Peter Schweizer, Who Smeared Hillary Clinton, Is Back for Joe Biden. Don’t Buy It.
Real journalists want to report the truth, wherever it takes them. Peter Schweizer wants to re-elect Donald Trump.
Are we really going to do this again, Fourth Estate? Are we seriously going to let a far-right propagandist who’s a close buddy of Steve Bannon frame the discussion of the (for now) leading Democratic contender for president? We went down this road in 2015-16, and I had thought that most everyone on the sane side of the fever swamps agreed that it was a shameful moment for the media. So why would we repeat it?
I refer here to Peter Schweizer, whose “investigative journalism” in 2015 just happened to target Hillary Clinton and today just happens to target Joe Biden. What a coincidence!
Virtually none of his allegations about Clinton back then were true. I don’t know all the facts on Biden. The Ukraine allegations have been credibly debunked. On the China stuff relating to Biden’s son Hunter, I don’t know. If there’s something to it, then so be it. But we know enough about Schweizer’s method to be extremely skeptical of any claim by him.
I don’t know if Schweizer is a neo-fascist, but the fact he founded a nonprofit with Bannon and is evidently his friend tells us plenty. He has a nakedly obvious political agenda. It could not be clearer. He wants to raise dramatic allegations against Democrats who look like they can win the White House.
He’s not remotely interested in the truth. The cesspool in which he swims doesn’t reward the truth. It rewards ginned-up “scandal.” It punishes the truth. David Brock learned this 20 years ago, also pertaining to Hillary Clinton. Then on the right, Brock got a fat advance from a right-wing editor to go out and prove that Hillary was a corrupt lesbian and so on. Instead, to his surprise, he found her to be interesting and in fact a somewhat sympathetic figure, and he produced a balanced and so far as I know accurate portrait. He was drummed out of the movement.
In 2015, nobody thought it would matter. Everybody thought Hillary would win. This time around, everyone should understand the stakes. Five more years with Trump as president could leave the Constitution in tatters. Saying that is not a liberal position. It’s an American position. And insofar as it is journalism’s job to defend the people’s interests against those who abuse power, it’s a profoundly journalistic position. Journalists should embrace it without apology.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/peter-schweizer-who-smeared-hillary-clinton-is-back-for-joe-biden-dont-buy-it