Washington D.C., June, 1972: Five men are caught breaking into the Democrat National Committee headquarters while attempting to remove planted listening devices. Although at the time this was a minor story of a simple breaking and entering, two diligent reporters from the Washington Post — Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein — believed there was more to the story and continued to dig until they found evidence leading all the way back to the Nixon White House. And indeed, to the President himself.
But when the reporters attempted to run the story, the Republican-run DC establishment along with 90% of mainstream media outlets engaged in a concerted effort to suppress the story. They tried to remove all copies of the Washington Post from newsstands, storefronts, vending machines, and even forcibly prevented paperboys from making their morning deliveries. They went so far as blocking the Washington Post from the White House until Ben Bradley and his team agreed to remove any mention of Watergate from its pages.
Meanwhile, every major TV network and every other major newspaper circled their wagons around President Nixon and with one voice declared that the break-in story was merely a “conspiracy theory.” And to top it off, 50 former intelligence apparatus operatives, including former heads of the CIA and NSA, publicly declared the Watergate reporting to have “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation” designed to make Nixon look bad before the 1972 election.
Sounds crazy, right? It is, especially in a country where the founders codified a free press in our bill of rights. Thankfully, this scenario could never happen in today’s world, though. Or could it?
Chillingly, it already has. All one need do is replace the word “Watergate” with “laptop,” “Nixon” with “Biden,” “1972” with “2020,” and reverse the party affiliations of the powers-that-be. All you need to do is replace the Washington Post with the New York Post and you have what happened just one month before the last national election.
In many ways, the Hunter Biden laptop story is far more scandalous and dangerous than Watergate. During the Watergate scandal, it was said that “the coverup is worse than the crime.” But in the case of the Hunter Biden scandal, it very well could be that the crime is just as bad as the coverup. Here we have the ne’er-do-well son of a sitting Vice President with ambitions aimed at the Oval Office, doing business with China – a country that openly labels us among their greatest enemies. And what is the business? Is it software, manufacturing, or property development? No, it is blatant, naked influence peddling.
And speaking of naked, said son is addicted to crack cocaine. He is staying in the enemy’s capital, in hotel rooms that are surely surveilled. The Chinese Communist Party’s intel knows of his addiction, of course, and they also know what a recovering crack addict in my own family once told me: “When you are on a binge you will say or do anything for your next bump.” That alone is an obvious national security concern. But also, Joe Biden is not only a politician but by all accounts a devoted father to a troubled son. Who knows to what lengths he will go in order to protect his son from embarrassment or worse? It’s a question worth asking.
To make matters worse, this scandal is not just about the son and his shameless influence peddling that yielded millions in ill-gotten Chinese (and Ukrainian) cash. The emails in question show that ten percent of those profits were kicked up to “the big guy.” Now, I wonder who that could be? Who is the Pauli Cicero to Hunter’s Henry Hill? Anyone care to take a guess? Is that “BG” the man sitting in the Oval Office who is also making policy decisions about our relationships and responses to the country that is far more a threat to the long-term interests of the USA than Russia? If so, one must wonder just how compromised are the highest levels of Federal power.
Like Watergate, there are several scandals within the scandal here. The obvious scandal is that the former VP’s, now the President’s, son has used his father’s name to wring millions from the coffers of an enemy state. And Xi Jinping’s people are too shrewd to part with millions of dollars without some expectations of a return on their investment, yet to be fully uncovered. But then we have a sitting Vice President who is now in the Oval Office most likely reaping kick-backs from his son’s nefarious dealings. And then, to me, the most frightening scandal of all is that the National Media/Big Tech/Bureaucratic State technocracy is lining up to suppress the story. Not only are they going so far as to censor the nation’s oldest newspapers , but they’re even reaching down to our personal devices to squash any mention of the story, just one month before an election that all interests involved in the suppression very much wanted to go Biden’s way.
My concerns are those of an American classic liberal, not a blind partisan. If the name “Biden” was replaced with “Trump,” and the year was 2016 rather than 2020, my outrage and fears would be the exact same. But one doubts the legacy media now belatedly chasing a story that has become too widespread for them to hide any longer can say the same.
The great misapprehension of many in this country is that, somehow, a different political system can craft a different human nature. No, human nature never changes. And political systems like ours — in which powers are balanced, ambitions checked by oversight, and a free and diligent press acts as an independent Fourth Estate — are constructed to rein in human nature. As such, when the levees holding back those who seek unchecked power break, when the watchdogs become the lapdogs of the State, then the country is in existential danger of becoming that which we once despised. Perhaps we are finally at an awakening. Only time will tell if we are too late.
Either way, for once Carl Bernstein’s overused hyperbolic go-to line is actually true this time: “This is worse than Watergate.”
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.