Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Covering unrelated stories of the trial of the late Cardinal George Pell and the notorious Hunter Biden laptop, Miranda Devine deserves a Pulitzer for journalistic integrity.

May 25, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

I never imagined that I would be writing a post with Cardinal George Pell and Hunter Biden’s notorious “Laptop from Hell ” sharing the same title. The connections are circumstantial, but once I stumbled upon them, I knew I had my title for this post.

In both stories, the mainstream news media brought little light, but lots of heat, while exposing little truth beyond its own vile bias. In the case of Cardinal Pell’s unjust imprisonment, much of the news media in both Australia and America embraced a wildly imaginative narrative filled with holes to presume his guilt with no evidence. Being sent to prison is by no means an indication of guilt. In the case of Hunter Biden, both mainstream media and social media teamed up to cover up the explosive story before the 2020 presidential election. It was a true account that citizens of a free and open society had a right to know.

In both stories, one journalist distinguished herself as a champion of journalistic courage and integrity for pursuing and publishing the truth despite immense pressure to adhere to the media’s availability bias. That journalist is Miranda Devine who covered the Pell case in Australia while single-handedly exposing the Hunter Biden laptop story for the New York Post.

Back in October, 2021, Ryan MacDonald wrote a post in these pages entitled, “Fr. Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell.” Ryan included in that post several pages from Cardinal Pell’s book, Prison Journal Volume 2 which was widely read across the globe.

The paragraphs that Ryan reprinted from the book were about me. I read them repeatedly, not because I like to see my name in print, but because I had a subconscious nagging sense that I was missing something. Then, just weeks ago, it struck me. In one paragraph, my name appears along with that of Miranda Devine. Why would that be important? It wasn’t at first, but in subsequent readings it leapt out at me. Here’s the story:

From the Cardinal Pell Journal

On May 15, 2019, three years to the day before typing this post, I published a carefully researched article entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Sheryl Collmer, a reader of this blog from Texas who writes for American Thinker and Catholic World Report, mailed a copy of my article to Cardinal Pell, then still in an Australian prison having lost his first appeal. From half a world away, Cardinal Pell pondered my article and then wrote about it on August 2, 2019 in the journal he kept in his cell. Here are excerpts:

“By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl [Collmer], a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog These Stone Walls written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around 15 to 20 years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.”

Cardinal Pell went on in his journal to analyze my article and why I believed his trial was scripted from another unrelated case in the United States. A sensational and distorted account of that case appeared in both the U.S. and Australia in Rolling Stone magazine by a now disgraced former journalist, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. In several paragraphs, Cardinal Pell described my 2019 article:

“Fr MacRae recounts extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine Rolling Stone, pointing out that there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence. The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited.

“In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama’s White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men. As Fr MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.”

Cardinal George Pell, Prison Journal Volume 2 : pp 57-60

Cardinal Pell did not know it at the time, but I had already posted articles on the story of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s dubious article about accusations against Philadelphia priests by the anonymous “Billy Doe” in 2011, and her equally dubious account of gang rape at the University of Virginia. The most recent of my articles was, “The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone.”

Now Comes Miranda Devine

After reading Cardinal Pell’s book, I set it aside happy to have been of some hope and encouragement during his unjust time of imprisonment. Cardinal Pell concluded in his journal:

“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.”

Prison Journal Volume 2, p. 60

Many months after reading Cardinal Pell’s journal, I took up another book ordered for me by a friend. It was Laptop from Hell (Post Hill Press 2021), a now notorious account by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. My friend told me that the first printing sold out within weeks at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble so it was placed on backorder for me. It arrived in early March, 2022 and I began to read its shocking pages.

I immediately recognized its author, Miranda Devine, as the now famous New York Post columnist who nearly upended the U.S. presidential election in 2020. But I also knew that I had seen her name somewhere else. It turned out that it was in that passage from Cardinal Pell above. I was surprised to see both my name and that of Miranda Devine in the same paragraph.

