Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration has launched a new federal government department tasked with tackling so-called “disinformation.”
The “Foreign Malign Influence Center” (FMIC) is located at the Office of the Director of US National Intelligence (ODNI).
Biden’s first attempt at censoring the American people was the First Amendment-violating “Disinformation Governance Board,” part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
However, following a widespread backlash and staff-related controversies, the board was quickly disbanded.
The “Disinformation Governance Board,” led by radical leftist Nina Jankowicz, was unofficially dubbed the “Ministry of Truth” in reference to the government’s censorship and propaganda department in George Orwell’s dystopian classic novel “1984.”
Despite the backlash, it was a fairly safe bet that the anti-free speech initiative would soon rear its head again.
The newly emerged FMIC looks a lot like a thinly veiled “Disinformation Governance Board 2.”
The FMIC also has a similar declarative focus on foreign threats, which the Biden admin claims takes the form of “disinformation” and “misinformation” online.
Such an agenda is then easy to transition, as a smokescreen, to turning the authorities’ sights onto “domestic dissenters.”
Critics fear that would mean more censorship, which would, in effect, fly under the radar.
This deceptive tactic could easily use foreign threats simply as an excuse to influence politics at home.
Speaking of interference – the FMIC could also “duplicate” other US efforts, such as that of a State Department’s unit that has taken it upon itself to suppress what’s seen as “populism” in other countries.
The FMIC warns that the threat from abroad is constant and “dynamic” and, therefore, “informing efforts to counter it requires constant attention, a whole-of-government approach, support from the private sector, and engagement from the public.”
However, the “soothing” mention of foreign threats is not the only thing the FMIC will be dealing with – there’s also “protection of US public opinion.”
And this, opponents may suspect, might be a euphemism for “policing domestic narratives.”
The existence of the Center seems to have been presented to the public in a rather low-key fashion.
The creation of the department was revealed last Thursday when it came up during an address by ODNI chief Avril Haines, a full 45 minutes into the speech, during a hearing organized by the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Matt Taibbi, who pored over Twitter’s internal documents to become one of those behind the explosive Twitter Files, doesn’t look at this kind of initiative very kindly.
In fact, he seems to pretty much consider it a ruse whose real goal is to “slowly adjust aim to domestic targets.”
But first – what Taibbi calls “the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age” must “raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from Congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance.”
READ MORE: Biden’s Former ‘Disinformation Chief’ Nina Jankowicz Sues Fox News for ‘Defamation’
