Bob Dole ran a pretty poor campaign against Bill Clinton in 1996. It was no surprise, then, that he lost. But let history acknowledge the former U.S. senator from Kansas asked the very best question in the entire election cycle. “Where’s the outrage?” he thundered at a GOP event at the end of October 1996. Back then, the chief issue was the Clinton Administration’s use and abuse of 900 FBI files on their political opponents. Imagine! An American president using the FBI as his secret police! Have you ever heard of anything so outrageous? In America, amidst Our Democracy™?
Then as now, however, the answer to Dole’s question is simple: Nowhere. There was, there is, no outrage. Then, as now, there are little flutters of enthusiast unhappiness among the rest of the faithful who greet news of outrageous behavior with applause and expressions of solidarity. “You go, champ!” they seem to say, before relapsing into a blinking, weakly smiling repose. (This is the cue for people like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney to adjust their hairdos and stride boldly on stage.)
But the media writ large? Then, as now, it’s crickets as far as the eye can see.
The biggest story of the day revolves around Elon Musk’s decision to open the window and reveal Twitter’s active role in stage managing the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden and very much to the detriment of Donald Trump. Over the past week, extensive Twitter threads posted by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others have revealed that the company was essentially part of a coordinated Democratic oppo-research and suppression operation and, moreover, one that was actively collaborating—or, to use the preferred term, “colluding”—with the FBI to destroy Donald Trump and assure Joe Biden’s election.
Obviously, this is front-page news in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major newspapers as well as top-of-the-hour reporting every night on the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall talk shows that many Americans turn to so they do not have to face reality.
Just kidding—about the prominence of the story, I mean, not the habit of Americans turning to their digital fentanyl to avoid the truth.
There’s been a tiny stream of stern commentary, but mostly what we’ve been treated to are hysterical (I do not mean “funny”) denunciations of Elon Musk for having the temerity to shine a little light into the netherworld of the Twitterverse. They say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Maybe so. Like iodine applied to a bad scrape, however, this is going to sting.
But probably not enough. Bari Weiss’ thread goes into the gory details about how Twitter “shadow-banned,” i.e., suppressed the tweets of various people with whom they, or their masters in Washington, disagreed. Remember Jay Bhattacharya? He is one of the Stanford University dissidents from the official COVID narrative. He, along with John Ioannidis and Scott Atlas, was routinely suppressed on Twitter. As Weiss shows, by quoting company directives, “Twitter secretly placed him on a ‘Trends Blacklist,’ which prevented his tweets from trending.”
Dr. Bhattacharya was worried about the harm COVID lockdowns could cause children. But this went against the Fauci-Approved Official Narrative, so it had to be suppressed. And suppressed it was.
Weiss’ thread is full of disturbing revelations. But even more dramatic is Matt Taibbi’s current thread, which proceeds under the title “THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP. Part One: October 2020-January 6th.” Unlock the closet where you keep your favorite conspiracy theories. It turns out, they’re not “theories” at all, at least not if by that word you mean something imagined but not true.
Nope. They are the pure, unvarnished truth. Remember when 51 top experts from our intelligence services signed a letter denouncing the New York Post for publishing a “sensationalistic” story fabricated by “the Russians” about Hunter Biden’s laptop? “Sensationalistic” the revelations may have been. But it turns out that Miranda Devine was right, they were all true. You just couldn’t hear about it because Twitter suppressed any mention of the revelations, especially those having to do with Joe “Big Guy” Biden and the Chinese lucre flowing into Hunter’s purse or crack pipe.
It’s all quite extraordinary—by which, I guess, I mean it’s just business as usual in the swamp. A sitting president of the United States finds himself suppressed by a major social media platform. Other politicians who have dissident opinions or are from the wrong party do as well. One user of Twitter just asked, “were any political candidates—either in the US or elsewhere—subject to shadowbanning while they were running for office or seeking re-election?” Musk answered: “Yes.” Which is why, as Musk also observed, “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene.”
I agree with David Limbaugh: “There needs to be a relentless attack from our side against the legacy media for their ongoing suppression of the truth, especially their refusal to cover these latest Twitter censorship revelations. They must never again be permitted to pretend to occupy the moral high ground.” I agree. But I fear that demand is going to go unheeded.
In any sane world, these revelations would have the public up in arms, literally. They would be marching against the media, the FBI, and the current administration. The anger would be acrid and ubiquitous.
That’s in any sane world. In our world, alas, you can hear the carpet being pulled back so that the whole dirty mess can be swept underneath it. Where’s the outrage? Nowhere to be found.