The Left Suddenly Cares Very Little About Misinformation

By Noah Rothman

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

‘There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz once insisted. That was hardly a marginal outlook within the Democratic Party. “Misinformation can erode people’s confidence in elections,” Connecticut’s deputy secretary of state, Scott Bates, agreed, “and we view that as a critical threat to the democratic process.” He and his fellow Democratic officials warned that false political narratives are often promoted by hostile foreign powers, and they can lead the unstable to violently lash out at their surroundings. In their report on the “crisis of disinformation and misinformation” in America, Joe Biden’s advisers pledged to “counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.”

 

These and other Democrats were wrong to contend that Americans’ civil rights were contingent, but they had reason to worry that those who are susceptible to suggestion are liable to act on their delusions. Today, however, that urgent mission has fallen out of fashion on the left. The self-appointed disinformation police have disbanded, and the mechanisms that were once devoted to countering false but popular narratives have sputtered to a halt. It’s no coincidence that this sudden outbreak of lethargy coincides with the growing appeal of misinformation among Americans on the left.

 

It was not surprising that Donald Trump’s third attempted assassin was, by his own admission, inspired by some of the many spurious but trendy allegations of misconduct that orbit around him. What was surprising was that CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell thought the president had to respond to his would-be killer’s deranged ramblings.

 

“What’s your reaction to that?” O’Donnell asked Trump after she read from a portion of the accused’s manifesto alleging that Trump is a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” In an earlier age, the alleged gunman’s actions would have sufficiently discredited him. Perhaps O’Donnell wanted Trump to address the charges against him because they are common currency in the forums in which the activist left cocoon themselves. Popular or not, though, the conclusions to which Trump’s latest attacker was wedded are unsubstantiated.

 

The notion that that the president is a “pedophile” is a faith-based assertion predicated on the presumption that Trump just had to have a more sordid relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than all publicly available evidence indicates. ABC News agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a defamation claim after anchor George Stephanopoulos falsely claimed that a civil court had found the president liable for rape when the jury in that case concluded the opposite. The accusations of treason, we must assume, stem from the left’s attachment to the assertion that Trump colluded with Moscow to get himself installed in the presidency, the extensive and unproductive investigations into those allegations apparently notwithstanding.

 

It would be inaccurate to say that these uncharitable assumptions about the president are exclusive to the left’s unrepresentative fringes. They are not. Indeed, rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly receptive toward paranoid conspiracism. That phenomenon was illustrated by a recent poll in which one in three self-identified Democrats said that they don’t even believe that the president was singled out once again for assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at all. What’s more, that same survey found that a staggering 42 percent of Democratic respondents believed the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear in Butler, Pa., was a carefully orchestrated act of political theater.

 

Perhaps Democratic institutionalists gave up on the fight against false narratives because that campaign had become inconvenient. After all, misinformation is what the base craved. There may be no better example of that tendency than the degree to which the left has become susceptible to any claim that implicates Israel in a misdeed.

 

In a New York Times op-ed over the weekend, Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer accused his fellow Democrats of knowingly subordinating their scruples to their need to curry favor with a “small but vocal and growing segment of the political left making opposition to support for Israel a new litmus test.” Conveniently for Gottheimer, the Times proved the truth of his accusation the following day when it published an op-ed accusing Israel of training dogs to rape Palestinian detainees.

 

That’s an extraordinary claim that needed more evidentiary support in the paper of record than a handful of links to outside publications and social media posts. But for a certain cohort, perhaps the very activist class of which Gottheimer warned, no evidence is needed to publicize the notion that Israel is engaged in genocide, either by slaughtering the Palestinian population wholesale or by starving it into submission. The lack of evidence in support of these claims or the marshaling of obvious fabrications designed to advance the left’s preferred fictions about Israel never seem to generate much pushback from those who once policed the malicious untruths that came from the right. Why?

 

We all know why. The initiatives designed to anathematize right-wing myths had nothing to do with civic hygiene. They were political operations aimed not at contributing to the sum of human knowledge but, rather, advancing the interests of one political party. Now that it is that very political party that is beholden to its own preferred falsehoods, the threat posed by misinformation has suddenly become far less acute.

 

The Democrats may have forgotten just how committed they were as a party to policing the dangerous spread of misinformation. If they were ever honest about the motives fueling that crusade, if it wasn’t merely a cudgel they used to bludgeon the American right, then Democrats have an obligation to crack down on their own purveyors of disinformation. Until then, average Democrats will have to navigate a blinding fog of misinformation on their own.