The headline at Fox was blunt:

Mayorkas testifies DHS is creating ‘Disinformation Governance Board’

The news comes two days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk secured a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter

The story began:

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security is creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” to combat misinformation ahead of the 2022 midterms.

Say what? The Biden administration is now setting up a decidedly Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” to “combat misinformation”?

Yes.

Aside from suggesting that the first place to begin combatting misinformation would be with the Biden administration itself (for example, the claims that Joe had no knowledge of Hunter’s business ventures, inflation is transitory and caused by Putin, the border swarm is “seasonal,” the Afghanistan exit was a “success,” etc.), it is time to call out this government-run attack on free speech exactly for what it is: out-and-out fascism.

And I don’t throw that term around casually.

Over here at a site called libertarianism.org is this decidedly relevant headline from history:

Mussolini attempted to remake the Italian mind, taking a personal interest in applying the twin tools of censorship and propaganda.

Here’s what it details about Italy’s fascist-in-chief and his dealings with the Italian media, which in his day consisted of newspapers and radio:

The unique totalitarian project of Italian Fascism reposed on a careful balance that required both popular confidence and a level of fear. The ambitions of this project reached not only into government, law, and economics, but also into the minds of Italy’s people, which the Fascists believed they could reshape and recommit to the nation‐state….

No such idea of adversarial journalism, of subjecting the actions of state to investigation and scrutiny, was to infect the minds of the nation’s newspaper writers and editors. Rather Mussolini contended that “Fascism requires militant journalism,” the country’s newspapers presenting themselves “as a solid bloc,” committed to “the Cause” and obscuring or outrightly burying any fact or story antithetical to it. Even more than post-factum censorship, Mussolini favored this kind of proactive steering of the press, hardly subtle and clearly defining his expectations as both military and civilian leader of the people. In Fascist Italy, social and political pressures—and the resultant self‐ policing by the media—were at least as important as actual legal proscriptions, probably much more important….

Just as Mussolini’s example had inspired Hitler and the young National Socialist movement, the Nazis’ Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, established in 1933, seems to have motivated Mussolini to adopt a newly invigorated approach to censorship…. In a sense, then, the Fascists were successful in creating, to borrow Orwell’s phrase, a new “climate of thought.”

Plainly put, what the Biden administration is about with the creation of the DHS “Disinformation Governance Board” is nothing less than the American version of what in 1933 so inspired Mussolini and his fascists — the Nazi “Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.”

So how will this jewel of Orwellian thought control deal with, say, Fox News? Or Newsmax? Or One America News? Or talk radio? Or, dare I say, right here with The American Spectator?

One can only begin to imagine the sight of well-paid government bureaucrats putting out command after command because Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, or Laura Ingraham has had an hour of prime time to talk the latest government-declared “disinformation.”

I cannot wait to see the fireworks when one of these Orwellian robots attempts to “correct” Mark Levin on either his radio or television show because they charge him with spreading “disinformation.” To borrow from Clint Eastwood: Go ahead — make my day.

And I definitely want a great seat to see the results when they accuse The American Spectator of spreading “disinformation.”

Exactly as that history of Mussolini illustrates, what Mayorkas is about is what Mussolini was about: “applying the twin tools of censorship and propaganda.”

This is exactly at the heart of the uproar, furies, and tears from lefty Twitter employees who are enraged at Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. The New York Post headlined this:

Twitter workers freaking out over Elon Musk in internal Slack messages

And indeed they were. Various Twitterites were saying things like this:

“Physically cringy watching Elon talk about free speech.” 

“We’re all going through the five stages of grief in cycles and everyone’s nerves are frazzled.”

“A M*sk-owned Twitter is one of the greatest threats to the 2022 and 2024 elections. We are f*cked if this happens.”

There was more like this — oh so much more. But right there is the self-reveal of what happened to Twitter. It moved from being the national “town hall” to being the lefty censor of all things — and people — conservative. It hated free speech. As does the Biden administration.

Blocking that October 2020 New York Post blockbuster investigation of Hunter Biden, banning President Trump, suspending Tucker Carlson, the Babylon Bee, and oh so many more conservatives known and unknown? All of this was par for the course at Twitter.

Now, with a Musk-owned Twitter, the government has decided, à la Mussolini, to take on the task of censoring conservatives and free speech themselves. The bureaucrats who spied on the 2016 Trump campaign and went out of their way to disrupt his administration from the inside are now going to be in charge of deciding what is “disinformation.”

Make no mistake, what this “Disinformation Governance Board” is about is exactly what Mussolini was about. Using Orwell’s phrase, the United States government is now formally about creating a new “climate of thought” with “the twin tools of censorship and propaganda.”

To say the least, this seriously dangerous board should be dismantled — post-haste.

Task No. 1 when the Red Wave swamps Washington in November.