by Victor Davis Hanson
2024 marked the comeback of figures once dismissed, with Elon Musk and Donald Trump reclaiming dominance and Devin Nunes solidifying his role as a stalwart in intelligence oversight.
2024 proved to be the year of the reemergence of many once and unfairly pilloried public figures.
Elon Musk weathered nonstop attacks on his X social media platform.
Furor escalated over his newfound 2024 Trump advocacy—even as he ended
2024 with his iconic Tesla brand still the best-selling car in six
states and the most popular electric vehicle in the entire nation.
Tesla’s rising stock prices ensured by year’s end that Musk was by
far the richest man in the world with a net worth of well over $400
billion. His recyclable SpaceX Super Heavy starship rocket booster
mesmerized the nation as it returned to the launch pad to be caught by a
huge mechanical arm.
After January 6, 2021, the media swore that Donald Trump was
supposedly washed up. He left office with a 34 percent approval rating.
Over nearly the next four years, Trump would face 91 felony indictments
and be liable for over $400 million in assorted fines.
Now he is a reelected president. Former oppositional world leaders
traipse to Mar-a-Lago to seek his approval even before his tenure
begins. His erstwhile critics at home are scurrying about in disarray.
The Trump-hating media who swore Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” and
“fit as a fiddle” are mostly discredited and are, for now, still
bleeding audiences. And Trump’s chief political adversaries, Nancy
Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Obamas are
increasingly either unpopular or irrelevant—or both.
Yet one unremarked-upon return is that of former Rep. Devin Nunes
(R-CA), who, after 20 years of representing Central California in
Congress, retired on January 1, 2022, from the House to become CEO of
the newly formed Trump Media & Technology Group, tasked to oversee
its social media platform, TruthSocial.
Nunes has regained public attention over the last two weeks after
Trump appointed him to become chairman of the President’s Intelligence
Advisory Board, which oversees the conduct and performance of America’s
intelligence agencies.
And once more he too is the target of tired residual left-wing venom, as a “pugnacious Trump loyalist” in the words of the New York Times.
Like almost all former chairs of this nonpaying advisory board, Nunes
keeps his full-time job. His old critics claim he has conflicts of
interest, given he serves Trump in both a private and public capacity.
Of course, these complaints come from those who saw no conflict of
interest when Vice President Joe Biden flew to China with his son on Air
Force Two to shake down foreign communist oligarchs and apparatchiks by
using his office to enrich, tax-free, the Biden family syndicate. And
no one alleges that Nunes ever became rich, in the fashion of the two
Pelosis, who leveraged privileged congressional insider knowledge to
make “wise” investments.
But more importantly, why would Trump not pick Nunes to enact the
board’s mission statement to oversee “the Intelligence Community’s
compliance with the Constitution and all applicable laws, executive
orders, and presidential directives?”
After all, he shattered the Democratic hoax of Russian-Trump
collusion between 2015 and 2018, even as his lead investigator, Kash
Patel, the next FBI Director, was himself an object of FBI surveillance.
As Nunes once pointed out, why did Obama’s non-intelligence
officials, like UN Ambassador Samantha Power, seek to unmask dozens of
names of U.S. officials, most of whom were political opponents?
So, who could Trump better trust to oversee the intelligence and
investigatory bureaus than someone who knows all too well the descent of
these agencies into Trump-Derangement-Syndrome-inspired chronic
dissimulation and illegal surveillance?
After all, the former CIA Director John Brennan, the former Director
of National Intelligence James Clapper, and the former interim FBI
Director Andrew McCabe all, by their own admissions, lied under oath
either to Congress or federal investigators. Former FBI director James
Comey pled amnesia or ignorance 245 times before the House Judiciary and
Oversight Committee.
Trump himself, remember, was the object of a vile and fabricated hit
“dossier” of Christopher Steele. Nunes proved Steele was a Democratic
Party-paid opposition research functionary and an erstwhile FBI
informant. Should not Trump have good grounds to want a known bulldog as
an overseer of the suspect intelligence agencies?
Do we remember the “51 former intelligence officials?”
Some were hardly “former” at all, given they still had enjoyed
contracts with government intelligence agencies. On the eve of 2020,
they blatantly “misled” the nation that Hunter Biden’s laptop,
authenticated at the time by the FBI, had all the “hallmarks” of a
Russian disinformation operation.
Such unapologetic election interference by our best and
brightest—including former CIA Directors Leon Panetta and John
Brennan—may well have played a role in the outcome of the 2020 election.
