Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday noted that the Biden administration is not exactly on a “winning streak” of late.
Biden shaking hands with the invisible man and being wrangled from the media by the Easter bunny are just two episodes that illustrate why.
But amid his battles with the White House over the economy, illegal immigration, Disney’s wokeness, COVID-19 policy, and other issues, the governor fired a new rhetorical salvo toward Washington – directly at Biden’s newly revealed Disinformation Governance Board, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
“As if they don’t have enough issues to deal with,” DeSantis told reporters during an event in Levy County, “they now have an idea … they’re actually going to create in the Department of Homeland Security a Bureau of Disinformation.”
“It’s basically a Ministry of Truth,” added DeSantis, recalling Big Brother’s information gatekeepers in George Orwell’s novel “1984.”
The governor added that at first he thought it was actually a “belated April Fool’s joke.”
But, he noted, “What they want to do, they want to be able to put out false narratives without people being able to speak out and fight back. They want to be able to say things like Russia-collusion and perpetuate hoaxes and then have people like us be silenced.”
DeSantis argued that Biden wants to advocate for policies like COVID lockdowns and school closures, which are not supported by evidence, and then crackdown on people who disagree.
“They want to stifle dissent,” he added. “And so we reject this bureau in the state of Florida.”
“We believe it’s essential that individual Floridians and Americans are able to speak out against false narratives trying to be jammed down our throats by this regime,” said DeSantis.
The governor then noted that the person appointed to head the new agency, Nina Jankowicz, has been an advocate for lockdowns, who personally dismissed as Russian disinformation the now confirmed reports, first by the New York Post, about Hunter Biden’s laptop and business deals, and who supported Russian collusion “conspiracy theories.”
Fox News on Friday reported that, among other examples, Jankowicz, now labeled the “disinformation czar” by conservatives, called the Hunter Biden laptop story a “Trump campaign product,” and praised Christopher Steele, the former British spy who created the phony dossier that alleged Trump had ties to the Kremlin, for a discussion that offered “some great historical context about the evolution of disinfo.”
Jankowicz also recently criticized Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, saying recently, “ 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.”
“This is not acceptable,” DeSantis said of the news agency. “And in Florida, we’re not going to have it.”
“Let’s get real here. Let’s start dealing with issues that people actually care about.”
“They want to stifle dissent,” the governor continued. “But I can feel the public is sick of this,” as shown by Musk buying Twitter.
“There’s a lot of momentum now behind having free speech, so that people can speak the truth, particularly speaking the truth to a very decaying and discredited ruling elite in this country.”
Given “our entire principles that the country was founded on,” DeSantis added, “you cannot have a Ministry of Truth within this country. … We’re not going to let Biden get away with this one.”
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