Dishonest? Stupid? Dishonest? Stupid? Dishonest and stupid? Dishonest and thinks you are stupid? Decisions, decisions.
I was intrigued by this water-is-wet, fire-is-hot discovery by Sam Stein in the Daily Beast. Stein, I am told, is smart and insightful. At first read, I thought who is shocked that the mainstream media served as a firewall to prevent a major scandal involving Joe Biden, his brother James, and his son Hunter from hitting the national consciousness. Consider back in 2000, George W. Bush was nearly torpedoed by the revelation of a two-decade-old DUI, and here we had a scandal involving obvious, in-your-face, pay-to-play on the part of a candidate for president. James Biden had a multi-billion-dollar contract for civilian housing in Iraq steered his way with no previous experience in the industry. There is the shady land deal in the Caribbean that looks like money laundering. There are the loans the Joe received at insanely low rates from Delaware banks and may never have been repaid. And there is Hunter, whose life could be the subject of a dozen made-for-LifeTime movies. The stripper baby-momma. The 85,000/month from a Ukrainian gas company. Flying to China on Air Force Two and returning with a billion-plus dollar deal. The cut of the deals set aside for “the big guy.” And, of course, the kiddie porn.
The stuff the Biden crime family did was never even considered by Paul Manafort.

According to Biden campaign metrics, online chatter about the Hunter Biden story during the election’s last week was greater than it was around Hillary’s emails during last month of ’16. The difference: it never spilled over into mainstream outlets. https://t.co/6zYPVfo0K8

— Sam Stein (@samstein) November 16, 2020

This is what it had to say:

As the 2020 election hit its homestretch, Joe Biden’s digital team began seeing alarming trends online.

Posts about the candidate’s son Hunter Biden and the contents of his laptops were spreading at incredible rates. Many of the posts were misleading, at best. Biden’s campaign had set up a comprehensive monitoring system to track the proliferation of disinformation across various platforms. And they’d seen their fair share of rumor, innuendo, and smear fly across the internet before. But this was entirely different in its scope. According to their data, there was more social chatter happening around the Hunter Biden story than there had been around stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails during the last month of the 2016 campaign.

Fearing a redux of that disastrous end-of-the-campaign implosion, the team dove further into the research. What they found there was more assuring. While the Hunter Biden story had taken off on Facebook, YouTube, and various right-wing sites, it had not crossed over into mainstream outlets. The campaign’s internal polling, meanwhile, showed that voters largely weren’t persuaded by it.

No sh**. We saw the same media that once investigated underage drinking by the Bush twins run like scalded dogs from any of the Biden crime stories. I’d be willing to bet that if Sam Stein had been given a choice of writing about Hunter’s kiddie porn and gnawing off both his forearms, he would have done the latter without hesitation.

What the story is really about is not how the mainstream media sandbagged a story of national import in order to fluff Joe Biden and his campaign. The story is really about the inability of the Democrats to use social media in politics because they don’t need it as they control all the traditional media outlets. They attribute the right’s success, not to entrepreneurialism, and the fact that we believe in American ideals and not merely the raw exercise of power. Nowhere in the post do you find anyone who believes the left has the energy to do what the right has done despite the massive amounts of cash lavished on leftwing outlets. What you do see is the idea that if they can’t do it, then they need to use political power to kill off conservative media.

But the party is divided about how much to prioritize the digital space. There are factions, including McGowan, that have invested in creating a constellation of online advertisers and content hubs, including a controversial network of localized quasi-news outlets. There are others, however, who think the onus right now has to be on counteracting and limiting the reach of the false and misleading information spreading on social media networks.

“We don’t care about having the one viral video that everyone saw but didn’t actually achieve our goals,” said Becca Rinkevich, director of political programs at the digital firm Bully Pulpit. “We care about showing a united force and having these other credible voices weigh in. It’s a lot more work to do that sort of disciplined message.”

 

This explains the massive investment the left has poured into “fact-checkers” that ensure nothing untoward gets circulated, like truthful material about the virus and information on the ongoing recount. It is pretty obvious that the message has been sent and received. In the past week the vote-recount group #StopTheSteal had a 396K follower Facebook page shutdown and MailChimp vaporized their email list (read #StoptheSteal De-Platformed: National Coordinator Nathan Martin Speaks Up). WordPress is booting Conservative Tree House off its server (read Popular Website the Conservative Treehouse Being Kicked-off WordPress — No Reasons Offered as to Why). PayPal has canceled the account of Andy Ngo, that indefatigable chronicler of Antifa violence, making it difficult for him to underwrite his reporting. MailChimp has also canceled a Tea Party group’s account for notifying members of the date/time/location of a recount rally.

Mailchimp, a common email delivery service, has refused to provide service to the Northern Virginia Tea Party, citing that it violates their terms of agreement about "potential… misinformation." It had attempted to notify members about a recount rally. pic.twitter.com/o156shaKq9

— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) November 16, 2020

and another conservative group in South Carolina called Engage the Right

They also took down Engage the Right emails in SC. pic.twitter.com/qNRcXmazmW

— Jacs, Duchess of Stormailles (@jacstormy) November 16, 2020

We are in a deadly serious war. A war that a lot of elected Republicans (with the notable exceptions of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley) just don’t seem to comprehend. The left, on the other hand, understands that this is warfare. They know they control traditional media to the extent that they can literally shut down major negative stories about Democrat officials. They also know there is a vibrant conservative alternative media out there. And while they can’t recreate what we are doing, they can discredit and destroy us, and that is what they have set out to do.

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