Can it be any wonder that so many Americans have lost faith in their democracy?

One theme dominates the Democrats’ argument as to why the country so desperately needs them, even if the cost is having a president whose best days are quite evidently far behind him with his finger on the nuclear trigger: Democracy must be saved from Donald Trump, who would use a second term to impose an authoritarian regime upon America.

Let us concede from the outset that Trump’s failure to call upon his supporters to cease and desist for hours after they besieged the Capitol on January 6, 2020, was one of the low points in the history of American democracy.

Yet I would argue that over the last 20 years, the left has done far more damage to American democracy by draining the main institutions of representative government of popular trust. When fewer and fewer citizens believe that the checks and balances put into place by the Framers are any longer effective, or that the playing field is level for both sides of the political debate, the unifying power of a common set of rules and procedures is lost.

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS is specifically secured in the Bill of Rights. A free press, the Framers believed, would act as a necessary check on government power by exposing the actions of those in power to sunlight, the ultimate disinfectant. Such a press was viewed as crucial for an informed citizenry.

But that only works so long as members of the Fourth Estate view themselves as bound to uncover and expose the truth, not to become actors in its suppression. When President Biden revealed himself to be well down the path of senility in the first presidential debate, members of the mainstream press showed themselves to be not just fools but tools. Until that moment, they saw their task as to dismiss as fake news all evidence of the president’s growing enfeeblement and rapidly declining mental acuity.

When the Wall Street Journal broke the silence and published a deeply researched news story on June 4 detailing the president’s mental decline, based, inter alia, on interviews with Europeans leaders who had met with him at various international gatherings, CNN’s Oliver Darcy attacked the article’s “glaring problems.” The talking heads on MSNBC’s Morning Joe ridiculed it as “so tilted, a classic hit piece,” and speculated that it was a gift from WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch to curry favor with Donald Trump.

The New York Times went to great efforts to label videos of the president wandering around looking confused or not making any sense as “misleading.” The Washington Post unleashed its fact-checkers to demonstrate “how Republicans used misleading videos to attack Biden.” And NBC characterized a viral video of the president looking lost at a G7 meeting as “debunked.”

Yet no sooner had Jill Biden led her husband off the debate stage than two of the New York Times’ leading columnists — Tom Friedman and Nicholas Kristof — were calling for Biden to withdraw from the race. And the Times’ editorial page followed suit the next day. Now, the order of the day was to get rid of the president as soon as possible, lest he sink the entire Democratic Party with him.

But Biden’s debate performance did not lay bare that which had long been hidden. It just made it impossible to hide any longer. Carl Bernstein, whose investigative Watergate reporting helped bring down President Nixon, suddenly recalled that people close to Biden had related to him, over the past year and a half, 15 to 20 incidents in which “the president appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show we witnessed.”

And Chuck Todd, former host of NBC’s Meet the Press, now remembered that as long as two years ago, a senior cabinet secretary had expressed amazement that Biden was considering running for another term given the state of his mental decline — a decline characterized by Politico’s Jonathan Martin, in discussion with Todd, as an “open secret.”

A week after the debate, New York magazine’s top political reporter Olivia Nuzzi published a piece titled “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.” Ever since January, she wrote, she had been hearing from Democratic officials, activists, and donors working to reelect the president, who wondered whether he would even make it to Election Day. At a reception for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, she had a chance to observe the president close up — “his eyes were half-shut or open very wide... his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals.”

After the photo-op, a group of reporters discussed how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one asked.

But only after the debate did she mention what she and others had clearly seen.

Post-debate Politico described how the president’s daily briefers carefully limit any bad news that might set him off. “He is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared... of him.” Apparently, the leader of the free world has to be fed any discouraging words in small doses.

BUT MAINSTREAM MEDIA REPORTING of the president’s mental slippage is only one example of major stories where its reportage — or non-reportage, as the case may be — was almost uniform and characterized by a minimal level of investigation. Three years ago, in another venue, I published a lengthy piece titled “The Press That Can’t Shoot Straight and Doesn’t Even Try.”

Some of those instances of mainstream media (MSM) suppression appear absurd in hindsight. For instance, the theory that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the most generally accepted explanation today. But for years, it was almost uniformly dismissed in the MSM as “debunked” or as a “conspiracy theory.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci had a great interest in suppressing that theory: The gain of function research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute was sponsored in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by him. Knowledge that he had inadvertently been paying for research that resulted in millions of deaths worldwide would certainly have undermined his aura of expertise with respect to managing the government’s response to the Covid virus.

Today, Fauci freely admits that much of that guidance was not based on solid evidence and nothing more than guesswork. And both he and Dr. Francis Collins, then head of the National Institute of Health, have stated that inadequate consideration was given to the massive social, economic, and educational collateral costs of prolonged school lockdowns and business closures.

The single most powerful example of the MSM advancing a uniform narrative, of course, is the three-year Trump-Russian collusion story. For that entire period, the MSM was filled with breathless reports of “the walls closing in” on President Trump in the investigation. The main MSM source was Representative Adam Schiff of California, who is now the prohibitive favorite to win the Senate seat in November, and who was then the senior majority representative on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The MSM consistently portrayed the Harvard-trained lawyer Schiff as having run rings around the senior minority representative on the committee, Devin Nunes.

