Back on 12 April 2019, Hunter Biden left three water-damaged MacBook Pro laptops at a computer shop in Delaware with instructions for the operator of the business, John Paul MacIsaac, to retrieve the hard drives if possible. Perhaps because of a memory affected by a long drug habit, Hunter never returned for his laptops, which under the terms of the service ticket became the property of MacIsaac after six months. The content in the hard drive of one of those abandoned laptops ought to have destroyed Biden’s candidacy. The greatest political cover-up of the century ensured it did not.

On 12 October 2020, three short weeks before election day, the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in the New York Post. The recovered hard drive emails appeared to suggest that Joe Biden was complicit in his son’s business dealings with both Ukraine’s Burisma energy company and the Shanghai-based conglomerate China Energy Co. Moreover, there was every indication that Hunter had used his father’s position to extract money from the Burisma board – already he was receiving a monthly stipend of $50,000 – while proposing a 10 per cent bonus from China Energy in order to satisfy ‘The Big Guy’ back in Washington.

The smoking gun, in journalistic parlance, was an email from Vadym Pozharskyi, a Burisma executive, thanking Hunter Biden for having introduced him to Vice President Biden during his Washington stay in April 2015. The Biden campaign never denied the veracity of the the Pozharskyi–Hunter Biden correspondence or that a Pozharskyi–Joe Biden tête-à-tête took place, only that they had no official record of the meeting. Candidate Biden offered no counter-narrative to the bombshell disclosures: ‘I have no response. It’s another smear campaign.’

An alarmed Big Media and Big Tech went into emergency mode. The Washington Post, for instance, deemed the hard drive scandal a ‘non-scandal’ and the vast majority of America’s media outlets complied with that verdict. Meanwhile, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Wikipedia et al. all did their best to suppress the story. Twitter actually locked the New York Post’s access to its platform.

Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey later apologised, and yet the newspaper’s original report remained censored: ‘While we’ve updated the policy, we don’t change enforcement retroactively. You will need to delete the Tweets to regain access to your account.’ Facebook’s public policy and legal expert, Anna Makanju, adopted a similar stance at her company, dramatically minimalising the distribution of the New York Post’s exposé.

And then, in a remarkably well-timed collective hunch, fifty-one – fifty-one! – former intelligence operatives, including Barack Obama’s CIA director John Brennan, issued a press release that dismissed the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story as the likely product of disinformation. Big Brother, not unlike Big Media and Big Tech, provided no evidence for their opinion despite the fact it could only serve the political aspirations of one candidate – Joe Biden.

When Trump confronted his challenger in the second of their two television debates with the New York Post’s report, Biden was able to reject it with a grin and wave of the hand. After all, fifty-one intelligence experts had already dismissed the whole thing as Russian disinformation intended to undermine the Biden campaign. If the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin in 2015-16, what was to stop Putin furnishing the American voters with a little dezinformatsiya in 2020? This, of course, is to ignore three crucial points. Firstly, Robert Mueller’s special counsel spent close to $30 million trying to uncover a Trump-Russia connection in 2025-16 but came up with nothing. John Durnham’s investigation into Russiagate, contrarywise, will come up with something – only that something is likely to be people in the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Secondly, the Hunter Biden story in the conservative-leaning New York Post has now been corroborated this past week by the rabidly left-wing New York Times. This means, among other things, that fifty-one former Big Brother hot shots either (a) got the origins of the Hunter Biden hilariously wrong or (b) deliberately deceived the American people on the eve of a presidential election.

Thirdly, the extraordinary stifling of New York Post’s revelations by the unholy trinity of Big Media, Big Tech and Big Brother confirms the validity of Trump’s populist critique: ordinary Americans people are being simultaneously rorted and duped by ‘the system’ which requires strong, decisive action on behalf of regular people to take back control from corrupt cronies.

During the the first presidential debate, before the New York Post story emerged, a writer for Forbes magazine castigated Trump for having brought up the fact that Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million transfer from the ex-wife of the mayor of Moscow: Why go after Biden’s family? It was not as if Joe Biden himself had received the money. Anyone familiar with Peter Schweitzer’s Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family Friends (2018), would know that utilising family connections is exactly how America’s political class enriches itself doing favours for foreign governments at the expense of ordinary Americans.

Thus, the contents of Hunter Biden’s hard drive, as Miranda Devine writes in Laptop from Hell, is the full ghastly story of how one of America’s most prominent political families sold out their country for personal greed: ‘A treasure trove of corporate documents, emails, text messages, photographs, and voice recordings spanning a decade…’ Could a second Trump administration, which is as likely as a second Biden one, see a genuine populist revolution taking hold? In his first time in the White House, Trump was often on the defensive after being hijacked by Mueller’s Special Counsel and demonised by his enemies at every turn. The next time around, if there is a next time around, the GOP will be less a RINO outfit than a pro-Trump party with genuinely conservative and patriotic sensibilities. Watch the November mid-term elections for more on that front. Just as importantly, perhaps, Trump will have surely found a way to communicate directly with the American people on a social media platform that cannot expurgate him. We should also expect, on Inauguration Day 2025, the purging of all Obama ‘Remainers’ at America’s seventeen intelligence agencies. The mainstream media will scream bloody murder, Twitter, Facebook and co. are going to be in full de-platforming mode and Hollywood celebrities driven to hysteria. But all have already cried wolf once too often. As the American classicist and conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson recently declared: The real ‘reset’ is coming.