I had not known until then that Ms. Devine wrote boldly in defense of Cardinal Pell against a tidal wave of progressive criticism in both Australia and the United States. Among her several articles on the Pell case was her last one, “Finally, Justice for George Cardinal Pell” published in the New York Post on April 7, 2020. Three weeks later I published, “From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell.”

There were several articles in the left-leaning Australian news media deeply critical of Ms. Miranda Devine for her defense of Cardinal Pell. She thus became, in my view, a champion of journalistic integrity. Such champions are few and far between now, but they keep alive the notion that fair, just, and courageous journalism is all that stands between us and the demise of democracy.

In the Bill of Rights, Freedom of the Press has long been regarded as fundamental to individual rights. Without a free media, a free society and democratic self-government would not be possible. Nonetheless, in October 2020, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and almost all network news media and social media banded together with an unprecedented decision to keep the American people from learning the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the presidential election.

I was in shock by this at the time. It was the sort of thing that happens during elections in any number of banana republics, but here it was, in a full court press, shamefully happening in the United States. As a result, the New York Post’ s Facebook and Twitter accounts were blocked and any mention of the laptop or its contents by thousands of users (including me) was censored.

Laptop from Hell got its title from a Twitter message of then President Donald Trump who read of some of its contents in the New York Post, the sole U.S. media outlet with the integrity to publish the story. Then President Trump’s Twitter account was also suspended.

I followed this story closely in October, 2020 as it was shamelessly suppressed and censored by most U.S. news and social media. The more it was suppressed, the more alarmed I became. As a 19-year-old in 1972, I was riveted to the Watergate story and the heroism of the Washington Post coverage by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The story led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 and criminal charges for some senior White House staff. The Washington Post won a Pulitzer for it while the names “Woodward and Bernstein” became synonymous with journalistic courage and integrity.

Hunter Biden’s Laptop

Now, a half century later, the same Washington Post was actively suppressing a story of government corruption of equal importance solely for political bias. The pre-election weeks of October 2020 should have caused an uproar over the revelations by Miranda Devine in the New York Post about the explosive contents of a laptop abandoned in a repair shop by the Democratic presidential nominee’s son and never retrieved. The White House and Democratic Party went into circle-the-wagons mode, and most of the news media, setting aside their primary role to be a nonpartisan check and balance on government, joined them there.

Hunter Biden’s laptop was not the only thing abandoned. Its potential impact before a hotly contested election resulted in the abandonment of the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press as well. Polls about trust and confidence in the news media were off the charts after Watergate, but reached an all-time low even before “Huntergate” when they bottomed out completely. In the most recent Pew Research Center survey of news journalists, in which I was invited to take part, American trust and confidence in the news media is under six percent.

The story told by Miranda Devine in Laptop from Hell is both utterly painful and painfully necessary. A web of lies, cover-ups and corruption drove Richard Nixon from the White House in his second term in 1974, but by covering up the Hunter Biden story in 2020, the news media interfered in a presidential election and now leaves a stunned nation with a scandal of equal measure after just one year of the Biden administration. It was not patriotism that did this. It was the opposite of patriotism. It was partisanship.

The laptop consists of thousands of emails, video clips, and other material produced by Hunter Biden, son of then Vice President Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic Nominee. The contents reveal a shocking influence-peddling scheme by Hunter Biden who received millions of dollars for arranging influence from his then Vice President father with foreign entities in Ukraine, Russia, and China.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Legislative Judiciary Committee Member Adam Schiff, and seemingly every member on the Democratic sides of the House and Senate who were asked, including fifty former intelligence officers sworn to uphold the Constitution, all agreed to knowingly propagate a massive lie: that the laptop story “had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation.”

That well-rehearsed lie was repeated to the American people by the Democratic nominee as he stared into the camera during the second Presidential Debate. It should be alarming that it was President Trump, and not the news media moderator, who brought it up in the first place.

