Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vowed Friday to fight the Biden administration’s new Orwellian disinformation bureau, insisting there can be no “Ministry of Truth” in the United States.
“They want to be able to put out false narratives without people being able to speak up and fight back,” DeSantis said. “But we’re not going to let Biden get away with it, so we’re going to fight.”
DeSantis is the latest conservative to criticize the Department of Homeland Security’s new “Disinformation Governance Board,” which has come under intense scrutiny since it was first revealed Wednesday.
The hashtag “Ministry of Truth” trended on Twitter Thursday as critics compared the new board to George Orwell’s novel “1984.”
DHS said the board was created to attack alleged disinformation tied to key vulnerabilities for the Biden administration, including the border crisis and Russian disinformation threats.
But critics, including DeSantis, have argued that it’s just an attempt to stifle free speech.
“You can’t have a Ministry of Truth in this country,” DeSantis said.
“We believe it is essential that Floridians and individual Americans are able to speak out against the false narratives that this regime is trying to swallow for us.”
He added: “They won’t be able to say things like Russian collusion… They want to be able to advocate for COVID lockdowns. They want to be able to advocate for school closures…but then when you speak up, they want to stifle dissent.”
DeSantis, who is considered a possible future Republican presidential candidate, went on to say that he initially thought the creation of the new panel was a “late April Fools’ joke.”
The governor also took aim at the board’s executive director, Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who has come under fire for repeatedly casting doubt on The Post’s reporting of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“We know that they actually appointed someone to run it, that she herself has been an advocate for COVID lockdowns, that she herself has published disinformation about the Hunter Biden tapes, that she supported Russian collusion, conspiracy theories,” DeSantis said.
“So this is not acceptable.”
Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson had previously criticized Jankowicz as a “beacon of disinformation” given his rejection of the laptop from hell in a series of tweets and interviews in 2020.
Reference-nypost.com