How the left and media concealed Hunter Biden's Shenanigans
In close elections, a fraction of the total vote distributed in the right places can swing an outcome, and we can never be sure what effect late news stories can have.
We’ll never know what effect the “October Surprise” of 2020, the New York Post’s reporting of the discovery of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden containing all sorts of embarrassing emails, might have had on the election that year if it had received wider circulation. Perhaps in a campaign dominated by Covid and characterized by chaos, it would have been another snowflake in the blizzard of news voters were being hit with.
But the allegations in the reporting—that the son of the man favored to become the next president had been selling his high-level family political connections to foreigners, including suggestions of a possible cut for his father—were worth pursuing. But enough influential people in and out of government—in the foreign-policy-intelligence complex, in the media, and in the big tech firms—were so alarmed that it would affect the outcome that they pulled off one of the greatest disappearing tricks since Harry Houdini made that elephant vanish from a New York stage.
It took its time, but last week the New York Times slipped the acknowledgment of the story’s accuracy deep in a report about Hunter Biden’s mounting legal problems. The Times, along with most other mass-circulation news organizations, had essentially ignored the story in the days when it might have made a difference, but it now says it has “authenticated” the laptop’s contents.
The concession from the paper, which serves as a sort of unofficial licensing authority for reporting by most of the rest of the media, prompted a predictable rush to self-vindication by those who had also trashed the story at the time. The Washington Post insisted its original decision not to touch it was justified because of uncertainty about its provenance.
Normally, when there is doubt about the provenance of an explosive story, news organizations consider it their job to ascertain the truth. Normally, it takes them less than 17 months to do so. But normally they don’t have the cover provided by technology companies that prevented people from reading the original story.
The media and tech companies that colluded in concealing this potentially critical information didn’t need any excuse to do so. But it surely helped that they were given validation for their actions by an august-sounding committee of concerned letter-writers who moved quickly to discredit the story.
In that famous letter, more than 50 former national-security and intelligence officials polished their gleaming credentials and alleged that the New York Post was guilty of peddling a story that had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The principal rationale for this, the letter laid out, was that the story might be helpful to Donald Trump. Russia wanted Mr. Trump to win. The story helped Mr. Trump. Ergo, it was the work of Russia.
That’s quite a syllogism. Using that same logic, you might conclude that Russia was also responsible for any unexpectedly good economic data that helped the incumbent, or that Vladimir Putin was behind the crime wave that had gripped Democrat-run cities.
Now we can guess why so much U.S. intelligence has been so faulty all these years. Either these 50 or so grandmasters of international espionage are completely unable to distinguish Russian disinformation from real information, or they prostituted their credentials in a naked act of political hackery. I don’t have their experience or deductive skills, but I’m ready to go with the latter.
The deeper shame here is the lack of accountability across American institutions. No one who colluded in this conspiracy against truth has even been inconvenienced by it.
Contacted by the Post last week, not one of the letter’s signatories expressed regret or contrition. The reporters and editors at news organizations and the employees and executives of tech companies who participated in the suppression continue to be lionized for their work.
This is what is so corrosive of trust and, in the end, of the system itself. The one way in which real accountability is supposed to work in a democracy is at the ballot box. But how can that even work when the people we want to hold accountable decide what information the voters are allowed to see?
WALL STREET JOURNAL OPINION (not mine)
TLDR: people conspired to bury Hunter Biden's laptop material including big tech and mainstream media by labeling it as disinformation without even verifying
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What do you expect from these people, they cheer for free speech, and for those who don't agree with them they accuse them and conform them to labels.
Very good, you are seeing the actions of the "people" that truly control things
I trust neither, but this may be one of the most retarded things i have ever heard. Bravo
So stupid.
You do realize that no one yet (to my knowledge) has actually shown that Mr Biden's laptop contained anything that a normal laptop wouldn't? If that's not the case, I'd love a point in the right direction so I can educate myself, but right now the entire "smoking gun" amounts to "Hunter Biden owns a laptop, which contains records of emails, and the mainstream media refused to report on it." Well guess what - I own a laptop too! I'm using it right now! The Times didn't do an expose on that.
