Watching the media scramble these last two weeks to save Joe Biden’s candidacy, I am reminded of a scene in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian sci-fi classic, Fahrenheit 451, 451 degrees Fahrenheit being the temperature at which paper burns.
In the novel, the state employs “firemen” to burn paper lest the few civilians who care about books avail themselves of information the state does not want them to have. During the Biden stretch run, the firemen on the left have shredded what is left of their reputations as journalists to destroy information the Deep State does not want their audiences to have.
Fahrenheit 451
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Even before Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced, the media busied themselves suppressing information that was readily available to the ordinary citizen — montages of Biden plagiarizing, groping little girls, making racially insensitive comments, eulogizing exalted KKK cyclops, threatening Ukrainian prosecutors, even sexually assaulting at least one very credible Democrat — and they did so with enough success that the Biden camp felt comfortable positioning Joe as the candidate with “character.”
The Hunter laptop was too tangible to dispose of subtly. Not since Joseph Goebbels urged the German Student Union “to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past” has a western nation so flagrantly thrown in on the side of ignorance. Twitter has gotten most of the attention for its total blocking of the New York Post, which broke the laptop story, but the firemen at NPR were not far behind.
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel told his audience in the way of answering a reader question. “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was… a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.” NPR’s public editor added that, in any case, “the assertions don’t amount to much.”
Unmasking Obama: The F...
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Had it not been for the final debate, the firemen might have succeeded in keeping major media audiences fully in the dark about what Trump called the “laptop from hell.” Knowing the subject would surface, Biden came prepared. He dismissed the laptop as a “Russian plant” and had his allies line up some 50 “intelligence” officials who seemed to agree with him.
The more sober members of the major media knew the “Russia, Russia, Russia” accusation — as Trump aptly mocked it — was insane, but it was out there. No longer able to burn it, they had to finesse it into insignificance. Top honors for sophistry in this effort go to the Washington Post and its “disinformation and political warfare” fireman, Thomas Rid.
