OPINION:
Elon Musk is pulling back the curtain on one of the most salacious political maneuvers in American history that polling suggests could have affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Leave it to Republicans, however, to never miss an opportunity to play by the left’s rules, even when they’re attempting to expose the great lengths to which Democrats went to cover up public corruption.
For more than two years now, Americans have heard repeatedly about the Hunter Biden laptop, or alternatively, the laptop from hell.
With the acknowledgment from even some of the most liberal media outlets that the laptop is real and its information reliable, it’s time to reframe the story. The liberal press want Republicans to keep using the left’s lexicon on a host of topics, including the laptop story.
It’s time to stop framing it as the Hunter Biden laptop, or more recently, the Twitter Files.
This story isn’t about the drug-addled, deadbeat dad, amateur porn star son of a president. It’s about mounting evidence that Joe Biden sold access to the White House using family members as intermediaries to conduct business with companies linked to communist China and other countries.
This story is about mounting proof, officials in the FBI colluded with the Democratic Party, the Biden campaign and politically aligned employees at Facebook and Twitter to manage information that was seen by the voting public in a way that interfered with the outcome of the 2020 election.
It should shock no one that the counsel to the FBI during the Obama administration, James Baker, who was tied to the Steele dossier and the anti-Trump Russia collusion operation was the deputy general counsel to Twitter up until this week. While former Big Tech executives are quick to blame federal agents for suppression of speech, the fact remains there was a well-organized plot that spanned government, political committees and the private sector to cover up evidence of public corruption at the highest levels.
Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson have already exposed financial records that show millions of dollars flowing from Chinese companies and their affiliates to Biden-related enterprises.
From the outset, though, even the Trump campaign got the messaging wrong here. They too led with Hunter as the main message point, therefore leaving themselves open to being criticized for fueling personal attacks against the troubled son of the former vice president.
The message discipline here is critical. It must be aggressive and focused. Hunter Biden, the No. 2 son of Joe Biden with no relevant experience to speak of in anything, was little more than a vehicle for the president to make lucrative deals while attempting to wipe the fingerprints off the evidence.
He was a vessel, traveling on Air Force Two to China, he conducted business that could have resulted in kickbacks to “the Big Guy,” while his father dined with communist officials.
The credibility of the laptop and anyone who touched it needed to be destroyed quickly or the Biden basement campaign would fail. The party rounded up 50 intelligence officials to claim without evidence that the laptop was Russian disinformation. The campaign put the social networks on speed-dial to suppress their opposition. It crossed into the realm of fascism once the FBI got in on the act, providing cover for Facebook and Twitter to depress the story.
Democrats weren’t mobilizing to collude with Big Tech and federal law enforcement to protect Hunter Biden from prosecution. He was and is expendable. They were furiously trying to suppress evidence of possible corruption on the part of their party’s standard-bearer.
From now on, all of this — the Twitter Files and the laptop from hell — are the Biden corruption, Biden kickback, Biden pay-to-play scandal. Whatever you call it, respect the breadth and depth of the attack on our individual power as Americans.
This has never been about Hunter and a laptop hard drive with soft-core porn. As former Levi’s CEO Jennifer Sey, herself canceled by government and Big Tech for expressing her views about COVID-19 lockdowns, put it best last week, “when there is not daylight between government, private companies and the press … when they all carry water for each other … then we live in a centralized autocracy with forceable suppression of dissent. This is where fascism lives.”
In a time when nothing seems to shock the conscience, this suppression of speech in this way makes us an oligarchy. It can’t be dismissed as merely the drug-fueled ramblings of the president’s son. It is a threat to the republic.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV, an author and a former Bush administration official.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.