I waded into this story a bit when I posted “A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War” some months ago. It was posted just as Vladimir Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine was in its early stages. I wrote in that post that if the slowly published contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop are true, the President is compromised in foreign policy regarding Russia, Ukraine and China. I was certainly not the first or the last to raise this concern. The best coverage came from the least impaired news media, The Epoch Times, and a March 23, 2022 op-ed by Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke, “The Foreign Policy Ramifications of Hunter’s Emails.”

We only know about this story at all today thanks to the dogged pursuit of it by Miranda Devine and the New York Post. And in U.S. news coverage of the wrongly convicted and imprisoned George Cardinal Pell, Miranda Devine and the New York Post were singular in their expression of journalistic skepticism about the flawed case against him. Mercifully, all seven members of Australia’s High Court agreed. If there is a Pulitzer for journalistic courage and integrity, it should have Miranda Devine’s name on it.

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Note from the Editor: Please share this post. Father Gordon MacRae will mark forty years of priesthood on June 5, 2022, the Solemnity of Pentecost. Please join us here next week on June 1st for a special post as he reflects on those years in the most extraordinary circumstances. You may also like these related posts:

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

Fr Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell

A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War

A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War

While Russia invaded Ukraine with its nuclear arsenal on high alert, the White House and media were compromised by partisan secrets and selective reporting.

March 9, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

A lot of media angst and ink have been spilled over the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has silenced Russian media to keep his own citizens from witnessing the horror he has inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. However, the Free World has a media problem of its own. As I began this post on March 4, 2022 my account on Facebook was disabled and taken down. This is the message I received from Facebook: “Your Facebook account has been disabled. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards.” The offending post, which Facebook disabled based solely on the title and introductory quote was “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

I actually wrote that post several years ago, and shared it then on Facebook with no problem. This time I shared it on Facebook’s Catholic groups which should have a particular interest in its subject matter. Eighty years ago the government of Germany launched a moral panic accusing and arresting without evidence, 300 Catholic priests on trumped up sexual abuse charges. It was all a fraud, and after many months in prison all but six were exonerated, and even several of them were falsely accused. For unknown reasons, Facebook did not want Catholic groups to see that post. I can no longer share my posts among the fifteen or so established Catholic groups and News groups such as Catholic News Agency on Facebook. But you can. Today, it seems, that the media of the “Free” World cannot abide such a story. We will be reassessing our use of social media, so if you have suggestions, please let us know.

I very much miss Walter Cronkite, the most trusted broadcast journalist of the 20th Century. He was the longtime anchor of CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. I grew up with him on my TV screen from the age of nine to almost twenty-nine. Walter Cronkite guided us through the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. From our living rooms, he navigated the Civil Rights movement and the war in Vietnam. He was with us as the nation held its breath in 1969 while Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and he navigated a long cold war with the Soviet Empire. Yet no one I know could tell me today whether his personal politics leaned left or right.

In his career, Cronkite won five Emmys and the George Polk Journalism Award. He was a newsman and pundit in the strict sense of the term, and I wanted to emulate him. For some today, the word, “pundit” has a negative connotation confused with “spin doctor.” Its origin, however, is the word “pandit” from the Sanskrit word “pad itah” spoken in parts of India and Sri Lanka. It refers to a learned sage or scholar, someone to whom everyone else would be wise to listen.

