The DHS Disinformation Board and the Attack on Individual Sovereignty

In his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed a startling, heretofore secret, initiative within his agency to police the online speech of American citizens. Mayorkas, whose infamous abandonment of border security has rendered his official title an oxymoron, divulged (conveniently on the heels of Elon Musk’s planned liberation of Twitter from censorship and in time for deployment during the November 2022 mid-term elections) that DHS had initiated a “Disinformation Governance Board” to be chaired by left wing activist Nina Jankowicz. Jankowicz favors government regulation to rid conservative voices from media and endorses as fact two major falsehoods: that the Hunter Biden laptop story is fake and that the Trump-Russian collusion story is real. She envisions a dystopian world where government speech police block content deemed “disinformation,” a term she and DHS leave undefined to preserve unbridled censorship discretion. In short, she relishes the role of tyrant.

In his testimony, Mayorkas said that the Disinformation Governance Board would work with a network of local authorities to “identify individuals who very well could be descending into violence by reason of ideologies of hate, false narratives, or other disinformation and misinformation propagated on social media and other platforms.” In other words, the Board would be America’s new online speech police, complementing the role formerly played by Big Tech in league with governing Democrats, where politically selected bureaucrats would declare opinions with which they disagree forbidden.

Conveniently, the Biden Administration’s new speech police operate within an agency that surveilles domestic terrorists and has autonomous law enforcement capabilities. They may thus insist on compliance with their edicts with force at the ready. This Orwellian Ministry of Truth will target American citizens’ online speech critical of the administration, the very hallmark of every dystopian totalitarian regime and most notably Xi Jinping’s China.

This attack on American citizens’ free speech is not new for the Biden Administration. Attorney General Merrick Garland--at the urging of the National School Boards Association and the White House—established a Department of Justice initiative with the aid of the FBI and in coordination with local authorities to surveille, target, and prosecute parents who spoke critically of school boards.

Instances of federal speech policing have arisen repeatedly in American history, testing our commitment to core free speech principles protected by the First Amendment. During the administration of John Adams, the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts authorized federal authorities to prosecute seditious libel (statements critical of the government, members of Congress, and the President), provoking a backlash and the 1798 Virginia and 1799 Kentucky Resolutions anonymously written by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson (the latter who served as Adam’s Vice President). In those resolutions Madison and Jefferson reaffirmed the role of the First Amendment to disarm the government of power over speech and press, insisting that the federal government has no power to establish an official speech orthodoxy by banning dissent. Indeed, in no small measure, Adams support for the Alien and Sedition Acts contributed to his defeat in the election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson.

Fortunately for us all, the First Amendment protects our pre-political right to freedom of speech. Moreover, there is ample Supreme Court precedent firmly condemning instances when government establishes an official orthodoxy over speech in place of our wide open and robust marketplace of ideas and information. At root, the Biden Administration’s creation of a Disinformation Governance Board raises anew a question of sovereignty resolved at the birth of our Republic. Our Constitution rests on the proposition that people are sovereign and the state is their servant and, more particularly, that the people have the freedom to decide for themselves the relative worth of speech offerings and that government has no power to limit their access to those offerings.

The core principle of the First Amendment that no official may impose an orthodoxy over speech was articulated brilliantly seventy-nine years ago by Justice Robert H. Jackson inWest Virginia State Board of Education et al. v. Barnette et al., 319 U.S. 624 (1943). Jackson wrote: “The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.” The freedoms of speech and press are among those very subjects. In the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, we find the foundation of individual sovereignty: that governments derive “their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.” Indeed, Mayorkas and Jankowicz attack that foundation, meaning to deprive us of information indispensable to the exercise of informed choice, of the right to receive information and determine for ourselves its relative worth, of the right to be sovereign. As Jackson put it: “We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.”

In the DHS Disinformation Governance Board we find that haughty arrogance, characteristic of tyrants, whereby officials are presumed to know better than we do what is in our own best interests and assume it their right to lord over the idea and information market and deprive us of access to speech they find offensive. In America, that super editorial role is strictly forbidden by the First Amendment. The people are sovereign over matters of speech. We get to decide what to believe based on information freely shared in an open idea and information market, a market outside and independent of government.

