When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Democrats suddenly discovered “disinformation.” They had shown zero interest in it previously. In a fateful choice, President Barack Obama in late 2015 shuttered the only office in the entire U.S. government that was dedicated to combating Russian disinformation, a move that has never been explained.
Democrats made up for lost time with obsessive enthusiasm. A whole new, lavishly funded industry arose to fight disinformation, as defined by Democrats. Nearly all these “experts” were making it up, and many had an obvious partisan agenda. The “disinformation” sector has a pronounced left-wing bias and functions as an adjunct to the Democratic Party. To someone like me, who has been debunking Kremlin disinformation professionally since the 1990s, this cynical exploitation of a real national security problem was disappointing but hardly unexpected.
The “disinformation” industry’s close relationship with the Democrats mirrors how much of the media industry works (there’s considerable overlap in personnel, with a revolving door between Democrats, the media, and lucrative “disinformation” gigs). As last week’s disastrous debate revealed, President Joe Biden is an unwell old man in decline who can’t speak in complete sentences without a teleprompter.
But that’s not the real scandal. The real scandal is that while Biden has been declining throughout his presidency, the press never told us as much. It’s not that they didn’t know. Journalists have heard the same stories that many people around Washington, D.C., have heard since 2021. Whispers that Biden had dementia of some kind and could only function for a few hours per day have been circulating for years. It was obvious that Biden had trouble walking while he had been spending every weekend at his Delaware beach house. The presidency hasn’t been a full-time job for Biden.
Evidence mounted that Biden was unfit for his weighty office, but far too many in the media simply refused to dig into it. Worse, many in the media functioned as a Democratic Party adjunct by amplifying increasingly desperate White House efforts to deny Biden’s condition. Clear footage of Biden barely able to walk was derided as a “cheap fake.” Republican-aligned media reports about the president’s ill health were dismissed by the White House with energetic media assistance. That mask fell permanently last Thursday.
Let’s be clear: This was a disinformation scheme, engineered by the White House and executed by a pliant media. It follows a consistent pattern, what I call “the media three-step.” First, media outlets refuse to report a significant story that looks bad for Democrats (including active suppression by “fact-checkers”). Then the story is reported by non-mainstream sources since the press won’t do its job. Last, the media industry justifies its cover-up because only “the fringe” is discussing the issue.
If this sounds familiar, it should. This was the same play run to suppress Hunter Biden’s embarrassing laptop on the eve of the 2020 election. That was an unusually aggressive operation, including shameful collusion by retired senior spies with assistance from Big Tech to crush public discussion of that laptop and its unpleasant contents. In time, the laptop was verified as real, including by the FBI, but by then, Joe Biden was in the White House.
Democratic disinformation operations didn’t start in 2020, either. While they’ve gotten more shameless over time, they’re nothing new. I first encountered them in the 1990s in the Balkans, when the internet was just getting started. The Bosnian War of 1992-1995 demonstrated the power of advocacy journalism when pushed by media stars, most prominently CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Amanpour got close to President Bill Clinton’s administration (she married Jamie Rubin, who was Clinton’s State Department spokesman — in fact, they met in Bosnia), and she led the media effort to portray a complex ethnic conflict in simplistic, good-versus-evil terms.
In this telling, which was broadcast 24/7 for years, Bosnia’s Muslims were innocent victims while Bosnian Serbs were sinister criminals, no better than Nazis. This cartoonish oversimplification allowed the press to ignore and suppress important stories that didn’t align with their desired narrative. I was so incensed by this grand deception that I eventually published a whistleblowing book about the ugly realities of Bosnia’s fratricide.
What stories were ignored? That Bosnia’s supposedly secular Muslim government was in bed with the mullahs in Tehran and on their payroll. That the government allowed not just Iranian arms and fighters into Bosnia in the thousands but battalions of international jihadist radicals too, including Osama bin Laden. That the Clinton White House knew all this and enabled Bosnia’s infestation by Islamist terrorists. Moreover, Team Clinton allowed somebody — most suspected Turkey — to air-drop weapons (including from Iran) to the Bosnian Muslims in violation of the United Nations arms embargo. This included Team Clinton giving Tehran a “green light” to make Bosnia its base in Europe.
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You probably didn’t hear about that because media outlets refused to discuss it in much detail. Some of it they suppressed entirely. Despite a perfunctory congressional inquiry into the “green light,” the press never dug deeply. Republicans were caught up in other Clinton scandals involving stained intern dresses that were easier to explain than intricate Balkan spy stories. Therefore, a massive foreign policy scandal that paved the terrorist trail to the 9/11 attacks on America never got revealed, just as the Democrats wanted.
Regrettably, Democrat-media collusion in disinformation has only gotten worse since then. Today, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which debunks foreign disinformation (it was resurrected after Obama killed it), is headed by Jamie Rubin.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.