THROUGHOUT much of the Anglosphere, faith in the media has cratered in recent years. The proportion of those believing in the news ‘most of the time’ in the UK has gone from 51 per cent in 2015 to 34 per cent in 2022. The number of those actively avoiding the news has gone from 24 per cent in 2017 to 46 per cent in 2022.
It is not hard to see why. After all, what is the ‘news’? It is what is decided can be reported to you, filtered and manipulated along the way.
The modern convention is to report ceaselessly on trifles, exploding small stories into sagas a week, month or year long. Simultaneously stories of great import – those which will, in years hence, be seen as having changed the course of history – are sidelined and doused in invective (racist, sexist, conspiracy theory et cetera).
Even when significant topics are covered, it is invariably from the wrong angle, obfuscating what actually matters. Take, for example, the media’s reporting of daily deaths and demands forever-greater lockdowns during the Covid-19 hysteria. Asking the pertinent questions of whether such measures’ efficacy could be proved, or were in fact necessary, or whether forcing untested injections into a population was ethically proper, was left to independent media outlets.
Ask yourself this: is it newsworthy that the President of the US is implicated in taking bungs from dodgy ‘business partners’ from dictatorships and failed states? Central to these accusations is the President’s crack-addled son, who, by the way, appears never to have faced any legal consequences of his well-documented drug habit; unlike the 1.16million arrested for drug offences in the US who are unlucky enough not to be the president’s son.
Such accusations come off the back of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was abandoned in a computer shop in Delaware in 2019 and whose contents documented a litany of potentially criminal activities. The shocking revelations within were exposed by the New York Post in October 2020, at which time then-presidential candidate Joe Biden dismissed the story as a ‘Russian plant’, although the FBI had verified its authenticity the year before. Despite the information stored on the hard drive being genuine, social media giants – in the context of the upcoming 2020 US election – engaged in blatant political interference by suppressing the sharing of the New York Post’s article.
Ultimately, the mainstream media admitted the legitimacy of the information only in March 2022, presumably by which point they hoped that Hunter Biden’s cache of criminality had lost its potency.
Nevertheless, the data stored within was so extraordinary that establishment attempts to keep a lid on it have been doomed to fail. Over the course of 2013-18, Hunter Biden (a man with no business acumen nor identifiable skill in anything other than being born into the ‘right’ family) earned a total of $11million from Ukrainian and Chinese sources.
His father has denied any knowledge of his son’s ‘business’ activities, a view echoed by the White House and swathes of the mainstream media who seek to reframe the whole thing as a ‘family matter’. Despite this, apparent references to Joe Biden within Hunter’s communications heavily implicate the now-President.
In a 2017 email, Hunter’s ‘business partner’ James Gilliar stated that 10 per cent of a joint venture with the Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC would be held by Hunter ‘for the Big Guy’ – with the ‘Big Guy’ in question being widely assumed to be none other than Joe Biden himself. When asked publicly about the identity of the Big Guy, the now-President routinely dismisses it out of hand, dubbing it a ‘dumb question’.
Nevertheless, recent revelations may be the smoking gun which undoes this attempt at pleading ignorance. A WhatsApp message from Hunter to Henry Zhao, a Chinese businessman, threatens Zhao with the words ‘I will make certain . . . that you will regret not following my direction’ and signing off with the words: ‘I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.’ The nature of the ‘commitment’ which has been ‘unfulfilled’ is unclear, yet the millions of dollars landing in Hunter’s bank account soon after show it was something valued highly by their Chinese interlocutor.
Questions inevitably started swirling as to whether Hunter was peddling influence to hostile foreign groups before shamelessly evading the taxes that such income would ordinarily entail. By taking the money received from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, and then putting the funds into a Chinese company run by one of Hunter’s associates, Hunter was then ‘loaned’ the money back, meaning it had no income tax implications.
Nevertheless, the desire to investigate such allegations has been muted. What may be the most newsworthy story in decades has been underplayed by the media, who believe it their job to protect the Bidens. Soft-balling Biden Snr since his election – declining to pass comment on his undeniable cognitive decline and unsuitability to hold an office of such high responsibility – it seems that much of the US government is similarly inclined.
According to IRS whistleblowers, federal prosecutors and the Justice Department thwarted attempts at fully investigating the accusations made against Hunter, instead engineering a sweetheart deal which would see him plead guilty to a number of smaller offences. It is contested that despite a long-standing investigation into Hunter’s case, the 2020 nomination of his father as the Democrat candidate saw Department of Justice officials ‘drag[ging] their feet on the IRS’ taking investigative steps, stymieing the investigation. Should such politicised intervention be true, it shows just how urgently ‘the swamp’ needs draining.
Moreover, attempts to mitigate the seriousness of Hunter’s crimes and his father’s alleged involvement have been dressed in the most modern of garbs: that of victimhood. Hunter Biden’s lawyer knew the game he was playing. He claimed that any damning words used by Biden Jnr had to be seen in the context of his ‘horrible addiction’ and which had ‘no connection to anyone in his family’.
The immediate question raised by such a dishonest play is that, if he was in such an unfit state, why were Hunter’s activities allowed to carry on uncontested for so long? Any honest family – not to mention the President’s – would see the implications of such a loose cannon acting under the influence of drugs. Such an explanation simply does not wash.
The seriousness of these allegationsand the unwillingness of officialdom to tackle them ensures outrage will continue to simmer. The White House vehemently refuses to comment on Hunter’s apparent hustles. Commentators elsewhere have dubbed the scandal a ‘story of a father’s love’. Such excuses will not wash when that family sits atop the allegedly ‘free’ world. The Bidens are protected as part of ‘the tribe’, their degeneracy waved away. Just imagine if this had been Donald Trump’s son.
Most of these events have been little discussed in the media, with sympathetic outlets paying lip service to reporting of Hunter’s day in court – a day when none of these serious allegations was touched upon whatsoever.
These allegations should be enough to rock the political system to its core. Yet, in their collusion and cowardice, a craven mainstream media dance to the devil’s tune, facilitating the West’s continued spiral into politics once deemed fit only for a banana republic.
