Mere days after eccentric billionaire Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter sent the political censors into a tizzy, the Biden administration debuted a “Disinformation Governance Board” to crack down on online speech the White House doesn’t like. The proposed agency, which would fall under the Department of Homeland Security, already merits the comparisons many have drawn to George Orwell’s “ministry of truth,” but Joe Biden’s appointment of Nina Jankowicz to be the board’s executive director makes the hackery even more obvious.
Here are six of the most dystopian things Jankowicz — whom DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas ridiculously called “absolutely” politically neutral — has ever said or done.
1. When She Helped Choke the Hunter Biden Bombshell
Shortly after The New York Post broke inflammatory news of damning emails and photos on a laptop belonging to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter, Jankowicz aided the coordinated effort by legacy media and Big Tech to quash the story right before the election.
The Associated Press (among many other outlets) pooh-poohed the explosive news, citing Jankowicz’s input to claim “disinformation experts say there are multiple red flags that raise doubts about their authenticity, including questions about whether the laptop actually belongs to Hunter Biden.”
“We should view it as a Trump campaign product,” Jankowicz told the AP.
More than a year later, even corporate outlets including both The New York Times and The Washington Post quietly, grudgingly admitted the laptop is indeed real. In other words, the woman tapped to lead Biden’s disinformation Gestapo has herself engaged in textbook disinformation.
2. Her Creepy Mary Poppins Disinformation Song
In February 2021, Jankowicz posted a very weird video on TikTok singing about so-called disinformation to the tune of an iconic “Mary Poppins” song.
“Information laundering is really quite ferocious. It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious, by saying them in Congress or a mainstream outlet, so disinformation’s origins are slightly less atrocious,” she sang in the bizarre jingle.
3. That Time She Called for Censoring Memes
“The biggest challenge in identifying this content both for our team and for platforms is what we’ve dubbed ‘malign creativity’ — the coded language, memes, and context-based content which allow harmful posts to avoid detection,” Jankowicz tweeted in a thread about content she thinks needs more censoring.
A related report she co-authored went so far as to claim that “malign creativity,” including “iterative, context-based visual and textual memes,” is “the greatest obstacle to detecting and enforcing against online gendered abuse and disinformation.”
4. When She Suggested Using Cops to Police Online Speech
Discussing “online abuse” toward women in an April interview, Jankowicz insisted, “We need to at least upskill police officers and local law enforcement to deal with these things and perhaps start some collaboration.”
“In the UK, they’re looking at making the content that they call ‘awful, but lawful’ illegal,” she continued. “I think we need to think about that as well, because again, going back to the comparative situation, if I were walking down the street and there were a bunch of men yelling these slurs at me, the police would intervene, I could get a restraining order against these people who are coming back again and again to say these things to me. Online, that just doesn’t exist yet. So I’m hopeful for that architecture to come into play.”
5. When She Sang Praises for The Russia Disinformation Hoax’s Christopher Steele
In August 2020, Jankowicz tweeted about what a great authority Christopher Steele was on disinformation.
“Listened to this last night- Chris Steele (yes THAT Chris Steele) provides some great historical context about the evolution of disinfo. Worth a listen,” she tweeted about a podcast appearance.
Steele is the infamous ex-MI6 agent who was hired in 2016 by FusionGPS (which was hired by Perkins Coie, the law firm representing Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign) to manufacture a collection of sensational lies about then-candidate Donald Trump, which became known as the Steele dossier. The dossier was then peddled to the FBI and various media outlets, and serves as the basis for years of false slanders about Trump via the Russia collusion hoax.
Jankowicz’s praise of Steele is just one more instance of her support for actual disinformation when it fits her agenda. She wants to police Twitter memes, but is totally cool with lies fabricated by a Democrat presidential candidate’s campaign to take down her opponent and choke his presidency.
6. When She Called Insulting Kamala Harris a Threat to Democracy
“I wrote about the online gendered abuse I experienced, and the attacks we tracked against
@KamalaHarris, @AOC, @IlhanMN, & more,” Jankowicz wrote on Twitter, referring to an article she wrote for Wired. “Platforms and governments aren’t doing enough. It’s time to act. Our national security and democracy are at stake.”
It’s certainly unpleasant when cowardly people choose to tear down others for no good reason from behind a computer screen. But you don’t have to defend any actually malicious comments about Democrats like Kamala Harris to remember that the same media types whining now have hurled countless and inexcusable slander at Republican women like Sarah Palin without batting an eye. Double standard aside, online insults are hardly the biggest national security threat to America today.
By no means is Jankowicz’s disturbing history alone what makes the “disinformation board” so foreboding. It’s not unlikely Biden will yank her name from the ring once her radicalism becomes more widely known, or in an attempt to tamp down criticism of the new unit.
But with or without her, the proposed agency is just as dystopian as it sounds — and any Americans who value the First Amendment should speak out against it while they still can.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
