When the New York Post published information about the tawdry access-peddling business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son a month before the 2020 election, much of the major media refused to cover it. Some of them even called it (without any evidence) Russian disinformation. Big Tech’s social media platforms took the unprecedented step of throttling access to the stories.
Hunter Biden’s laptop included details about his foreign business dealings. These were dealings in which Biden traded on his father’s name — dealings that his father has said were perfectly fine. This story was highly relevant to the presidential election going on that year. It showed how Joe Biden’s family used his power to gain riches, and how Biden thought there was nothing wrong with it.
Twitter and Facebook cut off access to the New York Post stories on it. Politico and “national security experts” asserted falsely that the story was “disinformation.” Calling something “disinformation” is a way of saying the thing is not only false but dangerous. And maybe it was dangerous to Biden to have his family’s business ethics exposed right before the election, but it was just public service to tell that story before voters made their decisions.
Now on Thursday, the New York Times finally admits that the contents of the laptop were legitimate. Incredibly, this is surprising some people.
In the category of – didn’t see this coming : The @nytimes confirms the authenticity of Hunter Biden emails derived from his laptop that had been previously dismissed as Russian disinformation. pic.twitter.com/nK7xnD0fP2
— Michael Isikoff (@Isikoff) March 17, 2022
The thing is, just a couple of days after this happened, it was clear to any honest person that the laptop and its contents were almost certainly legitimate.
A federal law enforcement official tells @DCExaminer that the Justice Department & FBI agree with DNI Ratcliffe that the Hunter Biden laptop / emails in question are not part of a Russian disinformation operation, and further says that the FBI is in possession of Hunter’s laptop.
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) October 20, 2020
The whole episode was a 100% dishonest, frenzied, and illiberal abuse of power by major media and especially Big Tech.
While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020
Byron York sums up the shameful episode well. Twitter, Facebook, National Public Radio, and many of our media and cultural gatekeepers lied in order to protect Biden from potentially harmful information. They may have even changed the election result through this news suppression.
We can gripe about the past as much as we want, but the more important question is: Just what are the tech platforms and the major media colluding to lie about right now? What are our gatekeepers covering up today?
If they used “disinformation” as the excuse to hide a story that was “harmful” to their politics in 2020, we should assume that their current cries to cut off “disinformation” include efforts to protect the Left from other bad news items.
You know they are lying to you about the bill in Florida to stop child grooming — to prevent misguided or creepy teachers from giving age-inappropriate sex education to young students. Major media outlets and journalists have made this one obvious by using opponents’ factually false moniker (“don’t say gay”) as the only identifier of the bill.
You know they are lying to you about studies that purportedly show that forcing children to wear masks all day is important in fighting COVID-19.
You know that they lie to you about election laws in places such as Texas and Georgia.
But what else are they lying about that we won’t discover until much much later?
For example, I am thinking of Katie Couric’s decision to hide Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s criticism of Colin Kaepernick for protesting the U.S. flag, at the time when the major media were trying to paint RGB’s position as racist. I’m also thinking of Couric’s slander of gun-rights supporters, which was only exposed because someone had the foresight to record the whole thing.
What else do the journalists at the well-sourced, well-funded, well-connected newspapers know that they are not telling us right now? We know that the reporters and editors at the major outlets work hand-in-hand with the Left’s main PR firms — SKD Knickerbocker and Fusion GPS, for example. What stories do people in those circles know about but keep to themselves?
By its very nature, this is all information about which we can only guess. But it’s only reasonable to wonder. Now that we know they lied about such big things in the past, it is only logical to wonder: What are they lying to me about today?
