The Threat Within, Part 2: Wisconsin’s Censorship-Industrial Complex

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”); she called 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.

A Thorn is a Thorn by Any Other Name

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.

Specifically, as a memo by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau points out, the budget would have created a Homeland Security Office within the Department of Military Affairs (DMA). The director of the office would have been appointed by the Adjutant General, and—here we go—its job would be to “coordinate with the federal Department of Homeland Security and state and local law enforcement agencies to identify, investigate, assess, report, and share tips and leads linked to emergency homeland security threats.”

Ah, the very essence of vertical integration, in which our erstwhile censorship office would be funded to the tune of more than a half-million dollars over the biennium.

Thankfully, the GOP legislature scuttled this proposal, but what might this office have undertaken? Indeed, some might ask why it would not be legitimate for such an office to actually exist and to assess legitimate threats?

On that score, the first thing to ask is why this office was suddenly needed in 2023. On its face its job is redundant because a 16-member Wisconsin Homeland Security Council already exists that consists of representatives from major state agencies and statewide law enforcement, the city of Milwaukee, and others. Its job is to perform the very same function as the proposed full-time office would have—to advise the governor and coordinate the efforts of state, tribal, and local officials as they pertain to homeland security threats.

And those coordinated efforts are carried out by the agencies whose representatives sit on the council, and that identify the threats in the first place. So just what would the full-time homeland security staff do?

The key to understanding that is to look at what the DMA identifies as “homeland security threats.” There are five, among them three standard-issue, legitimate threats—cartel facilitation of illicit drugs, intellectual property theft, and cyber intrusions and attacks.

Then there’s the dubious threat of domestic violent extremists. Some items in this category likely would turn out to be real, so this category can’t be discounted completely. Still, sometimes those turn out to be FBI-initiated set ups of “far right” extremists, and, sometimes, as it was during the Biden administration, those far-right extremists turn out to be parents voicing their concerns about woke policies at school board meetings.

However, there’s nothing dubious or mysterious about the fifth category of threats the DMA wanted the Homeland Security Office to dive into, and it was inherited straight from the DGB: “Misinformation and Disinformation Campaigns.”

What does this mean mission-wise? According to the state Department of Administration, the new office would, among other things, assist with “identifying and reducing the influence of adversaries to the state.” Note the language refers to adversaries of the state, not of the people or of the constitution or even of the public interest. It is to identify adversaries of the state’s interest.

All this is clarified even more by looking at the state’s “Homeland Security Strategy 2023-26,” which clarifies that one of the state’s homeland security strategic objectives is to “Evaluate tools for countering potential mis/dis-information across a variety of mission spaces and provide best practices to state and local partners for managing disinformation in their spheres of influence, including election administration and other critical infrastructure.”

In other words, when we translate the bureaucratese, the new office would be set up, at least in part, to identify what information and news needed to be censored and to advise “state and local partners” how to do it, especially in the arena of elections. That latter directive was aimed at foreign threats, but don’t be fooled. That was exactly the announced mission of the federal DGB.

What they don’t tell you is that many of the foreign threats they include are those they say operate domestically on behalf of foreign actors. In fact, the government has stated publicly that most so-called foreign disinformation is distributed via unwitting voters.

One point the Evers administration made in defending the proposal was that the office would give administrative legs to the already existing homeland security council. It advises the governor and coordinates but lacks any enforcement or implementation mechanism.

And that’s the way it should be. Law enforcement has always coordinated between and among multiple agencies, with oversight provided by accountable agency heads. Interagency agreements provide the framework for coordinated activities, but, even with joint task forces, the actual work is performed within the jurisdiction of the coordinating agencies.

Likewise, the homeland security council brings to the table all the agencies that might be impacted by homeland security threats, and coordinates the activities those agencies themselves carry out. It’s hard to see what a new bureaucracy whose essential allegiance would have been to a non-statutory advisory council could have accomplished that wasn’t already happening, especially since the security council has six subcommittees and working groups coordinating activities now, including an information sharing working group.

Just as with the DGB, the office of homeland security would have been a cell unto itself, operating in the shadows of the council and out of the limelight—and potentially out of the reach of—the agencies comprising the council. It would be a bureaucracy that would by structure compartmentalize rather harmonize the council’s work.

Apparently the legislature felt the same way.

You’re Going to do What?

