In 2009, a man named Daryl Johnson worked for the Department of Homeland Security. His job was monitoring the potential of white-supremacist violence in the country, chatter that intensified in response to the election of a Black president. Johnson put together a report that was supposed to be sent exclusively to law-enforcement operations around the country. Unfortunately, it leaked, and Republican politicians went predictably bananas, largely because the report referred to “right-wing extremism.” They called for DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to rescind the report. Napolitano caved and, as we have seen, the years subsequent to her surrender have demonstrated that white-supremacist conservative violence has completely petered out.
We had something similar happen this week. On April 27, DHS announced that it was creating something called the Disinformation Governance Board which, according to the DHS announcement, would “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security.”
