Their own worst enemies

I don't care what was on Hunter Biden's computer. I do care about how many media outlets handled the story.

Here’s the thing about Hunter Biden’s laptop: I really couldn’t care less about what’s on it. It could have contained videos of he and his father throwing adorable puppy dogs out of third-storey windows to see if they could fly like in Raul’s Wild Kingdom, and it still wouldn’t have made me support Trump in 2020.

I’m pretty sure Weird Al became a vegetarian to make up for this scene.

Outside of the right-wing fever swamps in which people are still going on about Seth Rich and probably even The Clinton Chronicles, I doubt many other people would have cared about Hunter’s laptop, either. Problem is, many media outlets and social media platforms bent over backwards to make sure you couldn’t learn about it in the first place.

Two years later, with Biden in the White House and Ukraine very much in the news, The New York Times concedes that the laptop contents were real and not a Russian-backed disinformation campaign.

Take it away, Nellie Bowles:

The New York Post—the one outlet that reported on the story—was punished by Silicon Valley. Twitter shut down the Post’s account for 16 days and blocked people from sharing any information about the laptop or the news about its content. Anyone who attempted to post the story saw their accounts locked. Facebook said it would “limit distribution” of the story, making sharing the information similarly impossible. 

The blockade was brilliantly effective. In polite circles, the laptop and its incriminating contents became verboten—if you entertained the story it meant you were a conspiracy theorist. 

Now, 14 months into his tenure in the White House, buried in the 24th paragraph in a recent New York Times story, is a quiet aside: The laptop was real. And the Times confirmed the veracity of his emails.

From the Times: “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

As Hunter Biden faces a major Justice Department probe, with a grand jury looking for information on his financial dealings around the world, the mainstream press quietly acknowledges that the information they suppressed as fake before the 2020 election was actually true.

There are no apologies, of course. If you want to understand why no one trusts the press, this is why. 

That’s not the only reason no one trusts the media anymore. Many of the people now claiming vindication over Hunter’s laptop contents have for years been using the Steve Bannon strategy to make everyone confused and distrustful of established news outlets.

Golden Corral’s new slogan!

“Hey, who knows what’s even true anymore? Everyone lies sometimes and you have to do your own research and think for yourself. Watch “War Room: Pandemic” on Rumble!”

That said, it would really help matters if legitimate news outlets didn’t so regularly and so blatantly put their thumbs on the scale. We saw this in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the very idea that it might have escaped from a Chinese laboratory was deemed an outlandish, racist conspiracy theory, until one day it wasn’t.