VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The media lies add up
The public is exhausted after a decade of chronic untruth from the left wing and its media.
The 2016 presidential campaign will be long remembered for the false allegation that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to warp the election.
Citing the bogus “Steele dossier,” loser Hillary Clinton and other Democrat grandees claimed that the victorious Trump was an “illegitimate” president.
Almost immediately, the left and media then pushed for the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller. He assembled a ‘dream team’ of partisan prosecutors to prove Trump-Russian collusion.
Some 22 months later, Mueller found no evidence that Donald Trump improperly won the 2016 election with help from any colluding Russians.
More hysteria followed when Trump was impeached in December 2019.
The left claimed he had pressured the Ukrainian government to look into the family of Joe Biden (then a potential 2020 election opponent) for its corruption with Ukrainian oligarchs — as a condition for releasing military aid designated to Kyiv.
Yet Hunter Biden was paid nearly $1 million a year by a Ukrainian energy company to enlist his father, Vice President Joe Biden, for quid pro quo services.
In turn, Joe Biden himself later bragged he had pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor, Victor Shokin — who happened to be looking too closely into the various shady schemes of the Biden family.
The deceptions and lies continued.
On the eve of the first 2020 debate, Biden aide and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken helped to round up “51 former intelligence authorities” to claim falsely that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop—full of incriminating evidence of felonious Biden family behavior—was fabricated by the Russians.
Yet the FBI already had the laptop and had authenticated it as genuine.
The FBI was also actively enlisting Silicon Valley social media companies to suppress accurate news accounts of the laptop’s embarrassing contents—ostensibly to aid the Biden campaign.
The signees of the false letter included former intelligence kingpins such as Leon Panetta, James Clapper, and John Brennan. None has ever apologized for deliberating lying to the country in a (successful) attempt to help alter an election.
During the summer of 2021, top military officials, at least publicly, parroted the Biden administration’s lie that it was safe to abruptly withdraw all troops from Afghanistan.
The Biden plan was to take political credit for ending the two-decade-long war on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and the American invasion of Afghanistan.
Yet many intelligence officials in and outside the Pentagon had warned both Biden and the Pentagon top brass that any such reckless and total withdrawal would collapse Afghanistan.
They rightly also advised that sudden flight would give terrorists a windfall of equipment and infrastructure.
But they were ignored and during the subsequent Biden misadventure, thirteen American Marines were needlessly killed.
After the greatest military humiliation in a half-century, Biden and many in the media lied that the mission was nevertheless a successful withdrawal.
But that was not all. For the first time in history, a presidential candidate, Trump, was subjected to numerous criminal and civil suits in an election year.
Yet the federal prosecutor, Jack Smith, met with Biden officials. A high-ranking Biden Justice federal attorney joined the New York municipal prosecution. The Georgia prosecutor met stealthily with Biden’s legal counsel. And a major Biden donor funded the civil suit.
The once collusion-hungry media ignored all such lawfare and rank collusion.
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, the general election, and throughout the first three years of the Biden administration, it was evident that Joe Biden was physically and mentally incapable of serving as president.
Yet his aides and the media all misled the American people. They insisted that Biden was vigorous and sharp.
Then suddenly in June 2024, within a 24-hour period, Biden was declared by these same insiders as unfit to continue as the Democratic nominee.
Their new problem with Biden was not just his long-standing embarrassing dementia. Rather bad polls increasingly warned that voters no longer believed their lies and thus would likely not reelect Biden but would instead punish most Democrats in the upcoming 2024 election.
So, a new media narrative arose: the once-hale Biden was forced to resign as the Democrat nominee. His once widely caricatured vice president, Kamala Harris, just as abruptly was coronated as his replacement candidate by an equally suddenly gushing and colluding media.
In sum, for some nine years, the media and the left have successfully fed the country a succession of rank deceptions and conspiracies.
They did so because they proclaimed Donald Trump too dangerous to be president and therefore any means they employed to stop him were to be justified. And they are doing so yet a third time in 2024.
As they continue, they have all but destroyed democracy, ruined the reputation of the media, alienated the public — and embarrassed their country before the world.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com.
