The War on Truth, Deep State Style

Written by Robert Knight

It’s not even Halloween, and the election is two months away, yet the Russian hobgoblins are coming out again to scare all the boys and girls.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is working hard to turn some annoying Russian cyber meddling into the greatest threat to “democracy” since Hillary Clinton’s operatives hatched the Russian collusion hoax of 2016.

Here’s how it works. The FBI identifies “divisive” themes put out by Russian bots, such as citizens’ concerns over inflation or crimes committed by illegal aliens and then denounces them as “disinformation.” As Gary Bauer explained in his “End of Day Report” on Thursday:

“So, whenever Donald Trump raises these issues in the debate, you can expect Kamala Harris to say, ‘Don’t believe him. That’s Russian disinformation.’”

When then-President Trump brought up Hunter Biden’s laptop at a debate in 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden blamed it on the Russians. The FBI — and certainly Mr. Biden — had known for at least a year that the laptop was real and full of compromising information about Hunter’s drug-fueled sexploits and the Bidens’ business deals in Ukraine, China and Russia.

They got big help from 51 national security “experts” who signed a letter designed to mislead the media by pointing them to Russia as the culprit.

When they’re not concocting devilish Russian mischief, the deep state and its political sponsors are busy censoring views they don’t like. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have openly endorsed using government to snuff out what they consider “misinformation” and “hate speech.”

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that the Biden-Harris administration “repeatedly pressured our teams to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire and expressed a lot of frustration when we didn’t agree.”

He acknowledged that his staff did knuckle under at times. For example, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, shut down the New York Post’s Facebook page when it carried the factual news story about the Hunter Biden laptop.

But censorship is not enough for some. Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, has actually called for the arrest of Elon Musk if the X social media site owner does not censor content according to the left’s playbook.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s government has arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the internet messaging service Telegram. Prosecutors blame him for criminal activity conducted via the site.

Mr. Durov’s arrest comes at a time when Europe is going through a spasm of censorship fueled by the European Parliament’s Digital Services Act. That quasi-legal document calls for banning hate speech, disinformation and propaganda, all of which are in the eye of the beholder.

Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for internal market, “is wielding the law as a cudgel to censor speech worldwide,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial that noted that Mr. Breton threatened X just before Mr. Musk interviewed Mr. Trump on the platform.

Regulators will “not hesitate to make full use of our toolbox” if they determine that such content might “generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security,” Mr. Breton said.

Meanwhile, Brazil’s socialist government has shut down X in that populous nation.

I don’t know about you, but I think Mr. Musk has the juice to win these bouts. You’ve probably heard the expression “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

Mr. Musk owns the electric car manufacturer Tesla, the spacecraft maker and launcher SpaceX, the Starlink satellite network and of course X, on which he exposes censorship every day.

There are many forms of censorship. Google uses algorithms to suppress conservative content and elevate liberal content. Another is to bury a story, like The Washington Post’s report on Mr. Zuckerberg’s stunning letter, which was relegated to page 16 of the newspaper’s front section.

Speaking of submerging real news, a Post piece on page 22 acknowledged that climate change hadn’t caused a record number of hurricanes this year as they had been predicting.

The headline: “Forecasters backtrack as oddly silent Atlantic hurricane season churns on.” The upshot is that the warming atmosphere seems to be preventing more hurricanes. “Warm upper levels may be suppressing thunderstorm growth. Warm temperatures aloft act as a ‘lid’ that ‘caps’ showers and thunderstorms,” the Post says, citing researchers.

So, is climate change good? Not so fast. It’s still the greatest threat to humanity since the Donald came down the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015. Ask the previously mentioned Mr. Reich, who wants to arrest Elon Musk.

Mr. Reich is a signer of the Presidential Climate Action Project, which published a huge ad in the Post that reads like Chicken Little wrote it.

“Is THIS the LAST ELECTION for our CLIMATE and DEMOCRACY?” the headline screams. The group warns of “the assault on the institutions of democracy” and that we will face “millions of climate refugees fleeing newly uninhabitable places.” I flipped to the next page, which was the Post’s periodic full-page ad stating:

“No story is more global. More profound. More extreme. This is Climate.”

Yes, I think “extreme” is a fine word to describe what these people have in mind for us.