James Bovard on CISA and censorship

Hegelian notions of “Government = Truth” propelled censorship here in recent years. Three years ago, Americans learned they lived under a Disinformation Governance Board with a ditzy Disinformation Czar who boasted of graduating from Bryn Mawr University. A public backlash led to the board’s termination but federal censors quickly and secretly resumed their sway over the internet. 

Though American censors rarely invoke Hegel, their schemes tacitly presume that political power is divine, if not in origin, at least in its effect. The Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), created in 2018, has relied on “censorship by surrogate,” subcontracting the destruction of freedom. CISA partnered with federal grantees to form the Election Integrity Partnership a hundred days before the 2020 presidential election. That project, along with the efforts of other federal agencies, created an “unrelenting pressure” with “the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens,” according to a 2023 ruling by Federal Judge Terry Doughty. 

What standard did CISA use to determine whether Americans should be muzzled? CISA settled controversies by contacting government employees and “apparently always assumed the government official was a reliable source,” Judge Doughty noted. Any assertion by officialdom could suffice to justify suppression of comments or posts by private citizens. But when did government I.D. badges become the Oracle of Delphi? 

During the 2020 presidential election campaign, CISA established a “Rumor Control” webpage to deal with threats to the election—including rumors that the feds were censoring Americans. CISA targeted for suppression assertions by Americans such as “mail-in voting is insecure”—despite the long history of absentee ballot fraud. Biden won the presidency in part thanks to Democrats exploiting the covid pandemic to open the floodgates to unverified mail-in ballots. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) declared, “Twitter was basically an FBI subsidiary before Elon Musk took it over.”

~ James Bovard, "Sacrificing Truth on Leviathan’s Altar," Mises Wire, February 19, 2025