And I have a bridge in New York to sell you.<\/p>\n
Relax: Mayorkas Says His New Thought Police Won\u2019t Monitor U.S. Citizens<\/a><\/p>\n DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made the rounds of the talking head shows on Sunday to do some damage control and address concerns that the Biden administration\u2019s new Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security signifies an all-out war against the freedom of speech. Those concerns were only exacerbated by the revelation that the chief of Old Joe\u2019s Thought Police, Nina Jankowicz, is an enthusiastic fascist who is so excited about censorship that she\u00a0sings<\/a>\u00a0musical comedy numbers about it in an affected English accent. Mayorkas, however, is telling us now that there is really nothing, nothing whatsoever, to worry about. But his soothing claims show some signs of being yet more of that disinformation he claims he wants to fight.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve already gotten disinformation about the Disinformation Governance Board. Jen Psaki\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0Friday that it wasn\u2019t the sainted President Dementia at all, but the hated Trump, who set up the Board. There doesn\u2019t appear to be a shred of truth to this, as even Mayorkas had announced the Board as \u201cnew,\u201d and on Sunday, CNN\u2019s Dana Bash\u00a0asked<\/a>\u00a0Mayorkas, \u201cWould you be okay if Donald Trump were president, if he created this Disinformation Governance Board or if it is in place in 2024, that he\u2019s in charge of such a thing?\u201d Mayorkas didn\u2019t echo Psaki and answer that Trump had actually created the Board. Instead, he insisted \u201cthat we\u2019re safeguarding the right of free speech, that we\u2019re safeguarding civil liberties.\u201d Sure they are.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Despite working for CNN, Bash actually acted like a real journalist, pursuing Mayorkas about some of the principal problems with the Board. \u201cIt\u2019s still not clear to me,\u201d she said, \u201chow this governance board will act and what will it do.\u201d Good point. It\u2019s not clear to anyone. And all Mayorkas could offer in answering this all-important question was windy generalities: \u201cSo what it does is it works to ensure that the way in which we address threats, the connectivity between threats and acts of violence, are addressed without infringing on free speech, protecting civil rights and civil liberties, the right of privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n Sure. It was reminiscent of how politicians always promise that the government will magically do all manner of wonderful things for us while simultaneously lowering our taxes. Mayorkas is a similar kind of magician: he\u2019ll stamp out alleged disinformation while protecting the freedom of speech. A regular Houdini.<\/p>\n Bash then asked Mayorkas: \u201cWill American citizens be monitored?\u201d His answer was unequivocal and reassuring: \u201cNo. The board does not have any operational authority or capability. What it will do is gather together best practices in addressing the threat of disinformation from foreign state adversaries from the cartels and disseminate those best practices to the operators that have been executing in addressing this threat for years.\u201d<\/p>\n Okay, so it\u2019s all about \u201cdisinformation\u201d from \u201cforeign state adversaries\u201d and \u201cthe cartels,\u201d not from Americans at all. Yet when Politico\u00a0revealed<\/a>\u00a0the existence of the Board last Wednesday, it said that the Board would \u201ccoordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.\u201d Mayorkas then\u00a0added<\/a>\u00a0on Thursday that the Board was intended to \u201cmore effectively combat this threat not only to election security, but to our homeland security.\u201d Jen Psaki then\u00a0mused<\/a>\u00a0about some of the areas the Disinfo Board might tackle: \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Both Mayorkas and Psaki mentioned elections. The Leftist establishment has shrilly insisted that any skepticism about the one-hundred-percent honesty and integrity of the 2020 presidential election was \u201cdisinformation.\u201d But apparently the Disinformation Governance Board won\u2019t be dealing with that at all, but only with supposed disinformation about elections in foreign countries. And likewise, while there has been immense domestic skepticism about the administration\u2019s COVID claims (remember Biden\u2019s winter of severe illness and death?), the jolly old Board will only swoop in if Vladimir Putin or a drug cartel leader starts saying that maybe the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan. Do I have this right, Mr. Mayorkas?<\/p>\n This is apparently what Mayorkas would have us believe. Fox\u2019s Bret Baier said to him, \u201cAmericans are generally wary of anything that suggests censorship.\u201d Mayorkas answered that his Board was just the remedy for that: \u201cThat is exactly why we set up this working group to make sure that our work to address a real threat to the homeland, the threat posed by Russian disinformation, the threat posed by Chinese disinformation, by Iranian disinformation, the work that we do does not infringe on people\u2019s right of free speech. That\u2019s why this working group was set up. And we will do a better job of communicating about that.\u201d Yet from what he and others have said so far, it sounds as if Mayorkas\u2019 claim that \u201cthe work that we do does not infringe on people\u2019s right of free speech\u201d will end up looking as fake as the claim that Trump colluded with Russia. Remember, you were a purveyor of \u201cdisinformation\u201d if you doubted that one, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And I have a bridge in New York to sell you. Relax: Mayorkas Says His New Thought Police Won\u2019t Monitor U.S. Citizens DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made the rounds of the talking head shows on Sunday to do some damage control and address concerns that the Biden administration\u2019s new Disinformation Governance Board within the Department … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,9,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crap-for-brains","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-goobermint"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80663,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80662\/revisions\/80663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}