You didn’t have to be a right-wing nut to agree that a Department of Homeland Security–led “war on disinformation” sounded Orwellian. In May, after just a couple months on the job and a firestorm of internet outrage, Nina Jankowicz — Joe Biden’s “disinformation czar” — resigned, saying that the Disinformation Governance Board’s work was now officially on pause. The episode not only revealed the dysfunction in the Biden administration but also managed to dramatize everything wrong with “disinformation” as a political framework.

Fighting “disinformation” sounds like the kind of noble, nerdy cause all truth-lovers and earnest fact-checkers can get behind. Most of us on the Left are just as distressed as liberals over misinformation on vaccines or claims that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. I have close family members and friends who have at times believed that vaccines will make us infertile and spiritually bereft, that healthy people won’t get COVID-19, and that widespread concern over the pandemic was falsely stoked by liberals as part of a “green revolution” to unseat Trump.

But Jankowicz was never a disinterested arbiter of truth. Rather, like many self-styled enemies of “fake news,” she’s an information combatant on behalf of the most powerful military on Earth. As Ukrainian-American writer Lev Golinken pointed out in the Nation, Jankowicz’s experience working with a US-government-funded project called StopFake is an immediate red flag. Ostensibly formed to combat lies from Vladimir Putin’s government, the organization took the approach of casting anything the Russians said as “fake news.” That meant, for Jankowicz, rehabilitating the reputations of Ukrainian right-wing groups simply because Russians said they were bad. Although Amnesty International, Newsweek, and many other reputable sources had documented human rights abuses by the Azov Battalion and other far-right volunteer fighters, Jankowicz sought to whitewash all that and paint them as wholesome patriots unjustly vilified by Russian propaganda.