The Patriot Post® · The Greatest Media Hoax You've Never Heard Of
Here’s an idea: Why not have the Pulitzer Prize-winning hacks at The New York Times and The Washington Post hand over their medals to Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, and Matt Taibbi?
After all, the former wrote at length about and trafficked in demonstrable falsehoods, while the latter are now engaged in real truth-telling journalism via their deep dives into the so-called Twitter Files. The latest — and perhaps most powerful — case in point is Taibbi’s recent unraveling of a deep state, Democrat-driven digital disinformation dashboard called Hamilton 68.
Whomilton What, you ask? And that’s precisely the point: Practically no one had ever heard of Hamilton 68 (no, it’s not the Broadway musical) until Taibbi began digging around and unearthing its significance in one media-propagated Russia-collusion hoax after another. After another. What Taibbi found is this: A Swampy leftist think tank that dubiously claimed to be tracking Russian online activity was in fact responsible for thousands of fake news stories all built around a common theme: that Russia was aggressively meddling in U.S. politics.
Russian meddling in U.S. politics, eh? Where have we heard that before? And which political party was said to have benefited from it? And which former presidential administration was thereby wrongly subjected to a three-year-long special counsel’s colorectal exam?
The parent organization of Hamilton 68 is the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a leftist think tank founded in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump took office. (How do we know it’s a leftist think tank? Simple: It has the word “Democracy” in its name.) As the New York Post reports, “The ASD Advisory Council included such figures as top Clinton ally John Podesta, Obama-era acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and former conservative activist [and current Trump-hating activist] Bill Kristol.”
Who created the Hamilton 68 dashboard? A former — surprise! — FBI special agent and — surprise, surprise! — MSNBC contributor named Clint Watts.
“MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD,” tweeted Taibbi in his initial post, his tee-up to Twitter Files #15. (Jayson Blair, of course, was the notorious New York Times fabulist and plagiarist who resigned in disgrace in 2003.)
Taibbi tends to be about as wild-eyed as Walter Mondale, so for him to go ALL-CAPS and to invoke Jayson Blair is saying something. He even asked Homer Simpson to weigh in with a choice word or two:
1.THREAD: Twitter Files #15
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023
MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD pic.twitter.com/bLRpDpuWql
Here’s how columnist Roger Kimball describes the ginormous mainstream media-perpetrated hoax:
What is Hamilton 68? It is, Taibbi writes, a “computerized ‘dashboard’ designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure ‘Russian disinformation.’” But what it really measured was politically tendentious and utterly baseless allegations of Russian disinformation in order to discredit people and opinions that the people running Hamilton 68 didn’t like. Taibbi identifies it as a “neoliberal think tank” supposedly devoted to uncovering the nefarious influences of the Russkies on — well, everything. But especially — tell me you are not surprised — anything that involves Donald Trump or anyone or has to do with Trump.
As the Intercept’s Lee Fang put it: “The ‘Hamilton 68’ dashboard was a high level scam to falsely accuse Russian influence behind everything. Their entire opaque system was a fraud, and virtually every media outlet fell for it. Everyone from NYT to Mother Jones should post a correction.”
And by “everyone,” Fang means ev-ree-one. That includes NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, and the aforementioned New York Times and Washington Post.
Essentially, every time a conservative voice — even a relatively obscure one — spoke out in a way the Left didn’t like, they labeled it as coming from a Russian bot.
How widespread was the Hamilton 68 infection? It was everywhere and in most every major story. As Taibbi writes, “Hamilton 68 was the source for stories claiming Russian bots pushed terms like ‘deep state’ or hashtags like #FireMcMaster, #SchumerShutdown, #WalkAway, #ReleaseTheMemo, #AlabamaSenateRace, and #ParklandShooting, among many others.”
So: Where’s the mainstream media reckoning? Where’s the accountability? Where’s the cascade of mea culpas?
We’ll wait. And wait. And wait.