OPINION:
Hunting down a time and place of the birth of the left-wing censorship mob takes you to South America. In 2016, President Barack Obama met with Mark Zuckerberg, whose social media platform Facebook funnels immense amounts of news and opinion.
Mr. Obama was angry. Donald Trump had used Facebook to sell himself as the next president. Mr. Obama’s desire to fundamentally change America just got bushwhacked. He had counseled his supporters to get in the faces of nonsupporters, who now included Mr. Zuckerberg.
“He was mad and wanted to take off someone’s head — the legacy he had built with his phone and pen was now vulnerable,” writes investigative reporter Lee Smith. “When he saw the Facebook chief at a conference of world leaders in Lima, Peru, the outgoing leader of the free world read him the riot act.”
Mr. Smith’s new book, “Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic,” profiles what the author calls the “Shadow Network.”
The constellation is vast, with powerful components in the federal government, including the FBI, intelligence agencies and their retired activists such as the Democratic Party, college lefties, social and news media operatives and billionaire-funded nonprofits with innocent-sounding names to hide the fact they are political assassins.
“They try and do the coup all the time,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Smith. “Whether it’s the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax or impeachment number one and impeachment hoax number two.”
(As I wrote this review, The New York Times was texting an accusatory form questionnaire to prominent conservative influencers, including Tucker Carlson. The Times based its questions on Media Matters, a hard-left censorship organ. Mr. Carlson told the reporter to get lost.)
Mr. Smith, whose 2019 book, “The Plot Against the President,” exposed the lies Democrats told to sabotage Mr. Trump, appoints Mr. Obama as the Shadow Network’s chairman.
“A political party employed third-world tactics — surveillance, censorship, election interference, political prosecution, and political violence — to put America under the thumb of a totalitarian faction invested in controlling every aspect of American life,” Mr. Smith says. “That’s Obama’s faction.”
“Eight years on,” Mr. Smith adds, “it’s time to acknowledge Barack Obama’s leading role in the counterinsurgency targeting Trump, his aides, and his supporters. Yes, it’s terrifying to think that a man elected twice to lead the country had such poisonous designs against it.”
What ensued from 2016 to today was a consistent censoring of conservatives by Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. while angry leftists could post any bizarre anti-Trump narration they wanted. (As I write, YouTube is hiding Mr. Trump’s interview with Joe Rogan.)
The granddaddy was the Hunter Biden laptop obtained in October 2020 by the New York Post as former Vice President Joe Biden fought to unseat Mr. Trump. The laptop hard drive was a chest full of family secrets centering on a quest for millions from shady foreigners. The elder Biden was the brand, meeting clients with Hunter and ferrying him around the world on Air Force Two.
Ex-CIA chieftain Michael Morell immediately assembled a cast to put out “the Letter of 51” saying the laptop was Russian handiwork.
It was the Shadow Network’s most direct interference in the presidential election, all based on disinformation from Mr. Morell et al.
“He’s a dishonest shill who played a major role in politicizing, discrediting, and corrupting our intelligence agencies,” former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes told Mr. Smith. “These intelligence officials had spent the entire Trump presidency running ops like this, dismissing problematic facts as Russian disinformation.”
Mr. Nunes knows skulduggery. He more than any other investigator exposed the FBI’s role in lying and covering up for the 2016 Steele dossier. Paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, it falsely accused Mr. Trump and aides of felonies such as conspiring with the Kremlin. The FBI quoted the dossier and lied to federal judges to obtain wiretaps without confirming any of Mr. Steele’s allegations.
While the FBI under James Comey hugged the hoax dossier, it concealed the truth about Joe Biden. Agents alerted Facebook and Twitter about Russian ops. Facebook and Twitter blocked the New York Post laptop bombshell.
Hunter Biden’s criminal cases have since revealed that the FBI confirmed the hard drive’s authenticity.
“The FBI took possession of the laptop and formulated a plan to shape news of its contents,” Mr. Smith writes.
By 2021, Mr. Trump was living in social media exile at Mar-a-Lago. His followers’ Jan. 6 riot prompted more censorship.
“When I was silenced, it was shocking,” Mr. Trump said. “I was number one on Twitter, and a lot of people said that I built Twitter.”
He planned to hop on a new platform, Parler, but the tech giants smothered it.
“The Shadow Network showed it could not only censor speech on the platforms it controlled but could also destroy companies that did not abide by its demands to silence and censor the opposition,” Mr. Smith says in “Disappearing the President.”
Over 50 years, Mr. Trump built the Trump Organization into a global colossus. Building his own social media platform was simply his next challenge.
He created Trump Media & Technology Group as the corporate home for a new pioneering blogging site in his image: Truth Social. He selected Mr. Nunes to run the show. By February 2022, Mr. Trump was posting again.
“Donald Trump didn’t need a new company and I didn’t need a new job,” Mr. Nunes told Mr. Smith. “We did this because we had no way to have a voice. We needed a voice, and millions of Americans and people around the world needed their voice back. I would have never left Congress to create Truth Social had they not done all the bad stuff that they did over the last ten years.”
After being bounced around by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Truth Social carries a market value today of over $7 billion.
“As the most censored man in the history of a constitutional republic that enshrines freedom of expression, Trump became the de facto leader of America’s free-speech movement,” Mr. Smith writes.
“The former president was now the free world’s leading dissident.”
No one knows the deep state or “the swamp” like Mr. Smith. Now he educates on the “Shadow Network.”
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
• • •
Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic
By Lee Smith
Encounter Books, Oct. 29, 2024
248 pages, $29.69
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