What’s the next thing you said you are looking at that you hope other reporters look at? You mentioned something about Roger Stone sentencing right before that so I am curious if you are doing a deep dive into something about Roger Stone

And I think that a significant reason that the dick pick sniffing gained traction with the mainstream media, is that the initial strategy of both the Bidens and the mainstream media was to ignore the story. This gave right wing narratives, in bad faith, to control the story.

For example, Hunter didn’t sue Mac Isaac until March 2023 despite the story coming out in October 2020. He eventually lost that case due to waiting too long to file. Or the delay to use Giuliani or Marco Polo.

Or consider that Mac Isaac has been lying the entire time about which model of laptop Hunter allegedly abandoned. Has anyone in mainstream media even called out Mac Isaac for that lie? Or called out the NY Post for that basic failure of fact checking?

Instead, the response by media was mostly to be like, well, Hunter is not a government official so we are going to ignore this.

The right wing media was given cart blanche to run away with the narratives, and spread videos and photos. The narratives of corruption and largesse connected with a portion of the population. By the time the media started to cover Hunter, the legal cases or art, it was way too late. The narratives had already taken off. The public has already seen the videos and heard stories of paying thousands of dollars on prostitutes.

For example, the Daily Mail article which started the idea that Hunter lost 3rd “laptop” to a “Russian drug dealer” could be debunked by simply reading it and walking through the claims, and comparing with the data on the laptop. Same article had at least 2 other false claims that were part of the narratives surrounding Hunter, which could similarly be debunked.

And it’s my belief that the original silence by the Bidens and mainstream media are partly due to the full picture having national security implications, both by Hunter’s actions and also the chain of events which led to the laptop ending up with Mac Isaac. And they wanted to avoid any discussion surrounding the national security implications.

OT: sounds like Timothy Snyder recently took a job at University of Toronto. He gave this talk on Dec 5 about some of the factors that contributed to Trump’s win, and some of the likely consequences.

In the last few questions of the Q&A, he basically acknowledged that American dominance in the world is now ended. The U.S. will be too busy savaging itself internally for years now, and Trump’s team doesn’t understand or value pax americana, and no international allies are going to trust their word. Trump attacks his Western allies and gives comfort to foreign dictators.

Snyder wants Americans talking and thinking about the Insurrection Act, so they won’t be shocked (and do nothing) when Trump tries to use it. Snyder said he was cheered by what just happened in South Korea, where the President tried martial law and the people said “No”. He hopes that might also happen in America.

In the last Q he was asked if Trump might try to stay in office at the end of his term. Snyder’s reply was basically, he wants to die in bed and not in jail, he’ll never willingly leave the presidency. But also his team aren’t thinking of themselves as caretakers “administering” the U.S. gov’t for 4 years, but rather as, having raw power now, for as long as they can keep it. He’s worried about whether the U.S. even has free and fair midterm elections 2 years from now.