Hunter Biden by Gaslight

In a sane world — which, apparently, this isn’t — the ongoing story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the amazing generosity of multiple countries’ oligarchs and officials in giving millions of dollars, not to mention diamonds, to the Biden family would be the top story nearly every day, as Watergate was in the early ’70s.

Of course, it’s not. In fact, the New York-to-Washington media/government hegemony has tried its best not only to avoid the topic, but it also cooperated for years trying to suppress it in favor of the “Russian collusion” hoax.

For those of us of a certain age, this isn’t unfamiliar. Sometime shortly after World War II, news became more and more dominated by television news, which pretty exclusively came out of the two weights on the Acela dumbbell, driven by the Washington Post and the New York “all the news that fits our political purposes to print” Times. So we saw the Johnson “little girl and mushroom cloud” advertisement in ’64, Walter Cronkite told us the Vietnam War was lost after what was objectively a military victory in the Tet Offensive in ’68, and, of course, there was Watergate in ’72–’75.

So it seems to me the big story now is not Hunter Biden as much as it is the fact that the legacy media hegemony has actually been dragged, kicking and screaming, to asking President-lite Biden about the Hunter Biden succession of scandal after scandal.

Biden, of course, is just outraged by the questions, more so now that he can’t just tell us the Fox reporters are “one-horse ponies.”

It actually reminds me of the run-up to the 2004 election. CBS’s flagship Sunday prime-time news show, 60 Minutes, had a massive scoop. It had obtained documentary proof, in the form of memos-to-file by his superiors, claiming that George W. Bush had used connections and family influence to enlist in the Texas Air National Guard rather than be drafted during Vietnam.

Something unexpected happened, though. The blogosphere looked at the memos and quickly noticed that the most damning memo had been typed and printed using Microsoft Word decades before Microsoft Word was actually a thing. CBS tried to dismiss it as the work of bloggers “in their pajamas,” but that didn’t work — although the phrase may be familiar to PJ (formerly Pajamas) Media readers. The internet’s freedom of speech had won.

When the smoke cleared, Bush had been re-elected, the producer had been fired, and Dan Rather was no longer CBS News’ managing editor — and shortly was “allowed to retire.” In line with the news tradition that all scandals must have a name ending in “-gate,” this became known as “Rathergate.”

So now we have Hunter’s laptop. During the Obama administration, the close relationships in the media hegemony went from being merely close to frank concupiscence. The government applied pressure not only to the press but to the major internet players to suppress the story, while the Clintons’ operation, 51 retired intelligence officials, and the legacy media lit the gaslight to try and convince us that it was all “Russian disinformation.”

Clearly, at least one lesson had been learned: the freedom of speech promised to all Americans must be suppressed and censored, and unauthorized opinions must be labeled mis- or disinformation.

This story starting to come out of the hegemonic press makes this, in my opinion, the really big story of recent weeks. The Twitter files, along with Merritt Garland’s and Chris Wray’s glaring lies, alerted the American populace to an attempt to fool us again. The media hegemony had to finally notice that it must either report the story or lose what little credibility it had left.

The facts about the Russia collusion info-op and the parallel suppression for years of the Bidens’ mystery income and its sources came out because of news coverage that finally couldn’t be suppressed because, as my friend John Gilmore said, the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.

There is a problem, however. We can’t report the news if we can’t pay for the servers, the writers, and the staff. Advertising is a source of revenue but an increasingly chancy one — the hegemony continues to suppress conservative voices in search, to demonetize conservative outlets, to put every possible obstacle in the way of uncomfortable truths.

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