Looking Back at the Censorship of the NY Post Story about Hunter Biden’s Laptop

I repeatedly encounter people who identify on the political left who insist that the Laptop found at a computer shop in October, 2020 was not Hunter Biden's laptop and that it was a Russian ploy to interfere with the U.S. Presidential election.  The fact that these beliefs persist tells a sad story about the power the news media has to defraud its trusting audience.

This CBS Report from April 3, 2021 is recent confirmation of my belief that the laptop really was Hunter Biden's laptop. April 2021, long after the election was decided, was a politically convenient time and place for Hunter to deny that the laptop was his, but he didn't deny it. October, 2020, when the NY Post initially  reported on the laptop, prior to the election, was also the perfect time for Hunter Biden to deny that it was his laptop, but he didn't deny it then either. He has never denied that it was his laptop. In fact, in the above CBS interview Hunter Biden stated that it is possible that it might have been his laptop. Watch the CBS video excerpt and observe Hunter Biden's demeanor. Is this the sort of person who would use his father's name to cut lucrative self-serving deals with foreign powers? Is that the sort of person who would write the emails found on the laptop. Seems apparent to me.

If this laptop and payoff had been about any of Trump's degenerate children, the media would have been all over it. The failure to cover this story is stunning jour - - - I almost wrote "journalistic malpractice," but it was far worse. It was an intentional and deliberate ongoing muti--news-outlet conspiracy to keep citizens from knowing something important that might affect their views on an upcoming election. Full disclosure: I voted for Biden and I was horrified by the thought that Trump might win a second term. There are more important principles at play, however, than the result of any one election. See Russell Brand's interview with Glenn Greenwald on this topic:

Glenn Greenwald has focused laserlike on this topic from the beginning. His felt need to tell the truth cost him his job at The Intercept, a news organization he founded. See "Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept: An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept." See also, Greenwald's article on the alleged Russian disinformation: "With News of Hunter Biden's Criminal Probe, Recall the Media Outlets That Peddled the "Russian Disinformation" Lie."

Were the materials on Hunter Biden's laptop the sorts of things the media should report on? The NY Post described some of the materials here:

In the final months of the heated 2020 presidential race, The Post revealed a trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop that raised questions about his then-candidate father’s ties to his son’s foreign business ventures, including Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company linked to corruption.

The emails revealed that the younger Biden introduced a top Burisma executive to his father, then vice president, less than a year before the elder Biden admittedly pressured Ukrainian officials into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, a Burisma board adviser, sent Hunter on April 17, 2015.

An image of Hunter Biden found on the laptop at the center of The Post exposé The water-damaged MacBook Pro — which bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation — was dropped off for repair at a Delaware computer shop in April 2019, but the individual who dropped it off never returned to pick it up.

. . .

In addition to his Ukrainian connections, other emails on the computer showed Hunter discussing potential business deals with China’s largest private energy company. One deal seemed to spark considerable interest with the younger Biden, who called it “interesting for me and my family.”

. ..

Hunter Biden’s position with the reportedly corrupt energy company — which paid him “as much as $50,000 per month” — “created an immediate potential conflict of interest” because his father was involved in US policy toward Ukraine, the report stated.

This is a complex story with fails in many directions, including Twitter's stunning decision to shut down the Twitter account of the NY Post so that it could not promote its blockbuster story.

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“Fact-Checking” Lurches Along

As Matt Taibbi indicates in his article, he is not taking a position on whether the "lab origin" theory is true. That said, in his article on "fact-checking," he describes what goes for serious reporting on a most urgent topic in modern day America:

Fauci’s new quote about not being “convinced” that Covid-19 has natural origins, however, is part of what’s becoming a rather ostentatious change of heart within officialdom about the viability of the so-called “lab origin” hypothesis. Through 2020, officials and mainstream press shut down most every discussion on that score. Reporters were heavily influenced by a group letter signed by 27 eminent virologists in the Lancet last February in which the authors said they “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” and also by a Nature Medicine letter last March saying, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct.”