And the rationale for the security establishment making that decision (which is conveniently left out of this article, which is an opinion piece and not to be held to any standard of journalistic integrity, I might add) was that we had definite, unimpeachable proof that Russia had attempted to, and likely succeeded at, influence the 2016 election in Mr Trump's favor, and that this bore the same hallmarks of a Russian misinformation campaign. In other words, they exercised their best judgement based on past experience. A bipartisan group of security and intelligence officials, mind you. Why shouldn't media outlets take their cues from that kind of source?
Really this whole "story" seems to amount to little more than the NY Post saying "hey, we published this ridiculous story a couple years ago, which combined a couple innocuous facts with a whole lot of wild speculation, which people ignored, and now there is evidence that the innocuous facts were true, which means the wild speculation must be as well!".
Even if you could prove that Hunter Biden's laptop contains evidence of criminal or treasonous activity, you'd still have all your work ahead of you to show that "suppressing" the story was the work of some malicious cabal.
What is even more amusing is that the kinds of things the Post is probably hoping are on Mr Biden's laptop (the one they claimed they had but couldn't produce, remember) are exactly the kinds of things that Mr Trump, his children, and his campaign advisors were actually caught in the act of doing. Double standard time! Or rather, to say it another way, GOP time!
Exactly. The whole argument is circular - What exactly was the cover up? I know this for sure - I won't be voting for Hunter Biden in 2024.
I also won't take a lecture from the political party who looked the other way while Don Jr. welcomed dirt on Hillary from the Russians, while Eric bragged that "we have all the funding we need from the Russians", while Kushner ran half of the executive office, while Ivanka sat in on U.N. meetings and got beneficial treatment for her failed clothing line once Daddy took office.
Trump lowered the standards across the board, and I certainly have no interest in unilaterally disarming.
Not that I want to get into it over the contents, before the Times came out, Ben Schrekinger at Politico did verify some of the contents on the laptop while writing his book on Biden. How much is genuine and how much is fake is really anyone's guess, but I am willing to believe that the laptop has material information on it. I think that Schrekinger is a good journalist and is pretty damn thorough as well. Plus, he's at Politico, which is far from a right leaning website, so it's not a conspiracy theorist coming forth. I think that it's fair to ask more about the suppression of the story than the laptop itself. I think that's the bigger issue anyway.
But if the laptop itself is a nothingburger of a story, then "suppressing" it isn't a story either. No one is obligated to report on every random conspiracy theory the American right wing comes up with - they're so ubiquitous that you wouldn't read any actual news if that was the case.
And besides, we have the exact reason most mainstream journalists didn't report on it (emphasis on journalist): a whole bunch of national security and intelligence officials came out and said that in their best judgement, the whole thing was a misinformation campaign coming out of Russia to sow chaos and discord ahead of the election. Seeing as the media got burned in 2016 by reporting on every stupid Republican conspiracy theory in exactly that manner, their decision to avoid it a second time is not only understandable, but prudent.
Right now, you have a tabloid newspaper flinging a whole bunch of unconnected and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories around and pretending it forms a coherent, factual narrative. Anyone repeating that narrative without actually connecting those dots is doing exactly what the Post accuses the "mainstream media" of doing - forming a vast conspiracy to cover up facts and/or the truth in service to a specific political agenda.
As always when it comes to American conservatism, it's deliberately concocted to be a no-win situation for those on the side of responsible governance, or responsible anything. Either you exercise discretion and some semblance of judgement and common sense, and you're attacked for being partisan, or you stoop to their level, at which point it's assumed that both sides are playing equally fast and loose with the truth.