Justice Jackson put it this way in profound words that today carry as much legal weight as when they were written: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

It is the intent of the Biden Administration to strip Americans of their speech rights and rob them of their sovereignty. The DHS Disinformation Governance Board is a profoundly vile example of that intention. We must demand that the Board be disbanded and that the Biden Administration be denied the power to regulate the content of speech in the idea and information marketplace. It is the duty of members of Congress, who have each sworn an oath to support the Constitution, to act immediately to achieve that end; indeed, the failure to so act is an indictment of those who, through inaction, become complicit in the deprivation of the peoples’ liberties. And finally, Alejandro Mayorkas richly deserves impeachment. His latest act against Americans free speech rights rests atop a horrendous record of immigration law violations that have resulted in terrorist entry into the United States and in prolific drug trafficking, sex trafficking, gang violence, and crime all across America, due entirely to his unlawful abdication of the DHS Secretary’s legal duty to secure America’s borders.

Well! These people who speak in opposition of the Disinformation Board must not realize that a former President of the US recently stated that US citizens have too much free speech? It certainly would be nice to peek into the recent communications of that wide-eared ex-potus! Might be some very enlightening words there, maybe even enough for a conviction? This is NOT slojoe’s doing as he would have problems tying his own shoes.

Rhetorical Question....

SO let’s say I address Bidon as a corrupt POS and run afoul of Jankowitz et/al. What exactly are they going to do? Imprison me? Cut my internet connection, cut off my cell phone service?

I don’t see how this dippy broad, would have any ability to curtail anything that I say anywhere, online or in public.

The Biden administration came up with a terrible name for this new agency. The “Disinformation Governance Board” sounds like something straight out of Orwell, and raises the antennae of many of our otherwise dimwitted fellow citizens. They should have come up with a more benign, flowery name that would have evoked nothing more than a shoulder shrug for most people.

The choice of Jankowitz looks like a set-up. That has to be a joke. They can’t be serious. They can’t be that arrogant to believe they would get away with this.
Makes me want to pay attention to what else is going on because I’d call this a smoke screen.

SHE'S what you get when the government convinces you that you must look to them to define your sovereignty.

If you ask the government to define your sovereignty, then you already lost it!!

Put you on the do not fly list, audit your taxes, and othewise use the power of government to keep you preoccupied.

At some point, more than are now will be charged and jailed for sedition and insurrection.

China has the same personal protections the US does, written into its constitution. The relationship between government and population is goverened by action, not by words.

-- If you ask the government to define your sovereignty, then you already lost it!! --

Yeah, but it's still worth knowing what your adversary the government thinks.

The choice of Jankowitz was specific.

1) it’s jewish...so any criticism is deflected by “you’re an anti-semite”

2) it’s a vagina... you’re a misogynist.

she’s probably a dyke, so we have the trifecta of immunity.

Its generally disinformation that the government has the right to do censorship. The First Amendment protects free speech. So any Biden official who tries to say they can infringe free speech is spreading disinformation. The officials have their Oaths to uphold and the Constitution is clear.

“Put you on the do not fly list, audit your taxes, and otherwise use the power of government to keep you preoccupied.”

And the big one that WILL hurt... Asset seizure.

11 posted on 04/30/2022 6:29:18 AM PDT by Openurmind (The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children. ~ D. Bonhoeffer)

For anyone who doesn’t quite understand the purpose of this ‘new department’ & it’s power-—Please read “ATLAS SHRUGGED”.

Nothing directly, unconstitutional as hades.

Their plan is public ridicule while doxxing the people who “wrong think” (These people live in an intellectual bubble) From there you will be indirectly targeted via employment status, supplier status if you own a business, expelled from universities/training programs, etc...basically ostracized financially and from bettering yourself.

Might work in States like New York, Massachusetts, California, etc...emphasis on the might. Like i said, these idiots think 90% of the population are rooting for them and cheering on their work to "liberate" the test of the 10%.

The MATRIARCHY is a moldering corpse that no matter how many times you drive a stake through its heart, it keeps rising from the dead

14 posted on 04/30/2022 6:50:39 AM PDT by atc23 (The Matriarchal Society we embrace has led to masks and mandates and the cult of "safety")

....It is a true Dark Age, where wisdom is confused with information,.... truth is problematized as spin,.... faith is ridiculed as superstition,.... language is tightly controlled,.... and reason is shouted down by weaponized emotion.

The choice of Jankowitz looks like a set-up. That has to be a joke.

She's probably more competent and intelligent than Kamala Harris (that's a very low bar, I know...). Still, no one's laughing except sardonically.

18 posted on 04/30/2022 9:53:53 AM PDT by Max in Utah (A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.)

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