OPINION:
In news almost everyone saw coming, Monday morning Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced he would hold no further press events until after the final presidential debate with Donald Trump on Thursday. What’s remarkable is not the duck-and-cover routine Mr. Biden has been playing — we all know what that’s about — but the fact that the media is simply willing to accept whatever political ploy from the campaign, no matter how anti-democratic.
Mr. Biden refuses to answer questions about court-packing? No problem, the public does not need to know. Mr. Biden calls off press questioning for a week? By all means, get your rest, sir. Mr. Biden calls off the second debate? Well, one can never be too safe with COVID-19 around.
The complicity of the press covering for one candidate is not a new. It may be more pronounced, but it’s an old trick. And as long as there existed an even balance in the media, things more or less were tolerable. But today things are different. Not only is there an imbalance in the partisan leanings of the press — the vast majority of outlets swing far leftward — but now Silicon Valley has joined the news world (whether they admit it or not), curating what can and cannot be seen.
What happened to the New York Post is a good case in point — and a harbinger of things to come.
Last week the Post broke a story on the lucrative financial connection between Hunter Biden and Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Mr. Biden (then the vice president), who has yet to be implicated in the story, at the very least has the aroma of the scandal about him — surely something the American public deserves to understand prior to the election.
And so, when Twitter and Facebook blacklisted and banned the verified and thoroughly reported story, it came as a shock to conservatives and (some) liberals alike. Both companies have since, and to varying and lesser extents, reversed course on their original decisions, but for quite a few days, the Post reporting on Hunter Biden was prohibited from being shared on social media.
Because Facebook and Twitter so dominate our media-sharing landscape, their decisions effectively killed an important story. Sure, the House Judiciary Committee and a few patriotic representatives reprinted and shared the story during the blackout, but it had no effect. The will of the Democratic Party and Western techies had been done.
Now, you might ask why such fabulous, fantastical and plain fabricated stories like Russiagate have been allowed to circulate freely. Why all sorts of inane, insane, and malicious is allowed to float freely on social media. Why China, for instance, can run stories intended to distort our political and social life on Twitter and Facebook without reproach. Silicon Valley does not have a good answer for this, so allow an interpretation of their silence and then a prediction: Donald Trump, in their estimation, simply will not be allowed reelection. He is too much a threat to their stranglehold on American thought and speech. And the prediction: If you are conservative, get ready for four years of censorship and repression the likes of which have been hitherto confined to scenes from “1984.”
The test-run of the repressive corporate future liberals want just happened.
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