The vicious and coordinated attacks by mainstream news figures against independent journalist Matt Taibbi in recent days reinforce an essential point about the American news media: they think we are all drooling idiots. Their response to Taibbi’s release of the Twitter Files, which details the company’s calculated suppression of a major news story in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, underscores this exceedingly low estimation of its audience.
Outlets like MSNBC and the New York Times seem to hope the American public is ignorant of the fact that they got every aspect of the Hunter Biden laptop story wrong from the start. While real journalists tenaciously reported the facts, such as the New York Post’s Miranda Devine, a disinformation machine comprised of Biden campaign officials, intelligence officials, liberal journalists, and Twitter higher-ups (with the omission of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was strangely left out of the loop) acted in brazen coordination to suppress the story.
Biden officials worked feverishly behind the scenes to “flag” Twitter posts that mentioned Devine’s article, and Twitter, due to the overwhelmingly leftist makeup of its employees, dutifully did their bidding by removing “wrongthink” from the platform. Twitter even suspended the New York Post’s account for having the gall to report a story that was damaging to the Biden campaign in the first place.
Mainstream liberal journalists, ever docile and obedient toward the establishment powers-that-be, also did their part by repeating the lies of a cadre of former intelligence officials who released a joint statement dismissing the story as “Russian disinformation.” Talking heads and partisan hacks hypnotically repeated this authoritative assessment, falsely claiming the Biden laptop story had “the classic earmarks” of a Russian psyop.
It is now a proven fact, however, that Twitter/Biden/CIA/liberal media psyop forced onto the public was the real source of disinformation, and it unfurled with military precision and force.
In recent days, the very same liberal media figures who did the bidding of the establishment have sneeringly dismissed the reporting of Taibbi, whose Twitter Files expo underscores what we already know to be true: that the aforementioned forces within the establishment sphere pose an immediate threat to our democracy in a way that former President Donald Trump could only dream of being. Liberal media thugs like NBC’s Ben Collins, for example, only exist in this industry to protect entrenched power in exchange for job security and the occasional pat on the head. Collins, who last week disparagingly referred to Taibbi as “Substack Man,” couldn’t carry Taibbi’s pencil case. (I would, right now, give my entire life savings and my dog to see those two discuss the Hunter Biden laptop saga on a debate stage).
The establishment press corp’s playbook in the wake of the Twitter Files release has been typical as well as depressingly effective. First, as previously mentioned, they’ve attacked the messenger in a coordinated fashion, as if we are all too thick to notice that they’re each using the exact same phrase to do so. They’ve also attempted to downplay the significance of the laptop story itself, despite the fact that it contains evidence that directly implicates the president of the United States, who, while serving as vice president, allegedly peddled his influence to foreign governments. Sounds like a real snooze of a story, doesn’t it?
Finally, and perhaps most cleverly, the liberal establishment has exploited the public’s increasing tendency toward tribalism by framing the story within the stale confines of pro-Trump or anti-Trump sentiment. In their telling, to be bothered by Twitter’s election meddling (not to mention their brazen flouting of First Amendment principles, as outlined admirably by progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) in the Wall Street Journal) is to be sympathetic to Trump’s demonstrably false claims that he won the 2020 election. They desperately want the American public to stuff themselves into these boxes in order to retain control over the narrative and to deflect from their own pitiful journalistic performances.
But above all, as ever, their mission is to protect entrenched power. The Twitter Files are just the start of what needs to happen if we’re to make sure that power is stripped from them for good.
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Peter Laffin is a writer in New England. Follow him on Twitter at @Laffin_Out_Loud.
