Comments on the News: 

This week Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that a Disinformation Governance Board had recently been created to combat online disinformation. 

Whether you lean left or right, this should alarm you if you care about freedom. Let’s start by addressing the timing of this announcement. I do not believe in coincidences so the timing of this happening immediately following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter makes the timing suspicious. There is no denying that Twitter was censoring expression prior to Musk’s purchase, and we do not know yet what Twitter will be like under Musk, but there is hope that expression will once again be free. 

When it comes to expression, there are only two choices; it is either free or it is not. It is a fallacy to suggest that freedom can be governed; it cannot. Governance is control according to a prescribed standard. What Twitter was doing prior to the Musk purchase was not freedom of expression but the control of information. If you want to control the distribution of information I do not have a fundamental problem with that if you present it as the control of information. 

Words do mean something and a case in point is the word “disinformation;” it is a poor choice if you ask me (I know, no one has asked me.). Defined, it is “false information which is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization over a rival power or the media.” Semantics are important and the semantics of this word produce a few questions. Is there such a thing as false information in an age relativism? Who gets to decide intent? Can we truly discern intent? Propaganda, according to the semantics of the word disinformation, is that which is issued by the government over a rival power or the media, which presents a dilemma … is the government’s oversight of disinformation—as defined, an oversight of its own intention to misled in regard to information—possible? 

But again, I refer back to the idea of governing freedom. If you are governing freedom it is not freedom. You can protect freedom; you can protect those who are free; you can even protects the rights of freedom, but as soon as you start to govern freedom and decide what is freedom and what is not, there is no longer freedom. 

Failing to see that this Disinformation Governance Board(DGB) is a power grab means your ideology is currently in power, and that is fine. All is fair in love and war, but let’s avoid addressing the issue as one of freedom. It is clearly not an issue of freedom or even an issue of ideology; the issue is power and the desire for more of it. 

I would encourage us to read our history because we are on a very dangerous path and if we stay on it the future of our country, which includes its diversity, is at risk because diversity is the first thing to disappear when one ideology controls all others. Here is what we know about history if we read it. Those in power currently will not remain in power forever; they never do. History and culture operate like a pendulum; the more you push the pendulum one way the more it will swing back the other way, and it will always swing back the other way … eventually. The goal is for there to be a balance in life, but the more power one side accumulates the more that side wants things according to its ideology. This equates to pushing that pendulum, and again, just like a true pendulum, the more you push it one way the more it swings hard the other way, and it will eventually swing hard that way one day.

There is no way to come to a logical conclusion that the purpose of the DGB is to protect freedom of expression. It is clearly to protect the interest of an ideology so let’s avoid insulting the intelligence of the populace by presenting it as a means of protecting freedom of expression. It may be many things but it is definitely not that.