President Donald Trump has been deriding the election as unfair ever since the race was called for Joe Biden last month.
Launching a series of lawsuits in target swing states decided by razor-thin margins, the president has now hinged his 2020 hopes on the existence of voter fraud big enough to tip the outcome. Whether there was enough ballot corruption to manipulate the result remains an open question, one to be decided in the courts. Whether fraud actually took place in an election with record turnout in the form of mail-in voting with last-minute rule changes, there’s no question.
Fraud or no fraud, however, Trump is right when he claims the election wasn’t fair.
To start, it was an open secret who corporate media were working for from the moment Trump took office. Democrats took notice that legacy outlets were eager to amp up their Russiagate conspiracies proclaiming the president a covert Kremlin agent operating to undermine American interests. For years the American people were subjected to nonstop Russia hoax storylines to introduce the Trump presidency, establishing a narrative that would never die even after a two-year special counsel investigation debunking the entire scheme.
As the calendar moved closer to election day, the media didn’t get any more responsible — quite the contrary. Liberal journalists infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome developed symptoms that grew worse by each month, moving from one conspiracy to the next. First the president was colluding with Russia. Then the president was apparently working an illegal quid pro quo with Ukraine. Then the president was apparently manipulating the operations of the Postal Service to suppress voter turnout in a scene straight out of “House of Cards.”
While perpetuating neverending conspiracies and labeling anything that flew against their preconceived narratives as more conspiracies, legacy media were joined in their election interference by big tech elites in Silicon Valley. The tight-knit relationship simmering under the surface came into full view once the biggest story of the campaign dropped in October that exposed incriminating information on their preferred presidential candidate and his son’s potentially criminal overseas business dealings. The entire ordeal somehow disappeared after the election.
A study from the Media Research Center out in October showed that together, Facebook and Twitter censored Trump and affiliated campaign accounts at least 65 times over the past two years. How many times did each censor former Vice President Joe Biden? Zero. According to their report, 98 percent of the censorship came from Twitter.
The platform first began “fact-checking” the president on a pair of posts in May related to mail-in voting, warning that radically expanding the use of mail-in ballots could lead to a turbulent election.
Twitter censored the president again several days later, tagging another tweet where Trump condemns the explosive riots erupting in the nation’s cities as “glorifying violence.”
Twitter, of course, escalated its censorship as November approached. Meanwhile, widely debunked conspiracy theories surrounding Trump’s dystopian manipulation of the Postal Service to secure re-election have gone unchecked.
This viral tweet alleging mass voter suppression orchestrated by the Trump-directed USPS by showing mailboxes that have been there for years has still never been censored. https://t.co/ElyJGDPCDN
— Tristan Justice (@JusticeTristan) December 3, 2020
Big tech’s election interference came to a peak when The New York Post began running exposés expanding the public scope of Biden family corruption based on material from a laptop retrieved from a Delaware repair shop. The first bombshell report, published on Oct. 14, revealed Joe Biden had been lying throughout the campaign that he had never discussed business with his son, Hunter, who served in a lucrative board position of a corrupt Ukrainian energy company while his vice president father dictated White House policy towards Ukraine.
The story was first ignored by the same legacy outlets that spent years pouring ink into Russiagate conspiracies.
Any time legacy media drops a supposed “bombshell” on Trump, it immediately hits the front pages.
Still waiting on NYT, WaPo, and CNN however to write anything on the @nypost‘s actual bombshell on Joe Biden lying about what he knew of his son’s overseas business interests. pic.twitter.com/amcilH0cv0
— Tristan Justice (@JusticeTristan) October 14, 2020
Meanwhile, big tech promptly weaponized their monopoly power over the 21st century digital public square to suppress the blockbuster stories online. Twitter suspended the Post’s account, and blocked the story’s link from being shared on the platform.
Facebook announced through a company spokesperson who used to be a Democratic staffer that the internet giant would preemptively suppress the Post’s reporting until it had been fact-checked by third-party groups.
