The headline in the New York Post was, as usual, straightforward: “Spies who lie: 51 ‘intelligence’ experts refuse to apologize for discrediting true Hunter Biden story.”

The story begins by reporting this:

They are the supposed nonpartisan group of top spies looking out for the best interest of the nation.

But the 51 former ‘intelligence officials who cast doubt on The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories in a public letter really were just desperate to get Joe Biden elected president. And more than a year later, even after their Deep State sabotage has been shown again and again to be a lie, they refuse to own up to how they undermined an election.

These “51 former ‘intelligence officials” weren’t alone in the Ruling Class’s “protect-Joe Biden” club either.

Over there at Fox News was this headline: “FLASHBACK: MSNBC, CNN, CBS told viewers Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation: Liberal pundits were quick to label the laptop ‘unverifiable,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘disgusting.’ ”

The reminder of just how the media played the game of hiding the explosive story by dismissing it as “Russian disinformation” went like this:

The New York Times last week confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s missing laptop, a story which was originally dismissed as Russian disinformation by many liberal media outlets leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

Television hosts, guests and journalists quickly took to the airwaves in October 2020, reassuring viewers that the laptop was “unverifiable,” likely tied to the Kremlin, and the product of a smear campaign orchestrated by former President Trump and his allies.

Breitbart was even more specific, headlining this: “15 Media Personalities Claimed Hunter’s Laptop Emails Were Likely Russian Propaganda Before New York Times Admitted.”

The 15 named were from establishment media outlets with names like the New York Times, MSNBC, the Daily Beast, NBC News, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, and CNN.

Right on cue in 2020, candidate Joe Biden himself said this in a debate with Trump when Trump accused Biden of being a “corrupt politician,” according to the Washington Examiner:

Biden responded by claiming, ‘There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said this is, has all the — four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.’

Trump retorted, ‘You mean the laptop is now another ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax?’ Biden claimed that ‘that’s exactly what I was told.’

Which is to say, Biden looked the American people right in the TV camera eye and lied. And is still doing so. This was demonstrated just the other day in this story from the Washington Examiner: “White House won’t say if Biden stands by Hunter Biden Russian disinformation claims.”

Hmmm. Did all those 50 intelligence types lie to Joe Biden?

Not to be forgotten in this larger web of political corruption are the names from the FBI and Justice Department, the people who used their power in the federal government to target then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, continuing on with this targeting once he became president.

Recall too this headline from the Washington Post on January 31, 2017, a mere 11 days after Trump took office: “Resistance from within: Federal workers push back against Trump.”

That story reported this:

Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives. Some federal employees have set up social media accounts to anonymously leak word of changes that Trump appointees are trying to make.

Add all of this together and what is perfectly clear is that the elites of the American establishment are corrupt. Whatever else the Hunter Biden scandal has surfaced in terms of influence peddling and alleged payoffs for “the Big Guy,” the scandal illustrates vividly that Trump was right when he used his recent CPAC speech to go after what he called the “corrupt political establishment.”

Whether it’s lying ex-intelligence figures or lying journalists or scheming bureaucrats, what America now finds on its hands is a thoroughly corrupt “Ruling Class.”

The late Angelo Codevilla, the former professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, famously touched on exactly this problem in his best-selling book The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It.

Codevilla wrote this first right here in The American Spectator in 2010. That would be long before COVID and the advent of Dr. Fauci explaining that he is science, and long before Vladimir Putin took a close look at a weak, frail Joe Biden and decided to invade Ukraine.

Codevilla said in describing the problem:

From Atlanta to Seattle, today’s Ruling Class was exposed to a narrow, uniform set of ideas, and adopted a set of habits and tastes, as well as a secular canon of sacred myths, saints, sins, and ritual language. The class’ chief pretension is its intellectual superiority: its members claim to know things that the common herd cannot. It confuses its own opinions with ‘science.’ While most Americans pray to the God who created us in His own image, our Ruling Class prays to themselves as saviors of the planet and as shapers of mankind in their own image. While the Ruling Class thinks that Americans are unfit to run their own lives, most Americans have noticed that our Ruling Class has lost every war it has fought, run up an unpayable debt, and generally made life worse.

Events since Codevilla wrote that have snowballed. But one seemingly disconnected incident or event after another over the years has validated Codevilla’s point in spades.

In his own fashion, as in that CPAC speech, Trump is making the very same point.

Awhile back, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson and Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley teamed up to produce what was called an “interim report” to investigate the Hunter Biden scandal. As the Daily Mail reported:

The report accused Hunter Biden of ‘cashing in’ on his father’s role as vice president in the Obama administration but found no wrongdoing on the part of then-candidate Biden himself.

In a separate interview on Sunday, Johnson signaled interest in restarting the investigation if Republicans were to take back the majority in the Senate in November’s midterm elections.

Bravo. Johnson is exactly right. But this time around, the investigation should be expanded to pick up on Trump’s point: America is now dealing with a “corrupt political establishment.” A point that is vividly illustrated by the Spies Who Lie and the media that covered for them.

Not good.

Not good at all.