Here's a simple rule of thumb, based on my long career in countering Kremlin disinformation: If you weren’t talking informatively about dezinformatsiya before 2015, you’re a hack, probably a partisan fluffer too, and I don’t care about your opinion, and neither should anyone else. Democrat-linked instant-experts created a whole “disinformation” industry, flush with cash, devoted to attacking Republicans. In a remarkable sleight of hand, they changed key definitions for partisan effect. Disinformation means lies created and propagated by Russian entities and allies, e.g. the infamous KGB Active Measure in the 1980s that the Pentagon created AIDS, but under the revised understanding, it applies to anything the Kremlin’s friends talk about. Ergo, Russians were talking about Hunter’s laptop, so if you discuss it, you’re helping Moscow (and perhaps secretly working for them too). This is lunatic stuff, not to mention straight-up McCarthyism, which liberals loudly deplored for sixty-odd years, right until it became useful for them to smear Trump and his party.

Neither was the overt partisan bias hard to detect. Kremlin propagandists are omnidirectional in their attacks on the West. There’s little consistency since that’s not the point. Moscow-linked liars spout venom about the “racist” nature of American society one day, praising Black Lives Matter, then the following day push agitprop castigating America for alleged anti-white bias. I’ve never once heard any of the battalions of liberal “disinformation experts” state that we should banish BLM from polite society because Kremlin propagandists talk about them, sometimes favorably.