While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020
The policies wielded to justify their suppression appeared to have been pulled out of thin air. While each platform pointed to existing guidelines, Twitter with rules against publishing hacked content and Facebook claiming it must be run through fact-checkers, neither had applied the guidelines consistently.
If they had, they would have censored stories related to the president’s phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart that became the basis for impeachment, the president’s tax returns, Michael Flynn’s phone call with the Russian ambassador, the Democrat National Committee-funded Steele dossier, Donald Trump Jr.’s WikiLeaks emails, The Atlantic’s anonymously-sourced story in September charging Trump with out-of-character remarks disparaging American troops, The Atlantic’s story about a shooting it made up, secretly recorded Trump audio, secretly recorded Melania Trump audio, and smears against the Covington Catholic students at the March for Life in Washington D.C.
The censorship of the Biden stories, however, continued. The New York Post dropped its second bombshell report the next day on Oct. 15, revealing even worse details about the Biden family’s business dealings. Emails showed the Democratic candidate stood to personally rake in millions from Hunter’s China business partners with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
The arrangement was outlined in an offer funneling the money through Hunter Biden signing $10 million a year contract for “introductions alone.” Twitter blocked the story again, while still prohibiting users from linking to the first bombshell story published the day prior.
Unbelievable. Yesterday, @twitter blocks links to @nypost story alleging Joe Biden corruption on China.
TODAY, blocking links to ANOTHER NYPost story alleging Hunter Biden sold access to communist China for millions. I just tried to share that story. Here’s Twitter’s response 👇 pic.twitter.com/NZpw4gmcb2
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 15, 2020
When legacy outlets were finally forced to give attention to the Post’s reporting, the corporate press fell back on their favorite narrative of the Trump-era media attempting to delegitimize the stories as Russian disinformation, if not outright claim they just didn’t want to cover the scandal.
“We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation – even if they probably aren’t,” wrote Johns Hopkins University Professor Thomas Rid for the Washington Post in an article labeled as “perspective.”
“Is the Trump Campaign Colluding with Russia Again?” titled an op-ed by a New York Times columnist.
CBS’s Lesley Stahl said information from the laptop couldn’t be verified at Trump’s interview with “60 Minutes,” and therefore CBS wouldn’t air the president’s statements about the scandal during its signature program in the final days of the campaign. This prompted the White House to preemptively release the tape, putting Stahl’s bias on full display. Stahl also lied about there being no evidence that the FBI spied on the president’s 2016 campaign.
National Public Radio (NPR) released a statement telling readers that the taxpayer-funded outlet just didn’t think the stories mattered. “We don’t want to waste our time,” the outlet wrote. Apparently journalism to serve a public coerced into funding the Democratic outlet masquerading as a news organization now is a waste of time.
Why haven’t you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story? Read more in this week’s newsletter➡️ https://t.co/CJesPgmGvo pic.twitter.com/jAi7PnpbZf
— NPR Public Editor (@NPRpubliceditor) October 22, 2020
The Biden campaign, meanwhile, never disputed the authenticity of the laptop in question, which also had its contents retrieved by the FBI as part of a federal money-laundering investigation. But it was still a “waste of time” for the leftist editors at National Propaganda Radio.
Instead, Biden embraced the baseless narrative of Russian disinformation despite the claim having been publicly debunked by the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of National Intelligence, and the Department of State. Still the censorship continued. The New York Post, the fourth-largest newspaper in the country, was locked out of its Twitter account for two weeks at the close of a major election before it was finally given back access to its profile on one of the nation’s largest online platforms.
The joint operation to cover up the most major revelations of the entire campaign in the final days to November likely saved Biden’s White House chances. The Media Research Center commissioned a study of Biden voters across eight swing states after the election, examining their knowledge of several news stories the group felt the media had not fairly or adequately covered, including the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
Of the 1,750 surveyed, 17 percent said they would not have voted for the Democratic president-elect had they known just one of eight stories presented. Biden carried seven of the eight states where voters were surveyed, including Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia. The president would have captured a second term had he won just 45,000 more votes across the tipping-point states.