The August 24 announcement of the cancellation of the press censorship department called “Disinformation Governance Board” (DGB) has to be viewed with more than grains of salt. A long-term background committee called the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which combines retired “prominent” opportunists that have served in our government, with representatives of the “business” community, has already stepped in to conduct the media management role that was rejected across the board when the Biden Administration attempted, without success, to assemble such a dictatorial apparatus under the psychologically unstable Nina Jankowicz.
In recent months, there has been extensive press coverage of the blowback against both the Jankowicz nomination (much of which ignored how close she is to the security apparatus in Ukraine) and against the discontinued DGB. As noted by Vanity Fair, for example, Republican lawmakers across the board nicknamed the DGB a “Ministry of Truth,” borrowing from George Orwell’s well known novel on dictatorship, 1984, with many Republican Congressmen jumping into the fray, including Josh Hawley ("make policing of Americans’ speech [a] top priority") and even Mitt Romney ("terrible idea"). Similarly, a whole array of left-wing and liberal voices raised attacks on Homeland Security monitoring the press, and linked it to government attacks on minorities. New York magazine editor Benjamin Hart captured the idiocy of the idea, writing, “Presenting anyone from the government as an arbiter of truth in 2022—much less defining ‘disinformation’ in a way that more than 40 percent of the population would agree with—seemed doomed from the get-go.”