I remember 2016.
That was the year in which Democrats, progressives and the media—but I repeat myself—has a hissy fit over “election interference.” The story was that the Republican candidate for president and his campaign were actively colluding with the Russian government to subvert the presidential election. It was even alleged that the candidate himself, Donald J. Trump, was V. Putin’s servile hand puppet.
Let it be stipulated that Trump has proved himself to be a bad, bad man who should never have been elected president. But one thing he wasn’t was a Russian mole. As we now know, that was a fairy tale, concocted by the Justice Department and the FBI, assiduously promoted by Democrats and the broad Left. The truth of the matter was that yes, there was election interference—by agencies of the United States government, with the objective of keeping Trump out of the White House. Once he was elected, those same agencies, with the enthusiastic collaboration of Democrats, progressives and the media, did all they could to cripple and destroy his presidency. Trump is heinous, yes. And so are his enemies.
Among Trump’s many enemies are the commissars of social media—the Inner Party, let’s call them. During the 2016 election cycle and thereafter they energetically promoted the Trump/Russia collusion narrative. More, they actively suppressed news and information that questioned or contradicted that narrative. Then they branched out. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, they took it upon themselves to stifle dissent from the official line, as exemplified by Dr. Anthony Fauci, calling it “disinformation” that was “unsafe.” In this as in electoral politics, the social media giants pledged their loyalty to the official line of the progressive establishment on issue after issue—CRT in public education, transgender ideology, and more.
In 2020 the hot topic for suppression was the sorry, sordid tale of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Joe Biden’s crackhead son is a train wreck of a human being who made his living off Dad’s notoriety as a prominent politician. The laptop that he abandoned in a Delaware computer repair shop was brimming with salacious and embarrassing information about Hunter Biden’s business and personal activities. That alone made it an embarrassment in a year when his father was running for president of the United States. The possibility that it might contain information linking Joe Biden himself to his son’s sleazeball influence peddling was enough to rally the troops once more—with the FBI and social media’s Inner Party well in the lead.
The mission this time was to stifle the laptop story, and it proceeded on two tracks. First, the FBI worked with Twitter & Co. to get the story dismissed as “Russian disinformation.” It was suggested that the laptop was inauthentic—in fact a Russian plant. A cohort of “intelligence experts” was summoned forth to declare that the laptop bore all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation. Second, when the New York Post broke the story in a big way, having authenticated a number of emails on the laptop, social media’s Inner Party, in close cooperation with the FBI, swung into action to bury it. Thus by the time it became clear that the laptop was not Russian disinformation but the real thing, Joe Biden had been elected president.
Whether a full airing of the Hunter Biden laptop story would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election is an unanswerable question; I suspect not, but who knows? That, however, is beside the point. Election interference is what it is, regardless of the outcome. And there can be no doubt that the FBI/ social media cabal was engaged in precisely that.
Enter Elon Musk.
It’s now clear why the quirky billionaire’s acquisition of Twitter sent Democrats, progressives and the media—I keep repeating myself—into a three-foot hover of panicky indignation. He arrived at Twitter HQ promising to clean house in the name of transparency and free speech. The ensuing purge has exposed the extent to which Twitter’s senior leadership actively colluded with the government to suppress or mute politically incorrect news and voices on a wide range of issues. Musk has been working with two independent journalists, Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, to publish the sordid details. Yesterday, Weiss cranked out a thread on Twitter exposing how Twitter’s Inner Party blacklisted users whose views and opinions deviated from progressive orthodoxies.
There’s likely to be much more to this sordid tale of public/private censorship and reality control—none of it flattering to those who wring their hands over threats to “our democracy.” It’s now clear that listed among those threats is freedom of speech and expression. Do you dissent? Then you’re an enemy of the people.