Remember, "alternative facts" didn't spring out of nowhere. It's part of an ongoing, deliberate attempt by American conservatives to erase the idea that there is a standard of truth and honesty that should be upheld, so that they can claim their opinions are as valid and should be taken as seriously as anyone else's facts. Which in turn is just an attempt to undermine democracy and revert to autocratic minority rule. Hence the whole "overthrow the government and install a dictator" thing we saw most national Republicans endorse on Jan 6th last year.
To be clear, I'm not taking a side on anything with this. I'm also not trying to make it political because, quite frankly, this isn't a political story to me. I'm also taking an apolitical stance as best I can here because this shouldn't be a "Liberal" or a "Conservative" issue.
The laptop is a story because it alleges influence peddling, particularly highlighting Hunter's dealing while his dad served as Vice President. That is a story in its own right. I'm fine ignoring all of the scumbag shit that Hunter Biden did and managed to incriminate himself with that was found on the laptop because it's irrelevant to the story. The fact that there is enough on this laptop to confirm that there is valid information in it is one thing. The fact that it took a journalist from Politico, of all places, to do the due diligence and prove that there is enough in the data that was independently confirmed by Schrekinger to make me believe that the laptop was owned by Hunter Biden. I know it is a difficult pill to swallow for many. While I take issue with the fact that it took forever to have any reporting on the validity of the laptop, a story like this shouldn't have been censored. This type of allegation of corruption sits at the same level as much of what was said about Trump's family. Instead of shying away from it, it should have been vetted further.
If we want to focus on the laptop, then the lack of denial from anyone in the Biden administration or Biden family is important because it puts the seed of doubt out there. No denial means that these documents may actually be authentic, and if they are authentic, then it poses the same kind of moral and ethical problems of the last administration. Look, by not denying the story, the Biden camp did nothing to kill the story as a lie or raise doubts. The media did that for them. As soon as the Biden camp denies it, it questions the validity of the laptop until the data is verified. The fact that Hunter's associates, Devon Archer, Ye Jianming, and Patrick Ho, have all be been charged with committing crimes still remains. Archer, who had ties to Burisma, was charged with fraud tied to a bond issuance. Ye, tied to Hunter’s project with China, was implicated in bribery charges in China. Ho, also tied to Hunter’s project with China, was convicted of bribery charges by a federal court. By the way, this was from the Politico article I linked in my earlier post, so I'm not using "Right Leaning" sources here. Add in the convenient fact that Biden has come out against corruption, and there is a clear problem. I'm not saying that this issue is unique to one party or the other. Politicians have used foundations and initiatives to skirt laws against pay-for-play to engage in influence peddling for a long time. What I am saying though, is that story of the laptop is a non-partisan issue of pay to play, corruption, and that the allegation that Biden knew was enough to warrant publishing.
It's also important to note that the New York Post isn't just "Some Tabloid". The Post is the 4th largest print newspaper in the country. Tabloid or not, there is a national circulation of ~425K papers in the US. Only USA Today (~1.6MM), the WSJ (~1MM), and the NYT (~480K) are ahead of it. And the LA Times ranks 5th with ~418K. After that, we're talking about WaPo, which is ~255K. So it's not an insignificant paper. If other newspapers choose not to run the story, that's one thing. However, for a major publisher to get censored over it is more concerning.
Just look at the timeline here - The Post published the story. Twitter and Facebook both censored it as disinformation even though this is a MAJOR US Newspaper. Once censored, you then have US Intelligence officials calling it disinformation, absolute silence from the Biden camp, and a media blackout of allegations that should have been discussed. To be clear, the letter in question signed by the Intelligence community explicitly stated "We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case." That is an explicit admission that they didn't know if it was true or not. The Media ignored the admission of ignorance and still used the letter to suggest Russian involvement. NPR openly stated, "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories... Or waste the readers' and listeners' time on stories that are just pure distractions." 60 Minutes just went with "It can't be verified.", despite the fact that Schrekinger did just with a number of documents from that laptop as part of the process for writing his book. What we have here is active collusion to bury a story that should have been covered. That’s suppression of information… Censorship.