The existing framework further begs the question of why the security council never needed a fully funded and staffed office prior to the administration asking for one in 2023. Such an office was not considered necessary after 9/11, when Gov. Jim Doyle established the security council in 2003.

What’s more, not only would it have actualized bureaucratic functioning for a non-statutory council, it would have duplicated the work of the Wisconsin Statewide Intelligence Center, which operates out of the state Department of Justice and which “gathers, receives, analyzes and disseminates intelligence at the national, state and local levels” and serves as the “threat liaison” between agencies, as well it’s own dubiously vague task of performing “critical services for government and private sector partners.”

So that’s another security state arm that needs scrutiny, but, as for the Office of Homeland Security, given those entities, the office, like the federal DGB, seemed to be cooked up to serve an entirely new mission. Coincidentally, if you believe in coincidences, just such a mission had emerged in 2022, that of identifying so-called misinformation and disinformation and carrying out appropriate actions to suppress it.

The timing of the office tells us all we need to know about that. Before 2022, no DMA annual report or multi-year strategy ever mentions misinformation or disinformation. During that year, however—when the Biden administration cooked up DGB—records show that the state homeland security council began to receive briefings on misinformation threats and to have discussions about misinformation and disinformation, all for the first time. The very next budget cycle an office was unveiled to address misinformation and disinformation.

One really has to believe in coincidences, and to be naive, to think that a federal Democratic administration and a state Democratic administration would separately and without any coordination think up the need for a new bureaucratic office pursuing the exact same newly minted security “threat,” especially since the state never needed one before the new threat was dreamed up.

Either way, and most important, the state government has no business tasking as part of its job the policing of misinformation or disinformation, whether Evers was spoon-fed the budget provision or not. No matter what the intended role of the Office of Homeland Security was, the government has no role in monitoring speech, and it especially has no role it deeming certain types of speech as threats to homeland security.

As Taibbi has written, identifying such a mission requires two conclusions on the part of society: “To favor such measures one has to believe both that identifying disinformation is logistically possible, and that government should hold that role. The former idea is metaphysically crazy, the latter unconstitutional.”

Whenever the government attempts to become the arbiter of facts, it inevitably ends up as propaganda. It quells debate. It obliterates the time tested doctrine that the antidote to misinformation and disinformation is more information, not suppression and certainly not government oversight of speech.

As for the threat posed, I’ll just quote from Vice President JD Vance’s speech last week in Munich: “You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

One final note on the governor’s attempt to fund efforts to fight misinformation. As concerns exist on the federal level, so too we must assume that the Evers’ administration and its homeland security council are still pursuing government assessments of information they don’t like and discussing how it might be suppressed. Only now it is even more in the shadows.

The actual office might have been still-born, but no one has ever withdrawn the disinformation strategic objective or disavowed that fighting misinformation is a part of the state’s homeland security goals. It should not be there, and, as long as it is, we should all assume the state censorship industrial complex is alive and well.

It’s another another reason next year’s governor’s race is so important.

Lipstick on a Pig

While much of the governor’s efforts was buried deep in the state budget, that was not the case with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which was publicly pandering for a huge influx of dollars and staff to fight misinformation during that same year.

In 2022, all six WEC commissioners—three Republicans and three Democrats—asked for $1.3 million from the Legislature (that was bumped to $1.9 million along the budget way) to create an Office of Elections Inspector General within the commission. WEC administrator Meagan Wolfe wanted 10 new positions to fight misinformation.

According to Wolfe, as reported by NBC, the idea was to prevent “the spread of false information about elections by putting forth as much accurate information as possible from our own election experts.”

Paired with the new Office of Homeland Security, Evers was ramping up the censorship industrial complex, but Wolfe’s presentation begged its own question: What was the false information that was being spread that this new office—and presumably its newly born twin, the Office of Homeland Security—would be fighting with its disinformation experts?

Well, according to a statement from the governor’s office to Wisconsin’s Public Radio, it was just about anything Republicans were saying about the elections. Indeed, Evers’s communications director Britt Cudaback put it this way to Wisconsin Public Radio in supporting the establishment of the office: “Gov. Evers welcomes additional efforts to combat Republican misinformation, continue bolstering election security, and ensure every eligible voter can cast their ballot in Wisconsin, and he looks forward to reviewing the Elections Commission’s request as part of the biennial budget process.”

