EU anti-‘disinfo’ effort falls apart after trying to be honest about the US

When one panel dared name Washington, Brussels and its allies fled – because it has always been about power, not truth.

It was supposed to be a safe space for all the Karens and institutionally-backed wine moms who spend their days policing public discourse like it’s neighborhood Block Watch fodder. Instead, this year’s EU #Disinfo2026 confab in Lithuania turned into a bust.

What happened was basically the equivalent of a friend’s husband getting called out ahead of the confab as the neighborhood perv, prompting everyone to ghost the meetup at the last minute.

The problem? A scheduled panel called ‘USA as a FIMI threat: adapt, acknowledge, push back.’ Incidentally, ‘FIMI threat’ is one of those hip acronyms that these people are overpaid to come up with so that it sounds like they’re doing something only those with their rare expertise can wrangle. In reality, it just means ‘foreign information manipulation and interference,’ and the average seventh grader can push back against it on social media if they want to. Usually with memes that are a lot more savvy, and without billing taxpayers.

The meetup was organized by the Brussels-backed EU Disinfo Lab, and was apparently such a great use of EU funds that the bloc had its own sponsorship logo taken right off the promotional signage and bailed on itself. “The organizers chose to frame some of the discussions in a way which does not align with the positions held by the EU,” said EU foreign affairs spokesman Christian Wigand.

And Lithuania couldn’t even be bothered to roll down the street in their pajamas to attend this thing. “Lithuania has cancelled its participation in Disinfo 2026 as several parts of the conference program differ from the official position of the government,” its Foreign Ministry said.

Colour me shocked that people who put an extraordinary amount of effort into corralling the masses into establishment-approved groupthink have just had a collective anaphylactic reaction to a deviation from it.

What about Canada? Surely it maintained its presence, right? Particularly since there’s a lot of talk in Canada these days about entities close to Trump, including State Department officials, getting involved in manipulation efforts to gin up incredibly long-shot independence movements in the provinces of Alberta and Quebec, with a view to gaining control of Canadian resources and then pressuring the federal government into doing what Trump wants. So you’d think that Canada would have relished the opportunity to head over to this conference and confront Washington, knowing that its behavior would be a focus. At the very least, it would have been a chance to demonstrate that all this talk about defending democracy and information integrity extends beyond smack talking from a comfortable distance.

“Following changes to the framing of several panel discussions, Global Affairs Canada decided to revise its participation in those sessions at the EU DisinfoLab 2026 conference,” a Canadian government spokeswoman said.

What could possibly have been behind all these US allies bailing in such a coordinated fashion? Couldn’t have been because they were all being pressured, right? Surely, nobody would ever think of manipulating anyone into not attending a conference about manipulation.

“While we are unable to comment on the details of diplomatic conversations, it should not be a surprise that countries would disaffiliate from this conference upon learning that it labeled the US a ‘FIMI threat,’” the State Department said. “Labeling the United States a ‘FIMI threat’ – a term normally reserved for describing influence operations of adversaries – undermines shared goals and should alarm those involved.”

Thanks for confirming that “disinfo” can only ever come from entities that you don’t like and depends on the source rather than a critical assessment of the info itself.

To be fair, it’s worth defining terms. “Disinformation” seems to be a convenient catch-all phrase used by the Western establishment to marginalize a wide range of discourse – from adverse opinions that contradict the establishment’s own mass mind-bending efforts, to straight-up nonsense. The fact that they don’t make enough of a distinction between those two things is to their discredit. There’s a rather significant difference between someone challenging an official narrative and someone insisting that the planet is run by a cabal of lizard people. But both have become fodder for the same sprawling industry of experts and other taxpayer-funded initiatives.

Before the internet and social media, the average person didn’t need some Western apparatchik to tell them that the guy ranting on the street corner was a nutjob. Or to know that states have a tendency to spin in their own self-interest. Or to take whatever you hear around the water cooler at work with a grain of salt. But apparently, now that we’re all connected online, everyone’s brains have gone to mush and we need self-appointed babysitters to tell us what to think under the pretext of protecting us. And certainly not just protecting their power, surely. The public, once trusted to exercise a modicum of judgment, has been demoted to a classroom of toddlers who would eat the crayons the minute they’re unsupervised.

Washington’s spin didn’t start with Trump. It’s just that it’s now so glaring that not even America’s friends can play along with it. Like his framing of the current French leftist riots as being caused by migrants and Islamists, despite French intelligence plainly stating that it’s the annual leftist activist effort. But hey, it suits Israel’s routine framing of everything in every country as being about Islam, which seems to be a big objective of Trump these days – keeping Israel and his Israeli donors like Miriam Adelson and Republican Israeli-backed think tanks happy.

See what I did there? Countered some info with other info. Not hard, right? And all without adult supervision. Unlike some folks who have made a career out of demanding that everyone else show their work, and clearly aren’t especially keen on having to ask the same of Trump’s America. But instead of showing up to their own conference and accepting the obvious – that Trump contradicts himself every five minutes all day long – it turns out that some of these guardians of information integrity ultimately decided that the cause wasn’t so critical to democracy that it was worth a Trump-grade headache.

Guess it’s a lot easier to keep lecturing the powerless than risk inconveniencing the powerful. What a stunning profile in courage from our fearless Western leaders. One might even call it a double standard. Although perhaps they should convene a panel before deciding, lest it qualify as disinfo.