Few stand out in the news media of today as Walter Cronkite did. I am just a minor voice in modern media, but as I began this post I was surprised to receive an invitation from the PEW Research Center to join its survey of journalists. “The views you share will tell us about experiences of journalists like you across the country.” While writing for Beyond These Stone Walls, I was also invited to serve as a Wall Street Journal Opinion Leader. That may be the reason for my PEW Research Center invitation, but I hope it is also because I try to write truth without political filters. As a result of writing with that in mind, some have come to appreciate Beyond These Stone Walls as a source of truth and reflection about truth. Over the last few years, BTSW has received several citations as a reliable news source at the “In the News” section of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Our most recent Catalyst citation was for a post that demonstrated a double standard in public perceptions about accused Catholic priests. It was one of the most widely read posts of 2021 and still dominates traffic in 2022. Of interest, that post was widely read and shared by the thousands of readers at the r/Catholicism forum at Reddit. That post was “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

I was happy about its success because that post in particular strove to cover the truth without spin. Its bottom line was something challenging to the news media status quo: that to be accused means to be guilty. In that case, the accused was my own bishop. I also have an unhappy history with him due to some of his actions and policies. Ryan MacDonald laid those out in a most important post, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.”

But I was proud that I set those concerns aside to take the high road in reporting on the story of allegations against my bishop. I believe him to be innocent of any such suspicion against him. However after publication of my post about a connection between former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and claims in a civil lawsuit against my bishop, I was “permanently banned” from ever again posting content at the Reddit r/Catholicism community. Then BTSW’s invitation for membership in the Catholic Media Association was rescinded without cause or explanation. The reasons for these, and the Facebook dismissal, were political and had nothing to do with the truth of what I posted.

Political Fallout at CNN

Long after posting that first story, above, its connection to former Governor Andrew Cuomo kept it in the neon lights of online interest, something I neither intended nor expected. Because the Governor’s brother, Chris Cuomo, was a lead anchor at CNN, the spotlight of investigation fell on him as well. It was discovered that he used his position as a news anchor to coach his older brother on how to navigate the news media against multiple sexual misconduct allegations. Then similar allegations were leveled at Chris Cuomo as well, among other ethics concerns.

On his way out the CNN door under a cloud, it is suspected by some in the media that he acted as a whistleblower pointing at CNN Executive Director Jeff Zucker for a long term consensual relationship with another CNN upper management employee, Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust. In the end, both of them were also forced to resign from CNN under a cloud of ethical concerns amid charges of violations of their due process rights leveled by some of the remaining CNN staffers.

Allison Gollust also once briefly served as Governor Cuomo’s spokesperson. Sources at CNN today claim that Mr. Zucker and Ms. Gollust “pushed hard” to orchestrate and promote a series of CNN interviews between Chris Cuomo and Governor Cuomo while navigating the earlier days of the pandemic. The interviews were for the sole purpose of countering President Donald Trump’s daily news briefs about managing the pandemic. Some staff at CNN now charge that the daily Covid-19 pandemic interviews between the Cuomo brothers set the stage for the very thing for which Chris Cuomo eventually lost his job: a blurring of the borders between news and politics.

The CNN on-air interviews between Chris and Andrew Cuomo were pushed by CNN despite their straddling an ethical line because they were a boost for ratings. Since the presidential election of 2020, ratings at all three of the 24-hour cable news networks plummeted costing the networks billions in advertising dollars, but CNN and MSNBC suffered far more than Fox News. So journalistic ethics took a back seat to ratings concerns at CNN.

This is something I have long noticed. The blurring of news and opinion at all three of these networks spilled over into the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news formats. Ratings and advertising dollars at all three were lagging behind the cable news networks which in turn were lagging behind their pre-2020 election standings. It became clear that former President Donald Trump was the cause.

CNN and MSNBC had to find ways to compete with FOX News which maintained comparatively healthy post election ratings. They could only do this by appealing to their virulently anti-Trump base. So you may have noted, as I did, that at some point around mid-2021 both CNN and MSNBC returned in their prime time news and opinion formats to a daily disparagement of Donald Trump long after he left office. This also spilled over into some print journalism. As I type this post, I have in hand a resent copy of The Week magazine which decidedly leans to the usual journalistic left. The issue I am looking at, dated in mid February 2022, contains one reference to sitting President Joe Biden and five references, all negative, to former president Donald Trump.

