David Harsanyi
The Federalist, Dec. 6, 2022
“… the Hunter story — with receipts, hard evidence, and on-the-record witnesses — had far more journalistic substantiation than virtually any of the anonymous one-source Russia-collusion “scoops” that Bump and The Washington Post peddled for years.”
A rant.
Mostly because the evidence confirms all my priors.
Elon Musk’s release of emails relating to Twitter’s 2020 presidential election censorship efforts confirms that big political media, Big Tech companies, and former intelligence officials were part of a ratf—ing operation in 2020. It confirms that the social media platform suppressed unfavorable stories to benefit one party, dispelling the notion that the platform acted as a neutral arbiter. It confirms that claims of “dis-” and “misinformation” are often used by censors to quash inconvenient news and debate. And the reaction from political journos to these revelations confirms there are no regrets.
We haven’t even seen all the emails. Not that we need a Ron Klain email demanding Twitter suspend the New York Post’s account to know what happened. Coordination doesn’t necessitate explicit instructions from a political Svengali. People know what to do without being told. Partisans coalesce around talking points and groupthink metastasizes. This happens all the time on both sides. It happened when journalist Matt Taibbi was reporting on the Twitter files the other night, and virtually every big left-wing account dropped nearly the same rhetoric and framing to smear him.
What we learned was that plenty of Twitter higher-UPS knew the company’s rationale for killing a major news story right before an election was hopelessly rickety.
“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” wrote communications official Trenton Kennedy about the Hunter story. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” then-Vice President of Global Communications Brandon Borrman asked.
But then, General Counsel Jim Baker, one of the Democrats who helped run the Russia collusion swindle on Americans (who was fired Tuesday for vetting the first batch of released emails without telling management), responded that it was “reasonable for us to assume that they may have been [hacked] and that caution is warranted.”
All they needed were 51 former intelligence officials, including known perjurers like Jim Clapper and John Brennan, to claim the Hunter Biden story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They passed this deceitful claim to the unscrupulous “journalist” Natasha Bertrand, then at Politico. From there, the story was repeated endlessly by gullible reporters and/or willful hacks. And Twitter had its justification. … SOURCE