But what perhaps infuriates the left most is Nunes’ resiliency and
ability to sluff off its chronic hysterias. Again, as chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee, he revealed to the nation that Christopher
Steele’s accusations were little more than gossipy fabrications from a
discredited ex-British spy—at a time when the media and the Democrats in
Congress had cited his “research” chapter and verse in near-biblical
fashion.
Moreover, Nunes showed that Steele himself was hired by Democratic
interests through the use of various paywalls—the DNC, the Perkins Coie
law firm, and Fusion GPS—to help ruin the 2016 Trump campaign, on the
false and ridiculous charge of colluding with the Russians to throw the
election. His team further found that the dossier of Steele, again a
one-time paid informant of the FBI, was used in part to obtain an FBI
lawyer-forged FISA warrant to spy on American citizen Carter Page.
At the time, candidate and then President Trump was under
unprecedented attack. At his inauguration, riots broke out. Madonna
publicly declared to a crowd that she thought about blowing up the Trump
White House.
Trump was branded a Russian “puppet” who should be removed just days after his swearing-in. Indeed, according to a Foreign Policy
article by one Obama administration leftover official, the left was
supposed to depose him quickly, either by impeachment, the 25th
Amendment, or a military coup.
So those were certainly surreal times, at least until Nunes’s
committee issued a controversial memo that laid out most of the
skullduggery but only earned him unprecedented media venom.
Only years later, with the issuance of Inspector General Michael
Horowitz’s investigative report, the conclusions of the House oversight
committee investigations, and the reportage of a few bold journalists,
did the public fully confirm there was never anything to the “Russian
collusion” charge, other than a Clinton, and then administrative state,
effort to destroy Trump by any means other than an election.
In those crazy times of 2017-2020, the media buzzed with predictions
that special counsel Robert Mueller’s “dream team” and “all-star”
lawyers would consume Trump and his supporters.
Nunes himself was written off as a California dairy farmer way over
his head, with legacy media headlines blaring, “Trump-Russia
Investigation: A Former Dairy Farmer, Rep. Devin Nunes Leads Historic
Probe!”
The media sought to contrast Nunes with supposedly brilliant,
Harvard-law-trained Adam Schiff, the then-minority party’s
highest-ranking member on the Nunes committee. Schiff would supposedly
devour the chairman—in what the media would boast would become a war
between a supposed yokel from the Central Valley pitted against an Ivy
League pro. Years later today, Schiff’s prior insistence on a real
Trump-Russian collusion effort in 2016 and his persistence that the
Steele dossier was factual remain even more laughable. A farmer might
editorialize that its takes far more savvy and resilience to run a dairy
farm than it does to graduate from Harvard.
When Trump appointed Nunes the head of TruthSocial, the same sort of
hick/rustic stories reemerged about Nunes. He was now again supposedly
“over his head,” as the blinkered rustic trying to make it in the
cutthroat world of sophisticated social media.
We were told TruthSocial would meet the same fate as Parler. That
ascendant 2020 start-up conservative alternative was sabotaged by the
left-wing Twitter monopoly that had conspired to ban Trump and partner
with the FBI to suppress news unfavorable to Biden’s 2020 campaign.
It was left to the trifecta of Apple, Google, and Amazon to destroy
Parler by denying its critical application platforms to the general
public.
Over the last three years, the media gleefully reported, erroneously,
that TruthSocial was nearly bankrupt, hemorrhaging users, piling up
operating debt, without operating capital, and losing a critical merger
bid. They high-fived the TruthSocial 30-month war with the SEC—one of
the most drawn out and politicized in its history—which, in likely
partisan fashion, had sought to delay or block TruthSocial’s partnership
with Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC).
As in the case of the Russian collusion hoax, the media was both
predictably hostile and wrong, as it serially predicted that Nunes and
Truth Social would fail from its very beginning. For nearly three years,
it sounded the same “walls are closing” doom and gloom hysterics where
it had left off with ‘Russian collusion.”
We were assured that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter meant that the
huge social media platform would veer right and preclude any need for
TruthSocial. For over three years, headlines in scare caps assured, as
did a Bloomberg autumn 2022 screed, that “The Walls Are Closing in on
Trump’s TRUTH Social.”
At about the same time, a giddy Washington Post boasted that
“Trump once reconsidered sticking with Truth Social. Now he’s stuck.”
