It's a shame the Hunter Biden laptop story was unable to get traction before the 2020 presidential election, especially since this seismic, once-in-a-century scandal would have offered such a stark contrast to the quiet dignity of Donald Trump’s family, the most scandal-free clan in the history of hominids.
Over the weekend, Elon Musk released the so-called Twitter files, which were meant to provide a window into the company’s decision-making before it muted a New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop just prior to the election. If you ask any random Republican, this was the biggest outrage since Barack Obama’s tan suit, because the media should be required to amplify every sketchy Russian psyop that comes down the pike, lest American democracy quickly devolve into communism or Putin-style fascism or something.
But despite lots of crowing from conservatives—who, again, enjoyed four years of beyond-reproach behavior from ex-POTUS Donald Trump and his family … unless you count the two impeachments, tens of thousands of virulent lies, countless financial conflicts of interest, and numerous attempts to upend American democracy—Musk’s big reveal has been something of a dud.
The Washington Post:
A handful of screenshots from 2020, posted over the course of two hours Friday evening in a disjointed, roughly 40-tweet thread, show the San Francisco company debating a decision to restrict sharing of a controversial New York Post story about the son of then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The Twitter thread, based on internal communications posted by Substack writer Matt Taibbi, showed the company independently decided to limit the spread of the article, without Democratic politicians, the Biden campaign or FBI exerting control over the social media network. In fact, the only input from a sitting politician that Taibbi noted was from Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna (D), who told Twitter executives they should distribute the story, regardless of the potential consequences for his party.
“I’m not persuaded these are anything close to a bombshell,” said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in an interview.
But Republicans still appear to think this was the biggest miscarriage of justice since Sean Spicer got booted off Dancing With the Stars for looking like an incontinent prairie chicken trying to eat its own face.
For instance, Patient Zero in our current mudslide into fascism thought the Musk files were reason enough to suspend the Constitution and install him as dictator. Here the ochre oaf was on his low-rent Twitter knockoff, Goof Social, calling for a brave new era of serially nullified elections:
“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” wrote the guy who once took a sacred oath to uphold the Constitution. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
Unfortunately for Trump, there’s really no story here—except that a private entity decided not to amplify a report that, at the time, looked a lot like a Russian disinformation campaign.
But if media outlets and social media companies are required to boost every scurrilous rumor that comes along about a candidate or their family, I have a couple of complaints of my own. In 2016, just before the presidential election, a woman claimed Trump had raped her when she was just 13. She was all set to provide details at a press conference, but it was canceled after she reportedly received “multiple death threats.” Why didn’t everyone hear about this? Why did we get a new fusillade of screaming headlines about Hillary Clinton’s email server instead of myriad references to this unproven allegation?
Or, again, going back to 2016, why did The Washington Post censor an allegation made by one of its columnists—this time shortly after the election, but before the Electoral College voted—that Trump had admitted to being attracted to his teenage daughter?
Buzzfeed News:
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote that President-elect Donald Trump once asked, “Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife?” — but the quote was quietly removed before the syndicated column was published Tuesday.
Trump was reportedly referring to his daughter, Ivanka, who was 13 years old at the time.
The quote was circulated Monday in a draft of Cohen's piece “Our Next President, The Godfather" that was sent to outlets that syndicate the column, a source told BuzzFeed News. The quote did not appear in the later, final version of the piece carried by the Post and other outlets.
Oh, my God! Install Hillary now! When did Cohen know about this, and why wasn’t it revealed earlier? And why didn’t the Beltway media cover it ad nauseam?
Of course, the real issue here is that Republicans thought they had an October surprise to rival the 2016 Comey letter, which very likely threw the election to Trump. In fact, there’s evidence that members of the New York City FBI office manipulated the Anthony Weiner email story to damage the Clinton campaign. But in 2020, the media refused to bite like they had in 2016. And that’s what Republicans find so brutally unfair—their attempts to ratfuck the election like they had in 2016 didn’t work four years later.
This Twitter thread from Dave Karpf, an associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, sums it up pretty well. If you don’t do Twitter, click here to see the entire thread.
The Trumpies know that the media love to follow shiny objects—and new shiny objects are their fave. So despite having hundreds of gargoylish Trump outrages and scandals to pick from, they’ve often seen fit to track the barest whiff of Democratic scandal like obedient bloodhounds—you know, in the interest of “fairness.”
But in 2020, the media were a bit more circumspect—and Republicans are now losing their damn sense over it.
Sen. Raphael Warnock is still defending his Georgia seat, and the Dec. 6 runoff is coming fast. If you can—and if you aren’t too tired from saving America on Nov. 8—please rush a donation to Team Warnock now! You can also write letters to Georgia voters with Vote Forward! Let’s finish up strong!
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.