The new Black Lives Matter: what the next import from the US might be

The enthusiastic reception journalists offered Russiagate contrasts sharply with their response to the New York Post’s October 2020 revelations about the business dealings of Hunter Biden

American culture has taken over our country much in the same way the North American grey squirrel has crowded out its timid and increasingly elusive red cousin from our island: by being bigger, more confident and carrying maladies that impair the health of the local population. Until recently, our cultural imports from the US were mostly limited to eating habits that made us fat, speech that eschewed adverbs, and films made in a place infested by appalling sexual abuse. However, the internet has also allowed American politics to tunnel its way into our own.

The most recent import from US political culture has been the Black Lives Matter movement. Although its grievances are entirely inapplicable to British history and society, it has spread its poison with such rapidity that in the space of eighteen months, it has come to underpin much of the British left’s policy platform. This should give the concerned UK citizen pause: what’s next?

When reporting on the presidency of Donald Trump and the 2020 US presidential election, newspapers and the social media giants abandoned any pretence of objectivity. For instance, ‘Russiagate’, a sprawling and Byzantine collection of accusations that the Trump 2016 election campaign had colluded with the Russian state, was reported as fact. Facebook and Twitter allowed their users to share freely even the most pornographic and unsubstantiated of the stories.

Russiagate had significant real-world effects. It contributed to a deterioration in the relations between the United States and Russia, and led a portion of the US public to believe their head of state might have been compromised by – or even an agent of – a hostile power. Yet one after another, the accusations related to Russiagate were found to be false. Ultimately, Robert Muller, the special prosecutor appointed by the US Congress and given the full resources of the state to investigate the conspiracy theory, including the power to compel testimony under oath, found no evidence that President Trump had colluded with Russia at any stage.

The enthusiastic reception journalists offered Russiagate contrasts sharply with their response to the New York Post’s October 2020 revelations about the business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of Joseph Biden, the then Democratic Party nominee for president. Emails the New York Post obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop – reportedly forgotten at a computer repair shop – appeared to show him attempting to persuade his father to take action in his capacity as Vice President to help a Ukrainian energy company that paid Biden Jr $50,000 per month to sit on its Board of Directors.

A later set of emails reviewed by the Wall Street Journal found that Hunter Biden was aggressively marketing his family connections as the reason a Chinese energy and finance conglomerate should involve him in a joint venture. Analysis of the emails also showed that the countries he targeted for business deals overlapped with those his father visited as Vice President. Biden Jr’s expectations for deals involved personally receiving twenty per cent of the equity of any venture, while ‘holding 10%’ for someone he referred to as ‘the Big Guy’ – widely assumed to be now-President Joseph Biden.

Mainstream television and newspaper political journalists responded to the initial New York Post revelations with silence or, where they were given space at all, quiet dismissal. Furthermore, Facebook and Twitter both blocked all sharing of links to the original story in the run-up to the US elections of November that year. Twitter even locked the New York Post out of its account for over a week after it had first published the story.

Yet nobody, including either Hunter or President Biden, has ever denied the authenticity of the emails. Furthermore, several individuals involved in the email chains and in Hunter’s business dealings have corroborated them. The incriminating laptop’s chain of custody, from Biden Jr to the repair shop, and thence to the FBI and former New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani, has been confirmed. Damningly, Matt Taibbi, a journalist famous for his investigative work into large financial institutions during the Global Financial Crisis, has reported evidence to suggest that in 2015, then-Vice President Joseph Biden’s successful attempts to replace a Ukrainian prosecutor directly benefited the aforementioned energy company of which Hunter Biden was a Director.

While the unsubstantiated Russiagate conspiracy theory was given extensive media coverage, a real story that implicated the office of the Vice President in nepotistic corruption was censored. That all this involved China and Ukraine, countries of the highest geopolitical importance to the United States, and that the New York Post published the story during an election campaign in which Joseph Biden was running to be President, apparently meant nothing. Ultimately, the US media and Silicon Valley appear to have concluded that their ‘moral’ obligation to take sides against President Trump took precedence over reporting on the corruption of one of their nation’s highest offices.

There are already indications that this behaviour is permeating the British media. The Russiagate story was essentially copied and pasted into the left’s reporting of the post-Brexit referendum. For a metropolitan elite that was suffering a bad case of cognitive dissonance, it was more comforting to think that a shadowy Slavic supervillain had manipulated Britain out of the EU than it was to face up to the bankruptcy of their own arguments for staying. Meanwhile, although British newspapers have always been polemic, the barriers between opinion columns and news reporting are being broken to the extent that some newspapers now do far more political campaigning than they do news reporting.

After the election of Donald Trump, the employees and owners of traditional and new media platforms in the US seemed to decide it could never be allowed to happen again. It therefore engaged in (to borrow one of the Americanisms that now litter our language) a full court press to prevent his re-election. We must all be aware that the UK media’s coverage of our next general election might be something else we import from American culture.