White House defends Mayorkas' new disinformation board
The panel on 'The Five' sounds off on DHS chief's defense of new bureaucracy
President Biden's new "Disinformation Governance Board" has materialized because the leftist establishment doesn't like their speech to have "competition," Greg Gutfeld said Monday on "The Five."
The board, set to be headed by Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, has sparked concerns it will infringe on Constitutionally-protected civil liberties.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, however, defended the board, telling "Fox News Sunday" he could have done a better job in communicating what it does.
On "The Five", Gutfeld said the board has more to do with competition than speech itself.
DISINFO BOARD BETTER SUITED FOR DICTATORSHIPS: GABBARD
Alejandro N. Mayorkas (AP)
"They don't like their freedom of speech to have any competition. They think, I believe, that they see speech as a zero-sum game -- if Joey has more speech, then that means somebody at MSNBC has less speech. That's the way they see it. That's why it's wrong," he said.
Gutfeld added that the controversy also shows establishment media understands that they are in decline, and that other free speech could be a threat to their ecosystem:
"I think the legacy media … know that it just it's not too far off from being dead … They're watching their numbers decline. And every time there's a threat, they go crazy."
Jankowicz/illustration (Arkadiusz Warguła/iStock)
He added that, while many see Tesla CEO Elon Musk as the chief concern among the anti-free-speech left, such proverbial risks to the establishment dynamic have been recurring for some time.
Gutfeld said that as far back as October 1996, that dynamic felt threatened by the conception of Fox News Channel, and later, journalists like Glenn Greenwald and commentators like Joe Rogan.
"Now it's Musk. So every reaction you see is the same. They fear speech because it competes with theirs," he said, adding that Mayorkas notably stated the new disinformation apparatus will work against speech's "connectivity to violence."
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