The consensus was so strong that some well-known voices saw social media accounts suspended or closed for speculating about Covid-19 having a “lab origin.” One of those was University of Hong Kong virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who went on Tucker Carlson’s show last September 15th to say “[Covid-19] is a man-made virus created in the lab.” After that appearance, PolitiFact — Poynter’s PolitiFact — gave the statement its dreaded “Pants on Fire” rating.

. . .

Fact-checking was a huge boon when it was an out-of-sight process quietly polishing the turd of industrial reportage. When companies dragged it out in public and made it a beast of burden for use in impressing audiences, they defamed the tradition.

We know only a few things absolutely for sure, like the spelling of “femur” or Blaine Gabbert’s career interception total. The public knows pretty much everything else is up for argument, so we only look like jerks pretending we can fact-check the universe. We’d do better admitting what we don’t know.

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Andy NGO Discusses ANTIFA, Including Media Coverage

Earlier this month, independent journalist Andy Ngo gave a talks at Hillsdale College. I saw images and videos I hadn't before seen, including massive disruption and violence in downtown Portland, Oregon. Until I saw this, I only had a vague notion of the goals and history of ANTIFA. Ngo's account is the only detailed account I have heard, so I won't pretend that anyone should stop their research after watching this one presentation.

That said, Ngo's account of ANTIFA provided considerable detailed information I had not heard before, even though I had often heard the term ANTIFA. Mostly, I had heard the term ANTIFA as part of a dispute of whether the group even exists. Ngo showed the audience these headlines:

My reason for sharing this video is twofold. Andy Ngo presents detailed information about an ideology (Ngo explains it is not one cohesive group) about which I hadn't before heard detailed information.

Much more interesting and concerning to me is the legacy media's almost total shutdown of selected events. I invite you to visit NPR/NYT/WP and word search for the terms "ANTIFA," "Portland" or "riot" and compare the threadbare on-the-ground news coverage of what happened on the streets with the vast and intense news coverage you will see for "Capitol Riot." I was disturbed by both of these incidents. I see them both as attacks on my government. These were both attempts to invoke a feeling of chaos and loss of confidence in the social order. In Portland, I see a federal courthouse under attack, night after night, forcing police into a defensive shell, hopelessly waiting it out. As I watch these videos and photos it repeatedly occurs to me that Courthouse are where our Civil Rights Laws are often enforced, where people abused by government action find a remedy. Yet the images show repeated attempts to damage or destroy it. The attacks on Portland (and Seattle) lasted for weeks, and they included substantial violence and destruction of property, far more than the damage down the our DC Capitol. The violence in Minneapolis amounted to a half-billion in uninsured property losses, substantial amount of this falling on fledgling businesses and immigrant shopkeepers.

I can think of no better evidence proving that the left-leaning media consciously embraces its chosen narrative every bit as much as FOX does on the political right. This is important to see, at a time when numerous left-leaning people I know insist that there is no such thing bias on the left. I personally know dozens of people who deny media bias on the left, people who hunker down only with NPR/NYT/WP and assume that they are getting the full story.

Continue ReadingAndy NGO Discusses ANTIFA, Including Media Coverage

CNN’s Puff Piece on Transgender Issues

CNN has published an article on transgender that gets one thing right: Many more young adults are claiming to be transgender compared to only a few years ago. The title: "High schoolers may be more gender-diverse than previously thought, new study says."

This is a classic one-sided puff-piece honed to fit the prevailing narrative. Apparently, we can sidestep a well-established medical term "gender dysphoria" by simply asking a CHILD if they are gender dysphoric (ignoring the effects of social media driven contagion). That number of almost 2% number corroborates with what Abigail Shrier stated, when she was excoriated for suggesting that something ELSE was going on when there is a 4000% increase in "gender dysporia" within a few short years (and see here). According to this CNN article, it's supposedly all very simple:

More awareness, more understanding, more exploration. One is that there is a greater understanding of the naturalness of gender diversity, whether that's expressed in terms we use to define ourselves, the way we dress, or how we see ourselves in relation to our culture. "Being gender-diverse is a totally normal part of human experience," [Dr. Kacie] Kidd said.

