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If You Thought Censorship on COVID Was Bad, Something Worse Is Coming

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

President Joe Biden is moving full speed ahead with his war on oil and gas companies in favor of a Green New Deal-style agenda. 

During the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, valid and factual information about the origins of the disease, treatments and questions about the effectiveness of the rapidly produced vaccine were buried by "fact checkers." The worst offenders were third parties used by Facebook and keyboard warriors working for Twitter. 

But censorship during the pandemic was just a test run for what's about to come on climate change. After all, trillions of dollars for corrupt governments, political pet projects and university research grants are at stake. 

This week, the Biden administration announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board, which is being set up under the Department of Homeland Security. 

"We know that there has been a range of disinfo out there about a range of topics — I mean, including COVID, for example, and also elections and eligibility," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said about the board. "It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities."  

The board is being led by Nina Jankowicz, a woman who is a prolific user of the Chinese Communist Party's social media platform TikTok and someone who believes Hunter Biden's laptop was a product of Russian disinformation. She also has a history of advocating for the censorship of conservative media figures. 

"Jankowicz was selected by the Biden administration after years of pushing disinformation on the left while calling for censorship of the right. Pitch perfect. Indeed, in seeing how we all 'measure up,’ Nina Jankowicz is 'practically perfect' in every way," George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley tweeted in reaction to the creation of the board. 

There's no doubt this board will be used to combat so-called "disinformation" that cuts down Biden's climate agenda. 

Last year, scientist Steven Koonin, who served as President Barack Obama's Under Secretary for Science at the Department of Energy, published a book titled "Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters." In it, he calmly explains that while climate change is a challenge, the current proposals being floated to "solve" the problem are panicked and overblown. He also argues the science is not settled, despite demands from power-hungry politicians claiming there's nothing else to discuss on the matter and that current belief must be doctrine, and therefore, must be accepted. 

After the Wall Street Journal did a review of the book, it was "fact checked" on Facebook by Climate Feedback. Counter to Climate Feedback's claims, the WSJ's review was factual, and the same is true for Koonin's work. The facts weren't incorrect. Instead, conclusions about solutions out of line with the climate regime were deemed unacceptable. Because of this, the review was censored, and its contents were disparaged. One of the "fact checkers" claimed the mere threat of criticism on climate predictions was enough to rate the review as misleading. 

"Wise responses to the changing climate require that we get the unfiltered certainties and uncertainties of climate science into the public dialogue. As most fair-minded people will discover, there is far more unsettled in the official United Nations and U.S. government reports than we have been led to believe. It doesn't help to have Facebook spreading disinformation under the guise of 'fact checking,'" Koonin wrote in response to the "fact check." "Thoughtful challenge and dialogue are the most powerful ways that science gets closer to truth. But Facebook's 'fact checkers' criticized what they imagined I wrote based on a 900-word review, rather than what I did write in a book of more than 75,000 words. They're no better than trolls who pan political adversaries' books on Amazon without bothering to read them. It's not the behavior of serious scientists, and it demonstrates the need for a book like 'Unsettled.'"

The unquestionable and unchallenged push for alternative forms of energy, which aren't "green" despite claims from bureaucrats driving the narrative, isn't about protecting the environment. It's about central control and global governance. Given most in Silicon Valley agree with this shift, now backed by a federal government "disinformation" board, the censorship of dissenting science and opinions about climate change will put pandemic censorship to shame.