Of interest, CNN now plans major changes. After a merger between its parent WarnerMedia with Discovery Inc., former MSNBC producer Chris Licht will become chairman and CEO of CNN Global. He is reported to be planning to adjust CNN’s broadcast format to include an emphasis on hard news and less opinion especially in its prime time schedule.

A Laptop Window onto Corruption

As I write this, Russian President Vladimir Putin is waging a full scale invasion of Ukraine. It is frightening to watch this unfolding reminder of the old Soviet Union and its savage consumption of neighbor states. For the most part, MSNBC and CNN are taking a little break from disparaging Donald Trump, but even now I hear the occasional blame aimed at Trump's foreign policy. We are not at all well served in this partisan distortion of news, but it is even worse than you think. Vladimir Putin knows well that both the sitting President of the United States and the American news media are compromised. There is simply no other way to say this, and I know that, for some, it will label me as a pro-Trump partisan which is not at all the truth.

A few months ago, a reader gifted me with a small book entitled Laptop from Hell by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. I was interested in the book because I was fascinated by media — and social media — treatment of this story in the months before the 2020 U.S. presidential election. We were a nation in denial about our own addiction to partisan politics, and the news media had become our greatest enabler as it struggled for ratings and advertising dollars. Now, with the Russian thirst for war, the truth of this story is at risk of being buried forever. So please let me do my own small part in preventing this even if it is painful. It is nonetheless the truth.

Our President is compromised, and so is much of our mainstream media. In 2019, drug-addicted Hunter Biden left his laptop at a Mac repair shop in Delaware, and then promptly forgot about it. It was just six days before Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Months later, just as the 2020 primaries got underway, the owner of the repair shop discovered the abandoned laptop along with a signed repair invoice from Hunter Biden who never returned to retrieve it. The laptop ended up in the hands of the New York Post, the fourth largest newspaper in the United States.

Hunter Biden was unresponsive to inquiries to ascertain that the laptop was his. He later finally owned it by stating in an interview that “I just wasn’t keeping very good track of my possessions then.” Since no one claimed it in time, the Post began to have it analyzed and discovered the entire contents of its hard drive. Miranda Devine described it as:

“A treasure trove of corporate documents, emails, text messages, photographs and voice recordings spanning a decade. The laptop provided the first evidence that President Joe Biden was involved in his son’s ventures in China, Ukraine and beyond despite repeated denials. Hunter [Biden] had something to sell. He was the son of the vice president who would go on to become the leader of the free world.”

While Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden mysteriously landed a $1 million per year position on the board of Burisma, a Ukraine oil company under suspicion for corruption. Hunter Biden had zero previous experience in that industry. Miranda Devine’s account of the contents of the “Laptop from Hell” reveals a series of emails to Hunter from shady figures in Ukraine demanding that he make good on his position by bringing political pressure to bear to remove a Ukraine prosecutor who had set his sights on investigating Burisma.

Joe Biden, while vice president, then set his own sights on that same prosecutor. In an impromptu speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, Joe Biden told the story of how he had flown into Kyiv aboard Airforce-2 and threatened to withhold from the Ukraine government $1 billion in U.S. aid unless Prosecutor General Shokin was fired. Vice President Biden boasted:

“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

— Laptop from Hell p. 95

In the months leading up to the presidential election of 2020, most of the mainstream media, and the powerful social media platforms at Twitter and Facebook, suppressed this story and many other related accounts covered by the New York Post. This is not about the outcome of that election. It is about trust in government and the news media to cover news without partisan political considerations. The existence of the book, Laptop from Hell by Miranda Devine, and the political efforts to silence it before a national election, now place our trust in both the media and our government at risk in a time of war. As Miranda Devine points out: “Hunter Biden found himself at the center of a titanic struggle between the US and Russia over energy... How the vice president’s son got involved with such a shady operation has always been obscured.”

