On Wednesday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH) shared information concerning a “serious national security threat” with every member of Congress. The threat, described by numerous anonymous sources from within the intelligence community as “very sensitive,” appears to involve Russian military capabilities. Turner has urged the White House to immediately declassify all information related to the threat so that Congress, the Biden administration, and U.S. allies can openly discuss “the actions necessary to respond to this threat.”
This development comes directly on the heels of the passage of a $95 billion aid package for U.S. foreign policy priorities, $60 billion of which would provide military aid to Ukraine as it works to repel the Russian invasion. Barely passing through the Senate with the minimum 60 votes, the emergency spending bill faces tough odds in the House of Representatives. President Joe Biden warned that failure to pass the bill in Congress would be “playing into Putin’s hands.”
The timing of the latest development appears suspiciously convenient for proponents of the Ukraine spending package, particularly among leaders from the “America First” wing of the Republican Party and anti-war progressives. As of Wednesday afternoon, the terms “false flag” and “national security threat” were simultaneously trending on X, underscoring the extreme distrust toward establishment Washington across ideological lines.
This distrust has been well-earned. Beginning in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, government and media forces have combined to use faulty intelligence and fabricated “threats” to gin up support for extreme actions at home and abroad. From the false claim that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq secretly harbored “weapons of mass destruction” to the numerous lies related to the COVID-19 pandemic, establishment powers have successfully manipulated the public by cultivating panic and fear. In the cases of Iraq and COVID-19, the results have been disastrous for the country. At this point, it is a patriotic duty to express skepticism of the government and legacy media line.
The decline in public trust in our institutions is the defining tragedy of our age. Of course, it is impossible to say for certain at this point that Russia does or does not pose an immediate threat to our survival as a nation, nor that some new Russian military innovation does not demand an immediate and decisive response. But it would be irrational to simply swallow reports of this new “threat” whole. We’ve been duped too many times in recent memory.
Consider the last time the public relied upon sources from within the intelligence community to make sense of a big news event. On Oct. 19, 2020, two short weeks before the presidential election, a group of 51 former senior intelligence officials, which included former directors of National Intelligence and directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, signed a letter that stated that data recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
In response to this letter, social media companies and the U.S. media effectively censored the truth — that the Hunter Biden laptop was indeed authentic and contained information that implicated Joe Biden in a vast influence-peddling scheme that could endanger U.S. security should he be elected president. In the years that followed, the media outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, that propagated the government line were forced to admit their error, but the damage was already done. What should have been a major news story with the potential to swing an election was successfully suppressed.
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As bad as that incident was in a vacuum, the greater consequence was that it further eroded trust in key institutions. So when the New York Times issued its headline Wednesday evening stating that the “U.S. Has New Intelligence About Russia’s Nuclear Capabilities,” the public had every reason to roll its eyes. The recent track record of the legacy media is just too poor, and the timing of the government announcement is just too perfect.
May this perilous moment raise up a new generation of truth-tellers in our government and in the media. Now more than ever, we need voices we can truly rely on.
Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.
