Blue State Blues: I Can’t Wait Until Conservatives Run the ‘Disinformation Governance Board’

This week, the Biden administration launched a “Disinformation Governance Board” in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, led by a hack who promoted the Russia collusion conspiracy theory and denied that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real.

It’s like something out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty–Four, and reflects a) the left’s conceit that it has a monopoly on truth; and b) the left’s desire to criminalize dissent, debate, and political opposition, so that it can hold onto power forever.

Notably, there is not one prominent Democrat who has come out against the idea — though liberal constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley noted that Democrats seem to have embraced old-fashioned state-run censorship, now that Elon Musk is buying Twitter and threatening the left’s corporate censorship regime. (MSNBC’s Ari Melber gave the game away when he fretted that Musk could use Twitter to “ban one party’s candidate,” as if Twitter had not already done so to Donald Trump.)

We are beyond the point where most Democrats can be convinced to abandon a bad idea by pointing to abstract principles like the First Amendment — which was, after all, crafted by white males, some of whom owned slaves, and therefore null.

The only time Democrats seem to understand that what they are doing is wrong is when Republicans do something like it to them, the way Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is punishing Disney. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but they do make a deterrent.

With that in mind, I would like to propose the following priorities for the Disinformation Governance Board, once it is run by solid conservatives after the 2024 election, assuming the voting system is not rigged to preclude that outcome entirely:

1. Climate Alarmism. Go after the Al Gores and the Bill Nyes of the world, plus the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders types, who predict the imminent doom of the planet and thus cause us to make disastrous choices on energy policy.

2. Gender Denialism. Transgender individuals have every right to express themselves in any way they choose, but the idea that biological sex is irrelevant and can be ignored is unscientific and should not be subsidized by government in any way.
3. Late-stage abortion. Leaving aside, for the moment, the complicated debate about when life begins, an unborn child or fetus is certainly viable in the third trimester of pregnancy, which makes late-term abortion a dangerous and deadly untruth.

4. The Bidens. The vast cover-up of Hunter Biden’s laptop and Joe Biden’s shady business dealings must be exposed, and the fifty or so former national security officials who falsely called the laptop Russian misinformation in 2020 must be punished.

5. Russia collusion hoax. Not everyone who spread the false conspiracy theory linking Trump to Russia broke the law. But none of them should ever hold public office — least of all National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, one of the key hoaxers.

That is just the beginning. The Disinformation Governance Board could also investigate institutions like Harvard, which this week promoted the false claim that the university was shaped by slavery. More Harvard men (117) died fighting for the Union in the Civil War than the number of slaves (70) that were employed on or around the campus in the century-and-a-half before slavery was abolished in Massachusetts. Teaching students otherwise undermines an iconic American institution.
Normally, I am a free speech absolutist, but like many recent Democratic Party innovations, such as the right of the January 6 Committee to exclude members of the opposition and to subpoena anything they want under threat of criminal prosecution, I can certainly see the advantages of a Ministry of Truth, when in the right hands.

Of course, the entire purpose of Biden’s new agency is to foreclose the possibility that Republicans can ever fight and win another election. But if they do, watch out.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.