As soon as Biden entered the Oval Office, the emphasis on foreign disinformation shifted to what the federal bureaucracy now terms “Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malformation,” which clearly encompasses the constitutionally protected free speech of the public. That is what the DHS is trying to censor. I’m no lawyer, but that doesn’t sound constitutional to me.
We went through this a few months ago when DHS announced its Disinformation Governance Board, set to be led by a Democratic troll, to censor domestic speech online. As this column pointed out last spring, that effort was undemocratic and unconstitutional. To be clear, there is already an agency inside the federal government to tackle foreign disinformation, and that’s the Global Engagement Center inside the State Department. There has never been any federal office to shut down domestic information. For good reason: This is America and that is illegal.
The DHS had that bumbling effort blow up in its face amid public outcry, and the board was quietly disbanded. Except that it now seems clear the Biden administration attempted to do the same thing again, in an end run, as the Intercept just exposed.
It gets worse.
[It gets much worse, as my friend John explains, especially since the media seems to be in bed with this effort. — Ed]
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