Few who pay attention should be shocked, but for those who still look to the “newspaper of record” to be the newspaper of record, the New York Times has acknowledged – some 17 months after the story broke – that President Biden’s son’s laptop was indeed President Biden’s son’s laptop.
As Glenn Greenwald recounts in the above link, the oldest newspaper in the US, the NY Post, broke an explosive story just weeks before the US presidential election: Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden’s son had left a laptop computer at a repair shop and never returned for it. On the computer was a veritable cornucopia of corruption liberally seasoned with some of the most depraved behaviors known to man.
The tales of corruption from that laptop, apparently leading up to the “big guy” himself, may have been enough to have turned the electoral tide against Biden. As a result, the entire US mainstream media moved as one to suppress any mention of the “laptop from hell.”
They refused to even cover it in the media and they erased it completely from the social media. Twitter actually suspended the account of the New York Post for two weeks as punishment for breaking the story. Facebook’s Andy S
tone – a longtime Democratic Party political operative – was trotted out to inform the world that Facebook would actively use its tech powers to suppress any discussion of the laptop.
The message was clear: the US media delivers narratives, not information.
But their next move is where it gets most interesting and revealing. The powers-that-be then trotted out very CIA-friendly “reporter” Natasha Bertrand to launch a nuclear strike on the trickling out of Hunter laptop information. As she wrote for Politico, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
The story cited some 50 “former intelligence officers” who signed a letter “casting doubt on the provenance of a New York Post story on the former vice president’s son.”
In one fell swoop, any inquiry into the laptop was halted in its tracks. If the whole story is a plant from Russian intelligence to get Trump another turn, obviously any journalist – or anyone else – looking into the story or even discussing the story was doing the bidding of a foreign intelligence service. A traitor!
Never mind that the 50 intel officers actually said no such thing. What they actually said was:
We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.
For propaganda purposes, this little qualifier was not even a speed bump on the road to “Biden laptop is Russian disinfo” that came pouring out of every MSM outlet. Here is a very helpful montage of the entire choir of the US mainstream media singing as one on the topic of “Russian disinformation.”
Many people sensed at the time that the whole thing was a lie. But still there is that nagging feeling: “I don’t want to be accused of spreading Russian disinformation so I just won’t mention it to anyone or even read about it.”
That’s how information has been suppressed by totalitarian governments from time immemorial. Censorship and demonization leads to self-censorship and the burial of any information counter to the desired narrative. Rinse and repeat.
Accusations of “Russia collusion” or “repeating Putin’s talking points” is just a variation of the old Soviet accusations of counter-narratives being the product of “foreign wreckers” or “lapdogs of imperialism.”
Lies to demonize the truth.
As Dr. Paul has said many times on the Liberty Report, under communism they would not automatically send you off to the gulag for “anti-state” activities. Sometimes they would just take away your livelihood. Being fired from a job and being unemployable is a kind of existential purgatory where one’s “sins” may or may not eventually be expiated in a rehabilitation. But in the meantime it feels like hell.
That is, shockingly, where we are in this country. And it is only made all the more obvious with the current Russia/Ukraine war. In the “West,” which prided itself on its liberal outlook to include free speech and free expression (in contrast to that “evil East” which suppressed such products of the Enlightenment), the very first move when shots rang out was to begin suppressing any counter-narratives. Americans and citizens of the EU were to be forbidden from watching any broadcast seeking to provide the other side of the story. RT was banned. Same with Sputnik. Even the personal Twitter profiles of American citizens who happened to be employed by these news outlets found a label slapped on their page identifying them as “Russian state-affiliated media.”
Twitter even just labeled the personal account of former RT news anchor Ed Schultz to be “Russian state-affiliated media.” One problem: Schultz has been dead for four years!!!
The message is clear: these are non-persons. Engage with them at your own risk. Even if they are dead!
That is the goal of the “Russia disinfo” tag, which has been used to attack truth-tellers and challengers of “conventional wisdom” for years. Just weeks before the 2016 presidential election, the Washington Post ran a scurrilous piece accusing many dozens of independent news and analysis organizations – including LewRockwell.com, ZeroHedge, Antiwar.com, and, yes, even the Ron Paul Institute – of being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.”
The current Ukraine/Russia war – no matter what you think of who is responsible etc. – is proceeding on those same lines, but on steroids. If you dare question whether Ukraine’s Zelensky – who until recently was a soft-porn TV comedian – is the second coming of Mother Theresa (as Col. Macgregor recently joked) you are a Putin apologist spreading “Russian disinformation.”
The real importance of the Biden laptop is that the term “Russian disinformation” to suppress facts and distort reality is now laid bare as the stuff of totalitarian governments. And our government and media are joining forces in that totalitarianism.
Just like Soviet thugs sought to deprive dissenters of their ability to provide for themselves, our modern day thugs seek to deprive the livelihoods of organizations questioning what we know are lies layered upon lies. They want to intimidate people into withholding support for truth-tellers – be it Julian Assange, RT, ZeroHedge, or the Ron Paul Institute. We know you will not allow that to happen and we are grateful to you for that.
