtTLC https://t.co/4DjBl9bzt0
— Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) April 27, 2022
In one video, Jankowicz takes on the role of “Moaning Myrtle,” a ghost featured in the Harry Potter series, and sings a sexualized song about the titular character:
Went looking for some prefects in the bathroom one day
But instead I found Harry and so I said “hey!”
I helped him solve the mystery of the egg
But I’d like to solve the mystery between his legs!
I hope that Harry drowns tomorrow in the lake
So that our honeymoon we can take
You know that ghosts have working ’natomies
What’s better than that – we don’t get STDs!Jankowicz has also integrated her day job into her singing hobby.
Asked about Jankowicz on Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki professed not to “have any information about this individual.”
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson unloaded on Joe Biden’s plan to create a taxpayer-funded thought police that so happens will be deployed ahead of the 2022 midterms. The timing isn’t lost on anyone. Elon Musk buys Twitter—and now the Department of Homeland Security announced this “disinformation” hit squad that will combat narrative Democrats don’t like. We’re not Oceania. We’re not a banana republic. Liberals are afraid they can’t control the flow of information anymore. The days of Twitter censoring conservatives are over. A simple Google search often torpedoes most woke talking points with simple facts and figures that have existed for years. With the Left losing control of a major social media platform and Joe Biden’s increasing the frequency of his dementia moments, clamping down on the access is key. There is no good news associated with this administration. None. So, deploy DHS. Carlson was having none of it (via Real Clear Politics):
When Elon Musk first announced that he was buying Twitter, it was pretty obvious the Democratic Party would soon become unhinged, not just angry or annoyed in the way you’re very used to, but instead legitimately terrified and hysterical. Imagine how you’d feel if an armed intruder broke into your home at 3 in the morning. You couldn’t exactly know where things were going, but you’d be dead certain that everything was at stake. That’s how Democrats feel right now, because, in fact, everything is at stake.
Joe Biden cannot continue to control this country if you have free access to information. It’s that simple. Biden certainly is not improving your life. He’s not even trying to improve your life. So, the best he can do is lie to you and demand that you believe it, but to do that, he needs to make certain that nobody else can talk because if you were to hear the truth, you might not obey. How is Biden going to pull that off? It’s not easy. Well, one option would be to get men with guns to tell you to shut up. Most Americans probably haven’t thought of that because this isn’t Africa or Eastern Europe. This is America and we don’t do things like that here and never have. More precisely, we haven’t until now, but now Joe Biden is president and everything is different.
So today, to herald the coming of the new Soviet America, the administration announced its own Ministry of Truth. This will be called the Disinformation Governance Board. Laugh if you want, but just to show you, they’re not kidding around here. This board is not part of the State Department or any other agency focused on foreign threats from abroad. No, the Disinformation Governance Board is part of the Department of Homeland Security. DHS is a law enforcement agency designed to police the United States and that, by the way, has a famously large stockpile of ammunition. So, it’s not a joke at all. Here’s DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
[…]
So Mayorkas told us that disinformation is a threat to homeland security. Now he’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security, so presumably he would know since assessing threats to Homeland Security is his job, but what he didn’t tell us is how he’s defining disinformation.
So here we have this new and terrifying thing that the Biden administration is so concerned about that it’s created a new agency to fight it, but Mayorkas never said or even hinted as to what it might be. So, the man in charge of the disinformation governing board never defined disinformation.
[…]
…one of our biggest law enforcement agencies has men with guns around the country doing so many things to stop disinformation and false narratives. Those aren’t even lies. They’re just deviations from the approved script. Mayorkas told us again that men with guns planned to “identify individuals who could be descending into violence.” Could be descending. Not people who’ve committed violence or even been accused of any crime at all. DHS is instead using law enforcement powers to identify and punish people who think the wrong things.
We used to joke that the United States didn’t need the SS because the IRS existed. We’ve entered a new and disturbing stage here because it’s no longer a joke. The test run for using these institutions began under Obama. The Department of Justice went after ex-Fox News reporter James Rosen for reporting a story on North Korea that contained classified information. The leak hunt named Rosen as a possible co-conspirator for simply doing his job. The Obama DOJ also obtained phone records of a dozen or so AP reporters. Then, there was the whole Russian collusion hoax. The IRS targeted conservative non-profits. And the FBI doctoring paperwork to obtain FISA spy warrants on Trump campaign officials. They also spied on Trump’s campaign as well. The Left’s long march towards weaponizing the state against its own people can be traced to the man who won the 2008 election. And now, in 2022, they’re going to deputize the DHS to go after conservatives for not thinking the right way. We all know this committee is going to go off the rails. We all know it will be staffed by people who are certifiably insane.
All you need to know about this latest Biden outrage is that Democrats would be screaming bloody murder from the rooftops had the Trump administration come up with this fascist idea.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 