Joe Biden’s short-lived Disinformation Czar is back in the spotlight, and once again it’s a decidedly cringeworthy look for an increasingly odd progressive establishment censorship movement. Nina Jankowicz testified April 1 at a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on the “Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department.” It was far from a command performance.
Jankowicz made her bizarre debut in the national consciousness in 2022 when then-President Biden appointed her to head the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board. “Jankowicz is a fellow at the Wilson Center and an author who has quite the track record of not being able to recognize actual disinformation,” Liberty Nation News’ Mark Angelides wrote at the time.
“On multiple occasions, she has shown herself willing to be swayed by partisan ideology when determining what constitutes a fact and what is ‘disinformation.’” This included saying of the Hunter Biden laptop, “we should view it as a Trump campaign product.”
Then there was that excruciatingly embarrassing video that went viral online of Jankowicz singing a revised version of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious with lyrics about “information laundering.” “You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation,” she excruciatingly exclaimed.
The sheer ridiculousness of her entire public and personal standing soon caused the Biden disinfo board to be disbanded before it ever got off the ground. Yet Jankowicz remains out there, diligently working to carve out a niche in the still-humming progressive censorship ecosphere. And she has not overcome any of the jarring flaws that scuttled her grand ambitions of three years ago.
Who Loves the Sun?
Jankowicz currently runs a disinformation organization called the American Sunlight Project. Its stated mission: “Expose deceptive information practices and the networks and money that drive them.” But in Jankowicz’s world, the sun doesn’t shine on all God’s creation. She adamantly refused to identify donors to her organization when pressed to do so by Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-WA).
“Has the American Sunlight Project received funding either directly or indirectly from George Soros or his foundations, including the Open Society Foundation?” Baugmargner astutely asked her.
“I've received a lot of threats for speaking out, and so I've decided that we are going to abide by the rules that other 501(c)(4)s in our country abide by. And we are not required to disclose our donors – small or large – because I frankly don't want them to be threatened the way that I have been,” Jankowicz said.
“So sunlight for other people, but not for your donors,” Baumgartner devastatingly replied.
“Right-Wing Censorship Lies”
As is evident from that exchange, Jankowicz very much sees herself as a political victim. Keeping with her penchant for partisan interpretations of her alleged subject of expertise, she has conveniently concluded that she was driven out of her post as Biden Disinformation Czar by ... disinformation.
“The fringes of the political spectrum immediately demonized the board as a Ministry of Truth, with me as America’s chief censor,” she wrote in a self-pitying Jan. 23 Substack post. “They falsely alleged that I was appointed to pick and choose what could stay on the Internet and what would come down. My family was doxxed and threatened, and the Biden Administration seemed neither willing nor able to stand up to industrial strength lies about our work. I resigned and the Board was axed a few months later.”
What a useful dragon that D word can be.
Jankowicz has a regularly recurring habit of closely associating the disinformation “threat” with her own personal identity. She did so again on April 1.
"The so-called Censorship Industrial Complex is a fiction that has not only had profound impacts on my life and safety but on our national security,” she testified. “More alarmingly, this fiction is itself suppressing speech and stymying critical research that protects our country.”
Those dastardly disinforming enemies of responsible internet content monitoring out to get her also pose a profound danger to the nation as a whole? Jankowicz has an enormously inflated opinion of her personal importance in the public square that makes the thought of her actually serving as an officially licensed federal nanny for anything all the more frightening.
I Was Always on My Mind
Her lengthy American Sunlight Project post summing up her appearance on Capitol Hill only adds to the impression. Jankowicz uses the words “I,” “I’ve,” “me,” or “my” a mind-numbing 34 times in a 644-word missive. That’s an average of one personal reference every 19 words, or roughly once every sentence or two.
Here’s a feel for what it reads like:
“It was the first chance I’ve been given to publicly correct the Congressional record ...
“I used my opening statement ...
“I also got to confront the conspiracy theorists ...
“And I called out the Republicans who ...
“...invaluable in helping me anticipate all the unfair, absurd falsehoods and inaccuracies the Republicans would throw at me.”
Special recognition must also be accorded to the following four sentences, which contain a whopping ten personal references:
“When I was a Fulbright Public Policy Fellow in Ukraine, I enjoyed nothing but the warmest welcomes everywhere I went. I used my rights to free speech there as I did at home: I spoke up about political developments not only in my own country, but in Ukraine. I wrote op-eds and articles. Those early writings were the seeds of my first book.”
It should only be expected that a wannabe Big Sister censorship hall monitor of all Americans’ internet activities would exhibit telltale signs of megalomania. The Achilles Heel for a tottering progressive establishment kicks up in public yet again.
The regular working citizens of this nation who abandoned the Democrats in droves last November are fully aware by now of the elitist left’s proclivity for self-absorbed narcissism. It is a supreme political shortcoming of blue partisans that they are wholly incapable of seeing this disastrously off-putting trait in themselves.