That was Cudaback’s telling version of Jankowicz’s “Republicans and other disinformers.” So in other words, the official government policy would be that any charges of illegality or irregularity in elections made by Republicans would be officially proclaimed to be disinformation, and taxpayer dollars would be used to suppress and fight it.

That proposal failed, but a similar proposal is back in the governor’s newest budget, this time an ask of $2 million dressed up as an Office of Election Transparency and Compliance.

Lipstick on a pig.

A Little Jab’ll Do Ya

None of this even gets close to scrutiny of the vast censorship industrial complex inside the state Department of Health Services. It employs a vast array of strategies, not to share health information from a range of perspectives but to proclaim truth for the government’s perspective and to label all counter arguments to be misinformation.

Much of this is also vertically integrated, with the state DHS participating in the Public Health Communications Collaborative (PHCC), formed in August 2020 by the CDC Foundation, the de Beaumont Foundation, and Trust for America’s Health to provide “unbiased communication about the Covid-19 pandemic.”

I know, it’s hard to read that without laughing.

It’s hardly unbiased. As Influence Watch scores it, “the de Beaumont Foundation is a left-progressive private foundation supporting aggressive and intrusive public health activism. It has reported receiving contributions from prominent left-progressive health care and public health funders, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation.”

Indeed, the Beaumont Foundation’s motto is “Inciting Action, Driving Change.” Among other projects, the foundation partnered with left-wing activist Soledad O’Brien in 2020 to support hard lock-down policies and to tie community health to progressive equity public policy. Beaumont CEO Brian Castrucci said the film “shows how a community’s health is directly tied to conditions like housing, education, and employment—and how we’ll need to address stark inequities if we want to be prepared for the next crisis.”

In other words, the the PHCC promotes a left-wing agenda and a Covid response that trampled on civil liberties, and the state DHS uses the PHCC as its source to address misinformation. What is spewing out of the state DHS is not evidence-based science, or substantive debate, or the transparent flow of information from all sides, but progressive propaganda.

Other research shows just how much time the state DHS and county health departments spend on countering “misinformation” in this way. In “Navigating misinformation and political polarization of Covid-19,” Garrett Bates of the Institute of Health and Equity at the Medical College of Wisconsin and colleagues described how public health agencies worked during the pandemic to counteract any narrative contrary to the government’s conclusions. His research attempted, through interviews with Milwaukee County public health officials, to whine about how poor public health workers were challenged by “the abundance of contradictory and misinformative messages, often through social media,” making it more difficult for them “to protect their communities from Covid-19.”

What the report actually does is establish that county health agencies, far from focusing on the mission to provide health services or to offer up balanced information for public consumption, actually spent valuable and significant taxpayer time and money censoring medical studies and opinions they disagreed with, many of which proved to be accurate.

“Health officials had to develop new plans to promote Covid safety recommendations and awareness among the public, all while counteracting circulating misinformation and politically polarizing media sources,” the 2023 article states. “To do this, many public health organizations turned to social media platforms. Research suggests social media campaigns can successfully inform the public on accurate Covid information to increase public awareness and education so that behavioral change can occur.”

As such, Bates wrote, public health agencies used social media as a frontier for Covid information dissemination. Tragically, Bates stated, health bureaucrats received little support from elected officials as they ran their campaigns against disinformation, and so, he warned, they had better get on board the next time the opportunity for social justice rolls around.

“Many times, they received little support from political leaders as the vaccine became politically polarized and they were required to develop strategies to overcome an array of circulating myths and misinformation about the vaccine,” he wrote. “By implementing tailored responses to the challenges that they faced, public health officials were able to create strategies for increasing vaccine acceptance and reducing hesitancies. Moving forward, public health officials need the support of all leaders (political, administrative, and community) to be able to best serve their community.”

The better lesson than simply blind acceptance of DHS’s ideologically derived science—given all the lies about the efficacy and safety of the vaccines—is that our elected leaders need to pay more attention to what censorship and propaganda campaigns are going on in our public health agencies and put an end to them.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more to the state’s censorship industrial complex than I can get to in this piece. I haven’t begun to talk about the DNR and its “scientific integrity” censorship policies, or the DOT, or a host of other agencies.

But unraveling all of it is crucial. Again, even if RFK, Jr., is successful in taking down the left-wing messaging at the federal level in health, and the Trump administration dismantles the rest of it, these activities will undoubtedly continue on the state level unless they are all identified and destroyed.

So stay tuned, I’m just getting started.