Truth be told, our president and much of our news and social media credibility are now compromised by this story and Vladimir Putin knows this.

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Update from Father Gordon MacRae: As reported in this post, our Facebook page was taken down on March 4th. On March 8th, after I wrote the above post, I published a short article at Linkedin entitled “Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression.”

A few hours after it was published, our Facebook page was reinstated without explanation and is now back online. However, when we attempted to post this post on my Facebook page, Facebook refused it with a message stating that other readers may not agree with it. Welcome to the world of the Facebook Speech Police.

We also want to bring to your attention a new addition to our “Voices from Beyond” section. It was first published a few years ago in the National Catholic Register newspaper, and it was the first time mainstream Catholic media had taken up my case. The article, by Brian Fraga, is “New Hampshire Priest Continues the Long Road to Clear His Name.”

There is more to come next week on the terror unfolding in Ukraine. Please share this post, and please pray for the people of Ukraine and Russia who are now pawns in these current events.

From Hong Kong to America Freedom Is under Siege

Is America ready to surrender free speech and other civil rights? A daring escape from Hong Kong and its encroaching Communist Chinese regime should raise alarms.

Just a few weeks before America shuddered in abhorrence over a post-election mob raid at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, something remarkable unfolded in Hong Kong. Two young Danes — Thomas Rohden, age 25, and Anders Storgaard, age 26 — choreographed a young democracy activist’s escape from Hong Kong. It’s a story worthy of a John le Carré novel. The story was first written in The Wall Street Journal as “A Hong Kong Dissident’s Daring Escape” (Jan. 13, 2021) by Editorial Page writer Jillian Kay Melchior, and it’s fascinating.

The two young Danes, in opposite political parties, belong to a group called the Danish China Critical Society. Its purpose is to raise awareness among Danish citizens about human rights abuses in Communist China. After meeting with some Hong Kong pro-democracy activists in Copenhagen last year, they remained in contact with Mr. Ted Rui, age 38, a Hong Kong legislator who has openly dared to protest legislation that threatens free expression for Hong Kong citizens.

Last summer, China imposed a new law on Hong Kong citizens that outlaws any form of dissent. Mr. Hui’s protests resulted in an arrest for which he was out on bail awaiting prosecution. He had begun to notice that he and some of his family were being followed since the arrest. Other members of the Hong Kong freedom movement have been assaulted. Though Mr. Rui had not yet been charged under China’s new dissent law, he knew that its penalty is life in prison.

A little history: Hong Kong island and the Kowloon Peninsula were ceded by China to become a British dependency in 1841 and 1860 respectively. Over the next 150 years, Hong Kong became a global financial center and one of the world’s largest trading ports.

An agreement signed by the British and Chinese governments in 1984 provided for China to resume sovereignty over Kong Kong and the region in 1997. The agreement was that Hong Kong would become a Special Administrative Region with its laws guaranteeing its citizens rights for a period of fifty years. The “One State - Two Systems” agreement remained in place until Beijing began to crack down on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in recent years. The massive pro-democracy protests were sparked by a bill introduced in the Hong Kong legislature giving Beijing arrest and extradition authority in Hong Kong.

After Ted Hui was released on bail, Thomas Rohden and Anders Storgaard concocted a bold plan to host a fake climate change conference in Copenhagen and invite Mr. Hui in an effort to get him and his family to safety. Fearing that his telephone might be monitored, they never told him that the planned conference was not real when they invited him. He had already been considering finding a way to go into exile when the invitation came.

Postponing the exile plan, he told the Danes that Hong Kong courts wanted to review the climate change conference before Mr. Hui could accept the invitation to Copenhagen. The Danes put something together in haste while Mr. Hui booked flights for his wife and two children to go to London. Ted Hui arrived in Copenhagen ready to address climate change without ever even suspecting that the conference was a ruse. He was relieved beyond words that he and his family had escaped Chinese communist tyranny.

