OPINION:
The constant trickle of lies coming out of Washington became a gusher this past week.
We’ll look below at President Biden’s State of the Union speech. But first, Big Tech took center stage at a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday.
Former Twitter executives testified that Twitter has never hassled conservatives. Nor were they politically motivated to censor the New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop just before the 2020 presidential election.
Crushing the laptop story was just a “mistake,” said Yoel Roth, former global head of trust and safety.
Sure it was. The cover-up kept the American voting public in the dark. Many learned only after the election about Hunter Biden’s perverse, drug-fueled lifestyle and the Biden family’s lucrative ties to foreign companies. These include the Ukrainian gas company Burisma and corporations run by the Chinese Communist Party. One email refers to a 10% “cut for the Big Guy.”
At the hearing, former Twitter chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, who admitted approving Twitter’s takedown of the Post’s expose, rejected the idea that politics played any part. She insisted that removing the explosive material had no “substantial impact on the public conversation ahead of the election,” The Wall Street Journal summarized. Surveys, however, indicate that an outcome-changing number of Biden voters would have switched had they known about the laptop’s shocking contents.
The hardest-to-swallow statement came from Twitter former deputy general counsel Jim Baker, who said, “I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation.”
OK, let’s connect the dots. From January 2014 to December 2017, Mr. Baker was general counsel of the FBI. He worked directly under three anti-Trump operatives: Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Director James Comey and current FBI Director Christopher Wray.
In other words, he was at the heart of the FBI legal team when the agency facilitated the Russian collusion hoax against Donald Trump in 2016 and 2017. Mr. Baker was then at Twitter from June 2020 to December 2022, before Elon Musk fired him.
Given that the corrupt FBI is functionally an arm of the Democratic Party, it’s a stretch to conclude that Mr. Baker had no FBI contacts while Twitter was muzzling conservatives and stuffing the laptop down a memory hole in 2020.
Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who spent $400 million to turn battleground states’ election offices into Democratic get-out-the-vote operations in 2020, has admitted that Facebook suppressed content at the behest of officials prior to the election.
Now, a few words about Mr. Biden’s fiery speech. It was packed with easily checked, baldfaced lies. The biggest was his claim to want an end to political “conflict.” This is the guy who called his opponents “semi-fascists,” Georgia’s election law “Jim Crow 2.0,” and said that “white supremacy” was the nation’s No. 1 security threat.
“Two years ago, our economy [under Mr. Trump] was reeling,” he said. No, it was not.
He claimed credit for reducing inflation and gasoline prices. Under Mr. Trump, inflation was under 2%. Under Mr. Biden’s spending binge and assaults on America’s energy industry, it soared to nearly 10% before coming down to a still ruinous 6.5%.
Gasoline was around two bucks a gallon under Mr. Trump. It rose to $5 under Mr. Biden before coming down to $3.50 a gallon. Mr. Biden tapped the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, selling some of the oil to Communist China, the Biden family’s business partner.
“Two years ago, COVID had shut down our businesses, closed our schools, and robbed us of so much,” Mr. Biden said.
No, it was draconian lockdowns imposed by Democrats.
According to Mr. Biden, he created more jobs — 12 million — “in two years, more than any president has ever created in four years.”
The lockdowns destroyed millions of jobs. Restoring some of them after the government’s foot came off the private sector’s neck is not the same as creating new jobs through economic expansion.
He blurted out, “I’m a capitalist,” right after a Bernie Sanders-like, class-envy pitch to go after “the wealthiest and the biggest corporations to pay their fair share.”
“Nobody earning less than $400,000 a year will pay an additional penny in taxes,” he claimed while proposing trillions more in government spending.
He accused Republicans of wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security, earning cries of “you lie” and “liar.” The GOP leadership says there will be no cuts, period.
“We now have a record number of personnel working to secure the border,” Mr. Biden claimed. This gave the false impression that the border, overrun by millions, is under control.
Mr. Biden also pushed cultural madness, including an extreme, national pro-abortion law and the “Equality Act,” which would federalize the LGBTQ agenda.
Giving the Republican response, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it best: “I’m for freedom. He’s for government control. he’s the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is. … The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left; the choice is between normal or crazy.”
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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