Don't call it a comeback
Three years later, extremists are still obsessed with me
According to the people who make money lying about me on the Internet, I have risen from the dead, crawled out of a hidey hole, or otherwise “come back” more than 50 times over the past three years.
Jesus ain’t got nothin’ on me.1
Today is the third anniversary of the day my life got turned upside-down: the day in 2022 that my appointment to lead the DHS Disinformation Governance Board was announced, and the day a bunch of popular grifters began to lie about me and the job I was hired to do. You can read about the saga in detail in Bill Adair’s book, Beyond the Big Lie, or listen to, watch, or read the shorter versions of the story.
The most important thing to know is this: tens of millions of people have repeatedly been fed an unhinged and baseless conspiracy theory that I was censoring people. The avowed goal of this campaign is to push me out of public life entirely.2 As evidenced by the liars’ embarrassing public freakouts every time they remember I continue to draw breath, let alone continue to work in my area of expertise, they have lost.
They have lost so thoroughly and so heartily that Constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley, one of the liars who happens to have a tie and a university affiliation, wrote two (!) op-eds denouncing my “return” just last week. My offense? In testimony before the European Parliament, I deigned to use my right to free speech to assert my observation that the United States is now an autocracy. I told the EU that if they wish to hold autocracies like China and Russia to account, they should do the same for newer members of the club.
I was so touched by Turley’s continued attention that I looked back at his archives; he has written a “Nina is back” article3 for every year since his fixation on me began. Ah, the hallmarks of spring: daffodils, gentle rain, and angry old men shouting at clouds...and younger professional women.
Turley is in good company. Since 2022, commentators, media outlets, and influencers have all decried my alleged return at a rate of 1.38 resurrections per month. They began just weeks after I resigned from DHS, when I gave interviews about the experience of being targeted by a nationwide hate campaign. They continued when my maternity leave ended and I began work with a British non-profit. They kept going when I announced my lawsuit against Fox News. They persisted when I launched The American Sunlight Project last spring. And now, they are very, very upset that I’ve been calling it like I see it, using my own free speech in Congress and European Parliament.
Much of this commentary claims that I’m “back with a vengeance,” “back and mad,” or even “increasingly pugnacious” (my personal favorite) because to the authors, it’s clearly unacceptable that a woman should have the temerity to be anything but grateful she has been doxxed, threatened, harassed, and inserted into deep fake pornography. Some of them even claim I deserved it, as an aide to Congressman Jim Jordan told POLITICO in 2023. Heidi Przybyla reported that the aide asserted that I “agreed to serve as the board’s public face, and should thus be held accountable in public.”
Well, accountability goes both ways. “Accountability” for made-up crimes is just harassment—a show trial without the trial. I’ve endeavored to make that clear by continually speaking out against the lies told about me. This approach was reinforced to me this week in a presentation from a scholar of social norms at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit. In any community, “transgressions that are not punished are tolerated,” they said.
I do not enjoy publicly reliving the worst moments of my life over and over again; I continue to do it because I believe the way I was treated was anti-democratic, inhumane, and morally repugnant. I have condemned the use of similar tactics—violent threats, gendered harassment, baseless speculation, and disinformation—against people with whom I disagree.
Denouncing this behavior is one way to punish it. And I’m not stopping any time soon. The stakes have never been higher, and public accountability has never been more important. The liars know this; it’s why they feign shock at my repeated “returns.” It generates clicks and revenue, along with a fresh set of threats and harassment they hope will be the final straw that sends me packing.
Well, I have some advice for the liars: Save your energy. I’m not going anywhere.
In case you missed it, here’s some work I’m proud of lately:
Clips from my recent Congressional testimony, in which I dismantled the “censorship” lie while sitting next to the people who peddled it;
A recounting of the most bizarre moments from that hearing, for The Bulwark;
An overview of our new research that uncovered how Russia is infecting AI chatbots in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists;
An interview with Jesse Dollemore about the white supremacists supporting Trump and Rubio’s fake anti-censorship crusade at the State Department;
My appearance at the International Journalism Festival, discussing attacks on disinformation research with James Ball, Emily Bell and Julie Posetti;
An interview with Eric Byler on why I keep “fight[ing] for a world that recognizes that our rights as women to free expression online are just as valuable as our abusers’;”
An interview with Dutch creative agency CreativeNL on the sidelines of SXSW, discussing the role artists have to play in fighting disinformation.
If you’d like to help me and my team at The American Sunlight Project continue to increase the cost of lies like these, you can do so here. We’re also on Substack now; subscribe here.
Finally, you can support the fund for my continued legal fees—because, yep, I’ve still got ‘em—here.
“LOOK OUT, HELL: Disinfo Queen Nina Jankowicz compares herself to JESUS in SACRILEGIOUS Substack post!!!” There, I’ve written the headline so the people cheering on the very Christian concept of deporting asylum seekers to notoriously harsh foreign prisons don’t have to.
That’s not exactly right; some of these folks don’t just want me out of public life, they want me dead.
Turley has written a total of 21 pieces that mention me. Extremely normal behavior.
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Call it what it is. They are scared shitless because she’s a threat to their profound corruption and they spew all kinds of garbage because she speaks Facts in detail that even a weak minded mega cultist that consumes fox spew media could possibly understand. That pretty much is the guts of all their repeated lies. Cheers 🥂
Hello Ms Nina- you are a true role model to our daughters, young girls and women who have been convinced that they are just a kitchen labor! We are with you! All the way! AJ