Beijing and Hong Kong were not amused. Beijing has asserted that its anti-dissent laws also apply to citizens of other countries who conspire to free Chinese residents. Rohden and Storgaard now must avoid travel to or through any country that has an extradition agreement with Beijing. The most important part of this story is Ted Hui’s reaction to his freedom:

“The message I want to take for the Danish people is not to take freedom for granted. Freedom is very fragile. It can go away in months or weeks. The hand of tyranny can extend very quickly, and can influence the world.”

— Ted Hui

The Rise of Socialism

The United States has just witnessed firsthand the need for a warning like Ted Hui’s, formerly of Hong Kong, that “freedom is very fragile.” Exactly as he has warned, “it can go away in months or weeks.” In the month since the mob attack at the U.S. Capitol, forces in this nation have shamed Americans using progressive ideology and the “cancel culture” pandemic to accept without dissent the open suppression of three foundational civil liberties guaranteed in the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious freedom.

After years of denials by Facebook and Twitter that the platforms suppress conservative points of view, that suppression is now in the open and inflicted without apology. As information technology, these venues have also suppressed freedom of the press. Here is the example that comes most readily to mind: In October, 2020, the New York Post, this nation’s fourth largest daily newspaper, covered on its Front Page a potentially explosive story that has since emerged as both factual and with hard evidence and witnesses that back it up. That story was about the business practices of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, blocked the story from exposure through social media. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did so as well. The rest of the mainstream media, taking their marching orders from Twitter and Facebook, suppressed the story as fraudulent. It was not. The obvious reason for the suppression was the fact that the story emerged a month before an election, but it had little to do with the election. The business practice that was exposed in the story was an allegation that Hunter Biden had received millions in profit from foreign entities through “influence peddling” by selling access to his father during the administration of President Obama.

It was and is an ugly story involving three of the most politically contentious foreign enterprises now faced by President Biden’s administration: China, Russia, and the Ukraine.

My purpose in writing of this is not to denigrate the current president, nor is it to determine truth and falsehood. That is for the Justice Department to do. It turns out that the FBI has been investigating Hunter Biden for many months, and that investigation now includes allegations of multi-million dollar deals within China while his father was vice president. That said, Hunter Biden deserves, and should have, the full spectrum of due process rights afforded to him, but the suppression of news coverage is not one of those rights.

The arrogance of some in the mainstream media being what it is, admissions of culpability are as rare as the unnuanced truth. The story remains suppressed by most of the mainstream news media, but that is changing as the DOJ investigation can no longer be ignored or covered up. Under public pressure, Facebook and Twitter have finally stopped removing the story or suspending the accounts of those sharing it. U.S. foreign policy has been critical of the Chinese Communist government for its suppression of news, but I have been hard pressed to see the difference.

That is the real harm caused by media suppression of this story. Repressive regimes that balk at America’s claim of having a free press all know of it. The mob that attacked Washington all knew of it, and it lent fuel to their insistence that the election was not a free and fair election. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Adam Schiff both knew about it even as they dismissed it as “Russian disinformation.”

The greatest harm has been to President Biden himself. This story will not go away. The fact of its pre-election suppression will cause it to expand and fester. It will haunt his term in office for the next year as he is drawn further into it. Freedom of the press has been abdicated in favor of a deeply partisan bias about the news we should be allowed to see and hear. The institution in our society that should act as a bipartisan government oversight for and by the people has openly betrayed that role. Freedom itself will suffer for it. So will we all.

The Assault on Freedom of Speech

The mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 — purportedly Trump supporters all — inflicted far more damage on Donald Trump and his presidency than any of his political enemies could accomplish. This mob attack at the heart of democracy was not an example of freedom of expression, but it is one of the core rights of our democracy —freedom of speech — that now suffers for it. And, again, so will we all.

