Democrat Rep. Dan Goldman, a member of the House Weaponization of Government committee, is still trying to maintain that there is a vast Right-wing conspiracy to smear Hunter Biden using a faked laptop hard drive.

WOW. @RepDanGoldman still doesn't believe that the Hunter Biden laptop is real.

How embarassing. pic.twitter.com/hg4KLLxpRh

— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) November 30, 2023

The clip comes from a hearing being held in which journalist Michael Shellenberger and others are testifying about the censorship-industrial complex. Shellenberger has tons of receipts and has written extensively about how government, NGOs, and social media companies collaborated to shape the political discussion by spreading falsehoods, censoring dissenters, and even shutting down the official communications of sitting congressmen.

Goldman has a problem: all of this is true. So, he has fallen back on the tried and true strategy of simply lying.

The lies don’t work with people who have developed an appropriate level of skepticism–an immune system of sorts that protects them from dis- and misinformation spread by the Left. It also doesn’t convince their own side because they don’t care about the truth. The people to whom it is directed are the low-information voters who desperately want to believe that the system is not rigged.

The Biden laptop must be one of the most verified documents in the world right now. Every major media outlet has confirmed its authenticity–reluctantly and late in most cases–and the FBI verified its authenticity as far back as 2019.

In this particular case, what is at stake for Goldman is not any consequences for Biden–either Joe or Hunter–but the fate of the censorship complex itself. Censorship and misinformation have become a cornerstone of the Left’s strategy, which explains their obsession with Elon Musk and Twitter/X. One of the most notorious examples of how censorship was used to manipulate the political process is the censorship of the New York Post’s story on the laptop, which was predicated on the idea that it was Russian disinformation.

It wasn’t, of course, and it is important to maintain the plausibility of the claim that it was. If a consensus develops that Twitter, Facebook, and the MSM shut down the dissemination of that information just before the 2020 election, it becomes indisputable that the election was rigged not just by social media companies but by intelligence officials, government-funded NGOs, and other media outlets who spread lies to muddy the waters.

So Goldman maintains the fiction that the laptop was faked. Everybody in the room knows he is lying, just as everybody knows because it is documented that social media companies agreed to government demands to censor other true but inconvenient information. The entire COVID communication strategy was predicated on spreading falsehoods (see my earlier column today for just one example).

NOW – Shellenberger: "US and UK military contractors" deployed "sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics… against the American people."pic.twitter.com/yEzXAwvBvY

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 30, 2023

What is striking about the story of how censorship and intentional misinformation have been covered is the complete absence of coverage by the MSM. They ignore the fact that government agents engaged in a years-long and illegal effort to manipulate information and the electoral system to regain power. And since the MSM has become essentially an agent of the bureaucratic state it, too, must maintain the fiction that everything is normal.

Matt Taibbi, Shellenberger, and Bair Weiss have shouldered all the burden of covering this story because nobody else outside alternative media wants to cover it.

In other words, the con goes on.

What’s interesting about all this is that most people have caught on but feel powerless to get solid information. They know their chains are being pulled, but have neither the time nor inclination to spend hours each day to suss out the truth.

The result is a collapse in social trust–one that may very well be fatal to the Republic.