The divide tearing America asunder is increasingly not, per se, that between Republican and Democrat. It is not that between conservative and liberal, and it is certainly not that between white or nonwhite, straight or gay, immigrant or native, or so forth. Rather, the divide in America is that between the ruling class and those non-elitist Americans that the ruling class deigns to treat as subjects to be ruled with an iron fist. – Josh Hammer
On the precipice of the 2020 presidential election, the American ruling class pulled off every stunt imaginable for its preferred candidate, Joe Biden. Presidential debate moderators deliberately refused to delve into the realm of foreign policy, an area in which Uncle Joe has been wrong on every major issue for four decades. Media elites dutifully praised the Supreme Court’s unwise failure to intervene and clarify that state legislatures, not governors or state courts, retain sole power over changing election law. The most anodyne of questioning about the unprecedented proliferation of inherently destabilising mail-in balloting was roundly denounced as “voter suppression.” In major cities, Antifa street thugs effectively held hostage public safety unless Biden won.
But of all the ways in which the ruling class’s various levers worked in tandem to pave the way for Biden, none was more galling than Big Tech’s weeks-long censorship of the New York Post’s bombshell reporting on prodigal son Hunter Biden‘s unsavory exploits overseas. On consecutive days in mid-October, the Post published stories about how Hunter leveraged his father’s lofty perch to unjustly enrich himself in Ukraine and China, respectively.
Facebook promptly blacklisted the story. Twitter nearly banned access to the story in toto and had the chutzpah to lock out the Post—the nation’s oldest continually operating daily newspaper, which was founded by Alexander Hamilton—from its own account for over two weeks. Outside Silicon Valley, media lackeys carrying water for the Biden campaign unanimously decried the Post’s reporting as “Russian disinformation.”
But now, as we approach the Electoral College’s presumptive formalisation of an impending Biden presidency, Hunter confirmed in an official statement that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware is investigating him for possible tax fraud and money laundering violations involving unseemly foreign business dealings. It appears that China, America’s arch geopolitical foe in which Hunter has had extensive private equity dealings, features front and center in the Feds’ investigation. Who would’ve thunk?
As one Twitter wit asked: “Where does the New York Post go to get its apology?”
Every single journalist and Democratic propagandist who rushed to dismiss the Post’s reporting as “Russian disinformation” now has egg on his face. And Facebook and Twitter, censorious industrialists who manipulate their monopolistic control over the 21st century’s online town square to bolster “enlightened” liberal narratology and suppress conservative speech, have been revealed for all to be what red-blooded Americans already knew they were: levers of the ruling class.
The divide tearing this nation asunder is increasingly not, per se, that between Republican and Democrat. It is not that between conservative and liberal, and it is certainly not that between white or nonwhite, straight or gay, immigrant or native, or so forth. Rather, the divide in America in the year 2020 is that between the ruling class and those non-elitist Americans that the ruling class deigns to treat as subjects to be ruled with an iron fist.
The American ruling class is multitudinous. It is both public and private, both deep state and “woke” corporate boardroom, both Hollywood and Wall Street. Entrance to the ruling class is circumscribed by its gate-keeping credentialing institutions—namely, the academy—and membership is closely monitored for uniformity of political ideology. The full “woke” catechism must be imbibed like mother’s milk, and the pursuit of Truth must be subordinated to the ever-evolving demands of the Narrative.
If the academy is the ruling class’s gatekeeper and the deep state its preferred mode of heavy-handed governance, then Big Tech is its most trustworthy private-sector appendage. The goliaths of Big Tech are entrusted with self-regulating our contemporary instrumentalities of political speech, and empowered with blocking rogue miscreants if they step too far out of line. Big Tech is the ruling class’s means by which to control the acceptability, or lack thereof, of speech itself. Truth is not a relevant criterion in that calculus—but fidelity to the tenets of sacramental progressivism, and the Democratic Party itself, certainly is.
Fortuitously, the Federal Trade Commission and 46 state attorneys general recently launched an antitrust probe to break up Facebook. Prominent private practice attorneys have also filed a similar suit. But the ruling class’s corruption and rot will continue to fester unless adequately challenged by conscientious citizens tired of being treated as second-class subjects, rather than free citizens. – Newsweek, 11 December 2020
› Josh Hammer is Newsweek opinion editor, a syndicated columnist and a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation.
Filed under: china, ukraine, USA | Tagged: financial corruption, hunter biden, political corruption, US elections 2020 | 2 Comments »