At least, that is, until the Justice Department’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz, an Obama appointee, issued a report finding that Nunes had been right on every point in dispute between the majority and minority reports. Schiff, concluded left-wing journalists Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Adam Mate of the Nation, was shown to be not only wrong but a “pathological liar.” Another left-wing journalist, Glenn Greenwald, concluded that Horowitz had “unearthed a scandal of historic magnitude, not only for the FBI but also for the US media.”

The most scandalous case of media nonfeasance concerns Hunter Biden’s laptop. The story broke in the New York Post in the months leading up to the 2020 election. The laptop contained hundreds of photos of Hunter’s debauched lifestyle. It was recently used by federal prosecutors to secure a conviction of Hunter Biden for having falsified a federal gun purchase form by stating that he was not a drug user at the time of the purchase.

But far more relevant to the election campaign between Hunter’s father and Donald Trump then in full swing were emails detailing Hunter’s business dealings with a Chinese company closely connected to the ruling Communist Party. One of those emails specified that 10 percent of the profits from the contemplated deals would be set aside of the “big guy,” whom Hunter’s then partner Tony Bobulinski subsequently identified as candidate Joe Biden.

But that story did not have legs, as they say, due to the studied incuriosity of the MSM media, and the strenuous and largely successful efforts of the intelligence services in convincing major social media platforms not to disseminate it. (See the discussion of the “deep state” in the next section.) Mike Morrel, a former acting director of the CIA, acting at the behest, according to his testimony, of Biden campaign advisor and current secretary of state Antony Blinken, enlisted 51 senior intelligence officials, including President Obama’s CIA director John Brennan and director of national intelligence James Clapper, to sign a letter that the laptop bore the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.

Yet none of those officials had ever examined the laptop. Nor did they explain how the Russians could have amassed such a plethora of photos of Hunter. Moreover, Bobulinski and others confirmed that they were recipients of emails found on the laptop. The chain of possession of the laptop from Hunter Biden to a Delaware repair shop was clearly established, and Hunter never denied that it was his. Most importantly, the laptop itself had been in FBI possession since 2019 and had been fully authenticated.

But the MSM remained oblivious to all these matters, happy to rely on the Letter of 51, rather than look into information potentially damaging to the Biden campaign. In an election ultimately decided by 43,000 votes in three states, the selfie videos of Joe Biden’s drug-addled son, and, even more important, the emails raising suspicions that Joe Biden benefitted directly from his son’s influence-peddling schemes, would almost certainly have changed the outcome of the election — making the election if not “stolen,” at least “rigged.”

THE REASON THE CONTENTS of Hunter Biden’s laptop did not receive wider play was not just the studied indifference of the MSM. In addition, the so-called “deep state” of intelligence agencies leaned hard on Twitter and Facebook not to disseminate the New York Post’s reporting on the laptop.

The full story of how the government intelligences agencies used the major social media platforms to censor views on a wide-range of topics in a manner forbidden to the government by the First Amendment only came to light when Twitter was sold to Elon Musk, and he put a group of independent journalists to work going through the so-called Twitter Files. (See Jacob Siegel’s “The Hoax of the Century,” Tablet, March 29, 2023.) According to Matt Taibbi, one of those journalists, the Twitter Files show “the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship.”

That censorship effort covered a wide-range of hot political topics — e.g., Alex Berenson’s reporting (now confirmed) that mRNA vaccines do not prevent transmission of Covid, Covid lock-down policies, and “anti-Ukraine narratives” — and was vast in scope. Stanford’s Education Integrity Partnership, a think tank, funded in part by major Democratic donors George Soros and Reid Hoffman, working together with the Department of Homeland Security, flagged 22 million tweets as “disinformation” and collected 859 million more for misinformation analysis.”

The intelligence agencies consciously put their fingers on the scale in the 2020 election. On the night prior to the New York Post’s breaking the story of the Hunter Biden’s laptop, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent ten documents to Yoel Roth, the director of trust and safety at Twitter. Chan had long been priming Twitter and Facebook to view the laptop as Russian disinformation, which, as we have seen, it was not.

Remarkably, Donald Trump was still president at the time. Yet the FBI, ostensibly subordinate to the Department of Justice, then run by Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr, was running its own election operation. So was the CIA. Ex-CIA official David Cariens had a book pending before the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board for which he was seeking security clearance.

A CIA official called Cariens to convey the message that his book had been cleared, but also took the opportunity to ask him whether he would like to sign the Letter of 51 described above, though the CIA official had no reason to believe that Cariens knew anything about the provenance of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In short, a CIA employee, at a time Donald Trump was still president, acted to aid the Biden campaign.

Remarkably, revelation of a “deep state” of intelligence agencies operating independently of supervision far from troubling many commentators on the left was treated as a cause of celebration. Prominent atheist and self-proclaimed truth-seeker Sam Harris acknowledged that the suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop amounted to a “left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.” But that was fully justified in his opinion because “Trump’s reelection was comparable to an asteroid hurtling toward earth.” (In those terms, assassination would presumably have been justified as well.)

National security analyst David Rothkopf published a book entitled American Resistance with the unlikely subtitle The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation — i.e., prevented Trump’s reelection.

Can it be any wonder, then, that so many Americans have lost faith in their democracy and the power of their votes to shape the direction of the country?

Next week we shall examine other American institutions in which trust has been greatly undermined; the IRS, elections, universities, and the Supreme Court.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1020. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)