The Threat Within, Part 2: Wisconsin’s Censorship-Industrial Complex
What most Wisconsinites don’t know—but should—is that Wisconsin has had its own censorship industrial complex that works in league and in tandem with the federal matrix of oppression.
Evers Wanted His Own “disinformation” State Bureau in 2023 …
Last week at a U.S. House judiciary committee hearing in Washington, in answers to questions by Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisconsin-7) about the federal government’s censorship-industrial complex, independent journalist Matt Taibbi spoke about the institutional nature of it, how embedded it is in government, in nonprofits, and in progressive organizations across the country, and how those institutions have turned the weapons of suppression and subversion against the American people.
As another of the panelists that day mentioned, most Americans aren’t even aware their freedoms are being taken away. People usually don’t until it’s too late.
What most Wisconsinites don’t know—but should—is that Wisconsin has had its own censorship industrial complex that works in league and in tandem with the federal matrix of oppression. And what most Wisconsin residents don’t know—and must—is that this censorship state regime is ongoing in the Evers’ administration and among its allies, and it is more than willing to take up the slack in censoring people as the federal censorship machine is shut down.
In fact, that’s the point. Originally designed to work as state subsidiaries of the federal censorship complex, some of the efforts are now being undertaken to work in their absence, to carry on the mission, as it were.
Exhibit A is former President Joe Biden’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board (DGB). Biden unveiled it to great fanfare in April 2022, naming “disinformation expert”—though there is no such thing—Nina Jankowicz as its director. The mission sounded noble enough: to protect national security by disseminating guidance to federal agencies on combating misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation that threatened the security of the homeland, particularly from foreign adversaries.
Translated, that meant her job was to censor any information that got in her and the government’s way because, obviously, she was an expert at knowing disinformation when she saw it.
It didn’t take long for people to discover that Jankowicz, a long-time U.S. security state hack, was a fount of disinformation herself. For example, she labeled all Republicans as liars by definition (“Republicans and other disinformers”); shecalled the Hunter Biden laptop story a fairy tale; she declared the Covid-19 lab leak theory to be a pro-Trump talking point, too. She even got into trouble with the left-wing The Nation, who called her out for working with a group called StopFake, which was funded by the U.S. government and George Soros and which was a principal in whitewashing on behalf of the U.S. government the reputations of several Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups.
Here’s how independent journalist Glenn Greenwald put it on X:
After seeing and hearing all of this from Nina Jankowicz, I would literally trust someone randomly chosen from the phone book (ask your parents what those are) to run this DHS Disinformation Board over her. She’s a caricature of a partisan fanatic and authoritarian extremist.
Well, after this kind of backlash, the administration hit pause, and Jankowicz resigned. After four months, in August 2022, the administration dismantled the outfit and promised to behave itself.
Still, many worried that, while the formal structure of the DGB—which sounds eerily close to KGB—was disbanded, the Department of Homeland Security would continue to carry out its functions.
Americans For Prosperity Foundation is one organization that has been worried about this, especially because so many of the defunct DGB’s documents are still under wraps or heavily redacted and because former DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas always insisted its work was “necessary.”
Here’s how Kevin Schmidt, the director of investigations for Americans for Prosperity Foundation, put it last May:
If DHS and Jankowicz were telling the truth about the board’s necessity, then DHS offices across the country continue to do disinformation work without any guardrails to protect free speech.
Indeed, many skeptics predicted the mission of the board would be camouflaged and distributed to other parts of the CIA and the government, as well as housed internally at DHS, as Schmidt warned. What sensible person wouldn’t think that, really?
But what most people didn’t consider was that part of the plan was to pass down DGB functions to state bureaucracies as part of a vertically integrated apparatus. Especially in Democratic states, the concern was that the federal DGB would lean in on state bureaucracies to help do their dirty work for them.
Enter Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, from the same folksy wing of the Democratic Party as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, just older and not as energetic. Let’s call them the folk woke of progressive politics—always to be counted on to follow the party line and not quite smart enough to know any better, or to quite get it right.
But darn it, folks—as Evers might say—the governor should have been smart enough to know better than to do what he did the very next year: The Democratic governor proposed his own statewide Disinformation Governance Board as part of the 2023-25 state budget. Only he gave it a different name.