'Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to attend a fire prevention speech delivered by an arsonist? Or perhaps a child safety seminar led by a pedophile? Well, that’s exactly what it felt like Wednesday during the University of Chicago’s “Conference on Disinformation and Erosion of Democracy,” featuring some of the greatest promulgators of disinformation and illiberalism in American history.
Former President Barack Obama had the nerve to help open the event, although his administration famously spied on the Donald Trump campaign with a secret court warrant backed by the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded Christopher Steele dossier which, in an ironic twist, was the product of Russian disinformation. Democrats used this disinformation to repeatedly smear President Trump and undermine the integrity of the 2016 election.
Former chief advisor to the Obama administration David Axelrod moderated two of Wednesday’s discussions. To this day, Axelrod still has the gall to repeat the debunked Russian collusion hoax. He even repeated it Wednesday.
To make matters worse, The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum joined the stage to share her “expert knowledge” on Russian disinformation. When asked pointedly by my Chicago Thinker colleague Daniel Schmidt about whether she thought the media acted inappropriately by dismissing the Hunter Biden story, Applebaum condescendingly responded that she didn’t “find it to be interesting.”
What did she really mean? The Hunter Biden scandal (now even reluctantly acknowledged by the partisan New York Times) didn’t fit Applebaum’s narrative. So it was better left censored and unreported.
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