By The Signal Editorial Board
The admission this week by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that, upon request from the FBI, his social media platform suppressed the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election — a story that proved to be true — reinforces the notion that the FBI, much of the mainstream media and big tech colluded to suppress information that could hurt Joe Biden’s election chances. We called it out two years ago when it happened. With that in mind, we are republishing the following editorial, which was originally published Oct. 22, 2020:
We are witnessing the death of our First Amendment and democracy as we know it.
Is that an overstatement? Regrettably, it may not be. We are seeing media, big tech, Democratic Party leaders and some in the intelligence community collude to kill a legitimate news story.
This is a real threat to our democracy right out of George Orwell’s “1984.”
The New York Post, the country’s fourth largest newspaper, and its oldest daily newspaper, started by Alexander Hamilton, published a story about a series of emails they say came from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
These emails show that Hunter Biden was selling access to his father, Joe Biden, former vice president of the United States. They also show that Joe Biden not only knew about the scheme but also expected to receive a cut of the multi-million-dollar deals his son was negotiating.
The media says it’s disinformation from Russia but will not investigate it.
Biden has not denied that the emails are real. No reporter has even asked the Bidens if they are real. Hunter Biden’s attorney asked for the laptop back.
The director of national intelligence, FBI and Department of Justice have now said that the emails are not part of any disinformation campaign and they are in fact real and Hunter Biden’s emails.
But that DOES NOT MATTER. Forget the story, forget the emails, forget who they are from and what they are and why.
Democrat, Republican, independent. Political, criminal, corruption. Any subject matter.
In this case the who, what and where DOES NOT MATTER.
That’s not the real story here. That’s only a small story that will pass. The big story is the threat to democracy. It’s the fact that the big-tech partisan interests and mainstream media are refusing to report on a newsworthy story and actively seeking to suppress and discredit it.
In fact, Facebook and Twitter removed links to it from their platforms and blocked the accounts of the Post and people who tried to share the link.
More than refusing to report it, they are keeping you from knowing about it. They are suppressing it.
Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t let people tweet or post it and they have taken down the accounts of the New York Post or anyone who has tried to tell the story.
The mainstream media does not want you to know about it. It’s not in the papers nor on TV news.
The reporters are not asking any questions nor investigating to get at the truth.
This story has almost completely been shut down by the media and big tech.
All of this is especially ironic, because those same interests — big tech, the “mainstream” media and partisan Democrats — recently accepted as gospel a story in the left-leaning publication, The Atlantic, that was based entirely on unnamed sources who claimed the president made derogatory remarks about members of the military. Those claims — none of which were backed up by a named source — have since been discredited by more than 20 people who were with the president at the time.
So, a negative story about the president, with no named sources to back it up, gets accepted as unquestioned fact. A negative story about the Biden family, with actual, visible, demonstrable evidence, is discredited.
Who would think that this could happen here?
Not in America.
Not where we have the First Amendment and a supposedly free press.
It happens all the time in China, but this is not China. Right?
Well, according to the Post, it also so happens that Facebook’s standards department includes “a half-dozen Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” so perhaps it’s no surprise that the tactics they are using are similar to what the Chinese Communist Party has done to China’s citizens for years.