I have no problem with any adult doing anything they want with their body, sleeping with anyone they want, doing any surgery or hormones. But I am against casually expanding a known and useful medical term that only yesterday applied to only 1 out of 10,000 people, mostly males, claiming that it now applies to almost 2% of high schoolers, mostly girls, shutting off the obvious questions that should be asked about why this is happening. There are no mentions of "contagion" or "Shrier" in this article. There is no mention of the dangers of teenage use of puberty blockers and hormones (including sterility). There is no mention that therapists are being prevented from giving real counseling to teenagers who claim to be transgender based on "conversion therapy" laws. This article has been carefully pruned to make sure that serious pressing questions are not raised.

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Greenwald: Trump’s Confrontational Russia Foreign Policy Was the Opposite of Obama’s Accommodationist Foreign Policy

From most legacy media reports, you would think that Donald Trump was a pawn of the Russian government. You'd never know that this narrative was wildly spun fiction concocted to get Trump out of the White House (Note: I am glad he's out of the White House).

The fable that Trump's foreign policy accommodated Russia lingers, however. As Matt Taibbi showed with numerous exhibits, we were showered with (literally) fake news suggesting that Trump was over-friendly to Russia. Now, Glenn Greenwald has written an article comparing Trump's often confrontational foreign policy toward Russia to the Obama's (and now Biden's) accommodationist policy toward Russia. By writing this, I'm not pretending to know how to approach foreign policy toward Russia. I suspect that I don't know many of the relevant facts (because I'm ignorant of them or because they are secret). Rather, I'm linking to Greenwald's article because the information he presents is shockingly counter to the prevailing narrative of the majority of legacy news outlets: "Biden, Reversing Trump, Permits a Key Putin Goal: a New Russian Natural Gas Pipeline to Germany: That Trump was controlled by Putin and served his agenda was the opposite of reality. First Obama, and now Biden, have accommodated Moscow far more." Here are a few excerpts:

When it came to actual vital Russian interests — as opposed to the symbolic gestures hyped by the liberal cable and op-ed page circus — Trump and his administration were confronting and undermining the Kremlin in ways Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had, to his credit, steadfastly refused to do.

Indeed, the foreign policy trait relentlessly attributed to Trump in support of the media’s Cold War conspiracy theory — namely, an aversion to confronting Putin — was, in reality, an overarching and explicit belief of President Obama’s foreign policy, not President Trump. During the 2012 presidential election, Obama and the Democratic Party famously and repeatedly mocked GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s warnings about the threat posed by Russia as a “relic of the Cold War.”

.    .   .

Consistent with that view, Obama rejected bipartisan demands to send lethal weapons to Ukraine throughout 2015 and into 2016. Even when Russia reasserted control over Crimea in 2014 after citizens overwhelmingly approved it in a referendum, Obama did little more than impose some toothless sanctions (though he did preside over, if not engineer, regime change efforts in Ukraine that swept out the pro-Moscow leader and replaced him with a pro-U.S. lackey). Obama worked directly with Putin to forge an agreement with Russia’s allies in Tehran to lift sanctions against Iran and bring them back into the international community, and then publicly praised the Russian leader for the constructive role he played in orchestrating that agreement.

And, enraging the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy community, Obama even refused to follow through on his own declared “red line” to attack Russia’s key ally in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad. Indeed, even after Russia asserted governance over Crimea, and even after Russia is said by intelligence agencies to have hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s computers, Obama, in 2016, sought to form a partnership with Russia in Syria to jointly bomb targets regarded by the two governments as “terrorists.”

Meanwhile, Trump — even as media figures gorged themselves on the conspiracy theory that he was a Kremlin agent — reversed virtually all of those Obama-era accommodations to Putin. Again and again, Trump acted contrary to the Kremlin’s core interests. After publicly threatening Russia over Syria, Trump twice bombed Putin’s key Middle Eastern ally — something Obama refused to do . . . Trump also reversed Obama’s Ukraine policy, sending the exact lethal arms to anti-Russian elements that Obama warned would be directly threatening to the Kremlin and thus excessively provocative. Trump filled his administration with long-time anti-Russia hawks who would never have been welcomed in the Obama administration (including CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, NATO Ambassador Richard Grenell, and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley).

These excerpts are part of Greenwald's much longer, factually supported article.

Continue ReadingGreenwald: Trump’s Confrontational Russia Foreign Policy Was the Opposite of Obama’s Accommodationist Foreign Policy