Senator Rand Paul questioned DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing about his newly-created Disinformation Governance Board.
He told him, “Here’s the problem: We can’t even agree what disinformation is. You can’t even agree that it was disinformation that the Russians fed information to the Steele dossier. If you can’t agree to that, how are we ever going to come to an agreement on what is disinformation, so you can police it on social media?”
Mayorkas responded that the board is tasked with ensuring there are “guardrails, definitions, standards” that protect civil rights, privacy, and free speech.
“I think you’ve got no idea what disinformation is,” Paul replied. “Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The US Government.
“Think of all the debates and disputes we’ve had over the last 50 years in our country. We work them out by debating them. We don’t work them out by having the government being the arbiter. I don’t want guardrails. I want you to have nothing to do with speech,” Paul said.
“You think the American people are so stupid they need you to tell them what the truth is? You can’t even admit what the truth is with the Steele dossier. I don’t trust government to figure out what the truth is,” Paul said.
During the hearing, Mayorkas claimed that he was unaware that Nina Jankowicz, the cartoonishly partisan Executive Director of the Disinformation Board, has posted all kinds of crazy videos of herself to TikTok and YouTube and has called the Hunter Biden laptop story “Russian disinformation”.
