(Headline USA) Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., blasted the Biden administration this week after it announced it is launching a new “Disinformation Governance Board” to crack down on “misinformation.”
“I confess, I at first thought this announcement was satire,” Hawley wrote in a letter to Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.
“Surely, no American administration would ever use the power of government to sit in judgment on the First Amendment speech of its own citizens.”
“Sadly, I was mistaken. Rather than protecting our border or the American homeland, you have chosen to make policing Americans’ speech your priority,” he continued. “This new board is most certainly unconstitutional and should be dissolved immediately.”
Mayorkas revealed on Wednesday that his agency had recently created a “Disinformation Governance Board” that would focus on the spread of “misinformation” online that targets minority communities. A few hours later, Politico reported that leftist activist Nina Jankowicz had been appointed to serve as the board’s executive director.
Hawley said Jankowicz’s intentions are obvious.
“Jankowicz has claimed that the ‘free speech vs. censorship’ framing is a false dichotomy,” he said.
“And when Elon Musk announced his acquisition of Twitter, she said, ‘I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities… which are already shouldering… disproportionate amounts of this abuse.’”
The Biden Administration’s new anti-speech czar is apparently no fan of the @elonmusk Twitter acquisition. This is the person Joe Biden just put in charge of policing Americans’ speech. Using the power of the government pic.twitter.com/7lkvhfnVey
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) April 27, 2022
The inevitable goal of this board “will be to marshal the power of the federal government to censor conservative and dissenting speech.”
“This is dangerous and un-American,” he wrote. “The board should be immediately dissolved.”