If we look at Facebook's choosing to suppress the story, the executive who put out the statement was a Democratic operative with ties to Senator Boxer, Representative McNerney, and Democratic fundraising organizations. He said the story would be censored pending an independent fact check, one that arguably is true in light of Schrekinger's research. That deprived how many millions of people of the right to read the article? The Post has 2.4MM twitter followers. Twitter's censorship deprived those followers the right to read the article or share it. Given the timing of it, the political motivation for censorship can't be understated. However, what is appalling about the issue of censorship is that it goes against the constitutional right for freedom of the press. The Post published a story and Big Tech said it was OK to suppress it. Suppression and censorship open the door to allow journalists and the media justification to refuse reporting on newsworthy stories. What happened was, essentially, a reversal of the 2016 playbook where these same outlets allowed reporting on John Podesta and his cache of leaked emails. Instead of reporting on this as an actual story, they chose to ignore it as not to repeat what happened to Hillary. Instead of publishing a story that was backed by documents capable of being authenticated and was in the public interest, most major outlets suppressed the story and denied it. Instead of investigating and proving this wrong, they made excuses why it should be ignored. It just further erodes the trust in media and forces people to question how much they should trust Big Tech.
If there was no censorship, would this have become a bigger story? I doubt it. However, the censorship blew to the stratosphere. This isn’t what happens in the US; it’s used by autocrats and dictators. This is an absurd case of partisan politics at play and shows the double standard of reporting. Instead of digging into the news and finding the truth, the suppression of this story showed how much Big Tech and the media care about who benefitted from the story. That should not happen. It is not a political statement, but an ideological one. The purpose of the freedom of the press is to allow the media to function as a watchdog and report on wrongdoing. These allegations reeked of potential wrongdoing. What’s worse is that these allegations reek of public corruption under the guise of influence peddling. Suppressing a story alleging that Hunter Biden engaged in influence peddling to his benefit while using his father’s position as Vice President to do so is the kind of thing we don’t want. If the accusation is that Trump set the bar so low that we need a President to bring it back up, how can anyone be comfortable with suppressing this story? This kind of abdication of responsibility should not have happened and should have been investigated further, especially in an election year.
What happens if the shoe were on the other foot, and this was Don Jr's laptop, with enough allegations of corruption on it, and a story like this was posted and then immediately censored? Let's say this played out exactly like what happened in the final weeks of the election? How would you view that? Would you assume that the Laptop has to be real? Or that those corroborating it are telling the truth and Trump should be tried for influence peddling? Would you be saying that the immediate censorship of the article was wrong and shouldn't have happened? This isn't a one way street where Anti-Trump is perfectly fine, but Anti-Biden is morally reprehensible. Allegations of corruption and influence peddling from the President or Vice-President can't get swept under the rug because you don't like one side or the other. It doesn't matter to me who it is, the failure to cover this story and then further censorship and refusal to investigate make this a huge problem.
Not a Biden voter.
But, who cares? Hunter is not in office, or any meaningful position AND it's not as if trump voters had a problem with inappropriate family involvement in politics anyway. Both political parties in this country always focus on the most trivial crap.
To be fair, a sitting POTUS having his personal attorney running a shadow government for the purpose of extorting a foreign government into digging up dirt on his political rivals isn't "trivial crap". That's a huge fucking deal, arguably the biggest government scandal since Ronald Reagan made the United States and illegal arms dealer in order to finance a slush fund to overthrow democratically elected governments.
And for those that don't follow politics as closely as we do, the foreign government in question was Ukraine. Trump withheld Congress-approved defense spending from Zelensky until he promised to investigate Biden. Trump's first campaign manager was working for the Kremlin inside of Ukraine when he was hand selected to run Trump's campaign despite no previous relationship with Trump. He was then sentenced to 7 years in prison, but immediately pardoned by Trump. I'm sure it's nothing...
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