In a democratic culture, what could be more pernicious than a secret marriage between social media and the huge spy agencies of a national government?
That is the heart of the Twitter revelations currently seizing the headlines of every (responsible) news organization, television network, and newspaper in North America and beyond.
The first portion of the story is that inside employees of Twitter were secretly manipulating what could show up on the Twitter platform. They made those choices based on their purely personal and individual political taste. They were chronically short-circuiting, banning, or underplaying conservative viewpoints.
The second portion is more particular. Mere weeks before a tight presidential election, a small and very active crew high up in the massive Twitter organization made every effort—and were mainly successful—in smothering a bombshell story, a story that, if reported honestly and with rigour, had the power to change the race for the most powerful office in the world.
They first banned the venerable New York Post, the news outlet that broke the story on Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The Post verified that the famous forgotten laptop was in fact Hunter Biden’s. That laptop had a record of Hunter’s privately degrading habits, but much more consequentially also had material recording his financial dealings with foreign powers—including China. These materials were explosive, and did more than suggest a high possibility that Hunter Biden, with the potential consent of his father, then the vice president, was greatly enriching himself and financing his reckless lifestyle.
These Twitter conspirators, for that is what they were and are, went into overdrive. They killed the Twitter account of the New York Post. They also killed all links to it from other Twitter users. And remember they also—on their own secret decision—killed the Twitter account of Joe Biden’s opponent, President Donald Trump, who had a huge following.
In other words, they massively interfered with the flow of information to the American public during an election. They manipulated what was to be seen and not seen, what was to be known and not known.
The third portion concerns the rest of the establishment media. While not actively in league with the Twitter manipulators, they shared the same mindset. When the Post broke the story, big media very quickly carried a rebuttal. They got 50 past members of the various intelligence and spy agencies to collectively issue a statement, which got immense coverage, that the Post story “had all the markings of a Russian disinformation” campaign. They were careful to say they could “not prove” this. But every big news outlet, including all the liberal cable barkers, gave it their most fulsome and vivid coverage.
A story of high scandal—foreign funding of a presidential candidate’s son, backed by the influence of and possibly with the knowledge of his father—was stomped down, in most cases ignored or rebutted by columnists and TV hosts, and pushed out of the news cycle within days of the presidential vote.
Does any reader, regardless of political alignment, believe a parallel story featuring Donald Trump’s son would get this treatment? No one can honestly answer yes to that question. It would enflame the entire North American media. It would be headlined in D-Day fonts. It would saturate every liberal network. Here in Canada, the mainstream media would be lining up every liberal pundit, never-Trumper, woke academic, and panel-hungry minor political science lecturer to tell the world of the horror.
CBC might even try for an interview from their once darling Trump challenger, Michael Avenetti, from his jail cell.
The fourth and last portion of this incredible and devastating story is that these same Twitter plotters, these arrogant, self-appointed, deeply-biased—they denied all when it was going on—manipulators were doing so in secret and with regular weekly meetings with Joe Biden’s campaign leaders and the very highest-up of the U.S. intelligence authorities.
Anyone who voiced any suspicion that such might be happening would be branded a conspiracy theorist, his Twitter and Facebook—Facebook got into the act as well—accounts frozen or deleted, treated as slightly less than mad by the media, and mocked and ostracized if he or she was in academia.
The Hunter Biden laptop story, as I will shorthand it, is by miles the biggest, most worrisome, and gravest political and media scandal—it involves both equally—of at least the last 50 years. Watergate was mainly political. In this story it is a portion of the press and the most dangerous state agencies, in deep collusion to fix public opinion, craft the news, deny opposition access, and in many cases flat out lie that they were undermining the basic elements of democratic government.
For three years of the Trump administration, this same press was in a rage of pure lust to “prove” Trump was in collusion with Putin. There was, to their immense grief and frustration, none.
For real collusion—the partnership between Big Tech and liberal news outlets to interfere with a presidential election, provable and now revealed—the Hunter Biden laptop story is one for the ages.
Much of the mainstream press still wonders why it’s in decline. This is the answer. They have killed trust.
