The former head of Democrat President Joe Biden’s “Ministry of Truth” Nina Jankowicz has claimed that “disinformation” is to blame for mass shootings.
Speaking during a Thursday interview on the NPR podcast “Fresh Air,” Jankowicz claimed that the now-paused DHS Disinformation Governance Board would have prevented mass murder events.
She claims that “disinformation” inspires mass shootings, such as the recent shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.
Jankowicz suggested that her censorship board could have prevented the tragic school shooting in Uvalde earlier this week if it hadn’t been shut down.
The comments came as Jankowicz tried to clarify her role in leading the “disinfo board” in the midst of accusations that she would be a “disinformation czar.”
“I think another example that’s important, that’s also within the Department’s portfolio, especially given the events of the past few weeks, is that disinformation plays a role in radicalizing people to violence,” she said.
“You know, we’re seeing continued mass shootings here in the United States, and in many of those cases, violent extremism is begotten by things people see on the Internet.”
“So, that’s the sort of thing that we would be looking to address,” Jankowicz added.
She also hit back at conservatives who claimed that her department was the “Ministry of Truth,” saying they made up their own “scary narrative” on what the board was doing.
“The idea was to bring me in as an expert and work with the folks in the department making sure they had access to best practices, helping them put good information out there, and, frankly, making sure Americans were equipped with information that kept them safe and secure,” Jankowicz claimed.
She began to unravel the supposedly false narrative that was spread about her job.
“Addressing disinformation, more broadly, really isn’t about labeling or censoring individual facts, which is what the narrative about the board was,” she claimed.
“You know, I’ve spent a lot of my career talking about how we can’t just play what I call whack-a-troll to get out of our disinformation crisis.
“We can’t just fact-check our way out of the crisis of truth and trust that we face.
“And I would have never taken a job that was all about that,” Jankowicz assured NPR.
“It was about something much more anodyne, much more boring.”
She then stated, “but it got totally taken out of context and because, you know, the Department didn’t provide a ton of information at the beginning, folks created their own narrative, a scary narrative.”
When asked by NPR podcast host Terry Gross what that narrative was, the former executive director tore into conservatives who accused her of heading a “Ministry of Truth.”
“Well, there were a lot of folks, mostly on the conservative side of the spectrum, who said that the board was going to be a Ministry of Truth, a la George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ that we were going to adjudicate what was true and false online and that I was a czar, a disinformation czar, a minister of truth,” Jankowicz explained.
“Nothing could have been farther from the truth,” she alleged.
“Again, this was an internal working group that was meant to support and advise the operational components of DHS.
“We had no operational authority or capability.”
