Here is the column:
For free speech advocates, there are few images more chilling than that of Nina Jankowicz singing her now-infamous tune as “the Mary Poppins of Disinformation.”
The woman who would become known as the “Disinformation Czar” sang a cheerful TikTok parody of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to rally people to the cause of censorship.
When the press caught wind of President Biden’s plan to appoint Jankowicz as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s new “disinformation board,” Fox News said she “intended to censor Americans’ speech.”
The backlash was swift. Plans for the board were suspended, and Jankowicz resigned in 2022. She then sued Fox News for defamation.
On Monday, the case was dismissed. But Chief Judge Colm Connolly, a Delaware Democrat, didn’t just say it was legally unfounded — he demolished the claims of figures like Jankowicz that they are really not engaged in censorship.
I was one of Jankowicz’s earliest and most vocal critics and she is discussed in my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” as part of the current growing anti-free speech movement in the United States.
The Biden administration has coordinated with social media and targeted the revenue of conservative, libertarian and other sites.
These figures gleefully worked to silence others with the support of millions in public dollars for years. Yet, when exposed to criticism, they often portrayed themselves as victims with an obliging and supportive media.
They all took a page from Mary Poppins, who “taught us the most wonderful word!” In this case, the word is “disinformation” and it is certainly not connected to “censorship.” Rather you are supposed to call the barring, blacklisting and throttling of opposing views “content moderation.”
Jankowicz took that not-so-noble lie to a new level. After losing her job, she launched a campaign soliciting funds to sue those who called her a censor.
I was highly critical of these efforts as trying to use defamation as another tool to chill critics and shut down criticism.
It was a telling lawsuit, as Jankowicz simply labeled criticism of her as “defamation” — just as she labeled opposing views “disinformation.”
The objections to her work were called false and she insisted that she was really not seeking to censor people with her work.
Connolly made fast work of that effort. After holding that people are allowed to criticize Jankowicz as protected opinion, the court added:
“I agree that Jankowicz has not pleaded facts from which it could plausibly be inferred that the challenged statements regarding intended censorship by Jankowicz are not substantially true. On the contrary … censorship is commonly understood to encompass efforts to scrutinize and examine speech in order to suppress certain communications.
“The Disinformation Governance Board was formed precisely to examine citizens’ speech and, in coordination with the private sector, identify ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’ … that objective is fairly characterized as a form of censorship.”
Of course, in America’s burgeoning censorship infrastructure, the entire decision is likely to be viewed as some form of disinformation, misinformation or malinformation.
After all, even true facts can be deemed censorable by the Biden-Harris administration.
I testified previously before Congress on how Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.”
The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” — described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
Thus, referring to Jankowicz as engaged in censorship on this defunct board may be true, but could still be treated as “malinformation.”
As I discuss in my book, these setbacks are unlikely to deter the corporate, academic and government figures aligned in our current anti-free speech movement. Millions of government and private dollars are flowing to universities and organizations engaged in targeting or blacklisting individuals and groups.
It is now a growing industry unto itself.
The new censors have gone corporate and mainstream. Silencing others is now a calling, a profession. They have literally made free speech into a commodity that can be packaged and controlled for profit.
Yet Confucius once said that “the beginning of wisdom is the ability to call things by their right names.” This opinion takes a large step toward such wisdom.
If figures like Jankowicz want to continue to make money silencing others, we can at least call them for what we believe they are: censors.
Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.” (Turley appears as a legal analyst on Fox, but nothing in this column is written on behalf of Fox Corp.)