Back in 2016, I wrote a pre-election post entitled, “Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables.” That seems almost a reserved and innocent time when compared with the unfathomable chasm between left and right that the four years hence have wrought. I had no frame of reference then for just how relatively fair Mrs. Clinton was being when she relegated a mere half of Trump voters to “a basket of deplorables.” There is now a highly charged and partisan effort to lump all 74 million Trump voters into that basket, keep them there, and silence them.

Blacklists are now emerging among publishers. Simon & Schuster just cancelled a forthcoming book by Senator Josh Hawley entitled, “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” Remember Mike Lindell? He’s the contagiously happy guy who sells pillows and “Dream Sheets” on TV. Exposed now as a Trump campaign donor, several large U.S. retail outlets have ordered his products pulled from their shelves. I could fill pages with similar examples of political suppression.

It is a credit to Hillary Clinton that she only called half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” in 2016. The other half, she said with candid honesty, “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them; nobody worries about what happens to their lives and futures ... Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

President Biden should call upon Democrats to end this blood lust for Republicans who cannot in conscience embrace cancel culture, identity politics, and a partisan disregard for the most inherent civil right of all, the right to life. Our newly elected president did not get off to a good start when he called for unity and healing with the insistence that “We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” It seems clearly to me right now to be rather the other way around.

Catholics Still in the Basket of Deplorables

There have been some unfortunate — scandalous is a better word — examples of the suppression of free speech even among Catholic leaders since the mob scene of January 6. A reader sent me a very troubling article from America magazine by Father James Martin, SJ entitled, “How Catholic Leaders Helped Give Rise to Violence at the U.S. Capitol” (Jan. 12, 2021).

The article is little more than a shameful attempt to use the events of January 6 to score political points against the author’s perceived theological and ideological enemies. I found it to be profoundly sad. Father Martin singled out Father James Altman, Father Ed Meeks, Father John Zuhlsdorf, Father Richard Heilman, Father Kevin Cusick, Bishop Richard Stika, Bishop Joseph E. Strickland, among others, to be examples of “priests and bishops who count themselves as pro-life (but) helped spawn a hate-filled environment that led to mayhem, violence and, ultimately, death.”

These names, and others like them, are the heroes of traditional Catholics and the Catholic pro-life community. They are deeply respected for speaking openly and with fidelity to Church teaching about the Holocaust of our time, the infanticide of 60 million aborted Americans who have no free speech rights of their own. By denigrating and accusing them so duplicitously, Father Martin scored some ideological points, but only within his own tribe — far left Catholics who would likely be far more comfortable in the U.S. Episcopal church. Frankly, no one else would even be reading America.

In his unfortunate America article, Father James Martin contributes to the atmosphere of tribalism that has so separated Americans in recent years. And clearly, he separates Catholics along the same sad partisan lines.

President Joe Biden’s greatest challenge may not be the conversion of Republicans to more progressive ideologies. It may well be the conversion of the progressive left to the tolerance and unity he rightly calls for. Trump is gone. The Democrats control the House and the White House and have the deciding tie-breaker vote in the Senate. But Portland, Seattle, and other Democrat controlled cities are still rioting, as they did all last summer. CNN blamed it all on Donald Trump then, and is still calling these “peaceful protests.”

Portland, Oregon police reported that the “peaceful protesters came armed with pepper-ball guns, tasers and other electronic crowd control weapons, fireworks, rocks, and shields.” Some were armed with molotov cocktails, knives, batons, chemical spray, and crowbars. In Seattle, the January 20 peaceful protesters burned American flags and caused damage to an ICE headquarters. In Portland they carried signs reading, “We don’t want Biden. We want revenge!" They identified themselves as anarchists and antifa protesters responding to racism, fascism, and police brutality.

They also attacked the Democratic headquarters. Police made multiple arrests at the peaceful protests.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like a related post that is mentioned in the text above:

Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

And for an example of media duplicity and coverup:

Hitler's Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times.

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