And still, the chorus continued a year later with New York Magazine blaring the same narrative, “Trump’s Truth Social Is an Unmitigated Failure.” And on and on.
Certainly, when Musk purchased Twitter, renamed it the free-speech
platform X, endorsed Donald Trump, and welcomed banned conservatives
back to the now-reinvented old Twitter, it questioned the original
reason-to-be of TruthSocial.
Yet despite media obituaries, 2024 ends with the Trump Media &
Technology Group’s stock price at some $35-37. In October, the company’s
worth soared to an incredible $10 billion in market
capitalization—albeit a figure representative of speculative interest
rather than the size of its profits or market share.
Still, unlike the old Twitter, TruthSocial had little overhead and
ran a tight ship. It reportedly has some $700 million in cash on hand.
And it enjoys something no other platform can quite rival—the
near-exclusive domain of the President of the United States, 2-million
of his followers, and over 600,000 investors. Most of the media’s
sensational stories about its massive operating losses were never borne
out by its officially released filings.
Tens of thousands of Americans have invested in TruthSocial because
of what it stands for and their faith in Donald Trump. In that sense,
they confound Wall Street orthodoxies about the magnitude of company
size and profitably in gauging stock prices.
There is a sort of nemesis theme to all these hubristic Nunes hit
stories: the clueless bumpkin from a California dairy who turns out to
have exposed one of the great scandals of political malfeasance in
modern history, or the fumbling ex-farmer driving the ridiculous Trump
media platform into, at one recent point, a $10 billion net worth—and
multibillion-dollar profit for Donald Trump.
Critics are right that the TruthSocial stock is astronomically
“overvalued”, but seem clueless as to why that is and why it may remain
more or less so.
It is a well-run company, and its inseparable brand, Donald Trump, is
no longer the media’s Satan but increasingly a widely admired,
resilient, and indomitable figure, traits that even his exhausted
enemies grudgingly concede.
So, looking back at the years of insanity, where now are all the
officials and pundits who swore that Nunes was either incompetent or
sinister?
Ryan Lizza, who in 2018 published a bizarre hit piece for Esquire by bird-dogging Nunes’s parents on their dairy in Iowa, was fired for sexual misconduct from The New Yorker.
He was recently embroiled in a messy, he-said/she-said courtroom
psychodrama—replete with charges and countercharges of blackmail, theft,
and physical intimidation—with his erstwhile fiancé, the peripatetic
Olivia Nuzzi.
The dissimulator quad of Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe has
receded into irrelevancy, only occasionally reemerging in half-hearted
fashion to reassert their stale first-term Trump accusations.
No one believes the pompous Schiff memo was more accurate than the Nunes brief it attacked.
No one vouches for the bogus Steele dossier, or that Steele himself
was a skilled and professional ex-intelligence agent, or that Hunter’s
laptop was cooked up in Moscow, or that Carter Page was a Russian spy
working to subvert the 2016 election.
No one trusts that Samantha Power had legitimate reasons to request
the unmasking of nearly 300 Trump officials, many of them her political
enemies, or that the FBI did not collude with social media to suppress
news unfavorable to Joe Biden in 2020, or that the intelligence agencies
initially were accurate in parroting the official line that the COVID
virus was birthed by a bat or pangolin.
Yet the disillusioned public also wants to know what these
intelligence agencies did not do when they were otherwise so busy
hunting down fantasy conspiracy theories and knee-deep in domestic
partisan politics.
Did they warn us that the entire U.S. effort in Afghanistan was about
to collapse, in the greatest humiliation of the U.S. military in a
half-century, as it abandoned over $50 billion in weapons to terrorists?
Did they have a clue about what Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah were up to before October 7?
Did they ever sense that Vladimir Putin was about to stage a massive attack on Kyiv on February 24, 2022?
Did they ever have any hint about what two near-successful Trump assassins were up to?
Did they ever honestly report what exactly was going on at the Wuhan
virology lab and to what degree our own health officials were complicit
in it?
And how does China keep producing state-of-the-art ships, warplanes,
drones, and weaponry that seem eerily to resemble or replicate original
American designs?
As in the case of the newly appointed reformist directors of the
wayward FBI, Pentagon, or National Institute of Health, so likewise the
intelligence agencies need and should welcome the civilian oversight of
Devin Nunes and his new board—to ensure they start doing what they were tasked to do and not continue to do what they were not.
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/30/devin-nunes-reemerges/
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
