After three short weeks, the Department of Homeland Security recently “paused” the operations of its “Disinformation Governance Board.” Its head, Nina Jankowicz, resigned virtually simultaneously from DHS, all but sealing the Board’s fate.
Good riddance.
The federal government routinely establishes boards and advisory groups of all kinds. Few people pay attention to them. But DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board was different. Over its short lifespan, the Board was the focus of significant public discourse, including countless editorials, TV news segments, and considerable congressional harrumphing.
Rightly so.
Consider the Board’s bungled rollout. The Disinformation Governance Board was revealed not in a formal press release, nor a comparable competent public announcement. Instead, the Board was revealed as an aside by Secretary Mayorkas during a House Committee hearing discussing DHS’s fiscal 2023 budget. Scant information about the Board was provided by Mayorkas at the time of its reveal, leading to concern as to what powers such an ominously-titled government entity might wield.
After nearly a week of public consternation, DHS released a “fact sheet” about the Board. While it repeatedly and strenuously cited “disinformation” as a threat against American national security, the “fact sheet” failed to state the Board’s specific authority or mission. The “fact sheet” did assert, however, that the Board would “not have any operational authority or capability.” Such a disclamation of authority might seem comforting. But it’s also the sort of proclamation one would see emanating from the Soviet KGB.
Perhaps most concerning was that the Disinformation Governance Board was not to be part of the internationally-focused State Department or Department of Defense. Instead, it was to be housed within the DHS—a domestic agency with significant funding and tens of thousands of domestic federal law enforcement officers at its disposal.
Parallels to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth were inexorable. But even in his dystopian view of a paranoid and evil government in 1984, Orwell could not conjure as haunting a name as “Disinformation Governance Board”—as if it should be mentioned in the same breath as such non-controversial institutions as the Board of Education, or a non-profit board. And in an age of increased calls for government persecution of disfavored speech by partisan activists, politicians, and even members of the media, the Orwellian parallels weren’t entirely unwarranted.
Ultimately, what is considered true today may be considered false tomorrow—and vice versa. Human beings are fallible creatures, and new information and modes of thought are continuously being discovered and developed. What may be considered “true” for some people may well be considered false by others. This is most clearly demonstrated in contemporary politics, where “disinformation” and “misinformation” have essentially become shorthand for information one particular party or viewpoint dislikes.
Medicine and science provide countless examples of the evolving nature of “truth.” For much of the past two millennia, bloodletting was standard medical practice to “cure” a sick patient. Only for the past two centuries did doctors begin to realize that the practice is not only ineffective, but often actively harmful. And it was taken as fact during the time of Aristotle that the earth, not the sun, was the center of our universe. Copernicus, Galileo, and others were considered heretics when they asserted that the opposite is true. But Copernicus and Galileo were ultimately vindicated. Indeed, the very basis of scientific thought is often expressed in the form of “theory,” rather than bulletproof laws, with the implicit understanding that human knowledge is incomplete and ever-evolving.
As British philosopher John Stuart Mill and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes both observed, it is for individual people, empowered by the right to free expression and through deliberation with their fellow citizens, to determine what is true and what is false. More specifically, it is the role of free people in an open marketplace of ideas—not fact-checkers or censors—that ought to determine what is “true” and “false” in a free society. The mere possibility of government agents determining what is true and false, and subsequently monitoring and perhaps even persecuting individuals who think and say otherwise, is beyond contempt.
The rapid unwinding of DHS’s Disinformation Board is instructive. Certainly, the Board’s bungled rollout contributed significantly to its accelerated demise. But the Board was ultimately doomed because its entire reason for being relied upon a profoundly un-American idea: that it is the role of government to determine what is true and false.
In a free and open society, the precise opposite is true: it is for the people, not government, to determine the truth. Without this foundation, all other freedoms wash away.