A friend and I have recently been discussing the filmography of Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to ever take home the Academy Award for Best Director. After winning the Oscar for “The Hurt Locker,” she and screenwriter Mark Boal would go on to make the excellent though controversial “Zero Dark Thirty,” the CIA-approved retelling of the Abbottabad Raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

When I sat down to rewatch that particular film the other evening, I also got a notification on my phone reminding me that there was a new article from Seymour Hersh about the Nord Stream pipeline attack, and I soon found myself paying more attention to my phone than the “greatest manhunt in history” playing out in front of me. At least it wasn’t TikTok.

For much of my life, journalists like Sy Hersh were aspirational figures. In his case because of the defining and revelatory work he undertook in exposing the truth behind everything from the horrors of My Lai to the skullduggery of Watergate. Woodward and Bernstein may have won the glory and the Hollywood treatment for their work at the Washington Post, but it is in fact Hersh’s coverage for the New York Times which has proven more valuable historically.

Hersh famously later broke the story on the then beyond top-secret Project Azorian, a massive Cold War CIA megaproject to raise a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine from the bottom of the ocean that even involved Howard Hughes. That particular scoop gave birth to the infamous “Glomar Response,” the non-denial denial tactic that has been used by governments and corporations alike ever since.

Now an octogenarian, Hersh’s latter years have been clouded by his willingness to pursue stories that none of his peers were able or willing to. This was especially true during the Obama Administration, an era that brought with it aggressive prosecution of journalists. The two most prominent were his anonymously sourced alternative retelling of the Osama Bin Laden Raid, and his belief that the claims that the Syrian government had used Sarin gas against its people were not just false but being used to drive us into war.

His reporting on the Bin Laden raid in particular rankled the Obama Administration as well as the Intelligence State, who largely constructed the official government narrative as a working “myth,” according to Hersh, to obfuscate exactly how that whole thing actually went down.

The version Hersh presented differs greatly from the one that then CIA Director Leon Panetta regaled the attendees of some spook-filled banquet with, amongst whom was screenwriter Boal. Boal would use what he gleaned from Panetta to inform the apocrypha of his and Bigelow’s film that I was ignoring while I read Hersh’s article. I should mention that before becoming a screenwriter, Boal was a journalist himself.

From what we know about the media’s relationship with Obama at the time, Hersh’s peers were given the “Mean Girl” treatment by a President they adored, and were largely corralled by the administration like a coterie of Instagram models trying vainly to catch the eye of Andrew Tate. For his dissonance and subversive wrong think, Hersh was cast out of the journalistic cool kid’s club, and smeared as a washed-up conspiracy theorist who should only be ignored.

Yet, he persisted. Meanwhile on Substack, Hersh’s latest expose claims that the still mysterious bombing of the NORDSTREAM 2 natural gas pipeline was in fact the deliberate work of American Intelligence. According to Hersh’s anonymous source, one of those people who is close to or familiar with the matter that we’ve heard so much from over the years, it was yet another daring example of espionage, engineering and skullduggery from American Intelligence, not unlike Project Azorian.

It will be interesting to see if there’s more concrete proof to back up Hersh’s claims behind the alleged operation, one that involved a Panama City diving school, the CIA and even the Norwegian government. Most critically, it involves the President, whose desires were allegedly invoked by the working group’s CIA handler on more than one occasion according to the source.

Much like the Obama Administration before it, the dynamic between the press and this president is often blatantly servile. Somehow the institutional press finds the notion of Russia’s guilt more credulous than anything that might support the claims of U.S. involvement, despite the multiple occasions where Old Joe spilled the beans and talked about getting rid of the damn thing out loud in front of microphones and cameras.

Hersh’s critics assail him for his willingness to engage with and publish information from unnamed sources, which is rich considering how dependent the mainstream press became on phantom sources during the Trump years. Yet for some reason they get published in the Gray Lady and receive Pulitzers for spitting out words fed to them by their Mockingbird managers. This double standard around anonymous sources is evident everywhere one looks, and we only have to shift over to the ongoing “Twitter Files” scandal to see how they were used to rationalize all sorts of indefensible undemocratic behavior.

Twitter’s ousted arch censors were recently brought to the floor before the House Oversight Committee to be ceremonially raked over the coals by representatives, including our own Rep. Kelly Armstrong. In essence the trio demurred on answering anything meaningfully, offering up mostly contradictions and fallacious apologia for their actions.

Roth, Gadde and Baker (formerly of the FBI) were the three executives with the most say in interpreting and applying Twitter’s terms of service, and they were also deeply entangled with FBI agents and partisan non-governmental organizations masquerading as arbiters and fact checkers. Somehow, they are able to testify under oath before Congress that, no, there was no government influence over their choice to censor certain things on their platform, despite all the well documented communication and secret slack chat lines that indicate otherwise. They also unconvincingly claimed that while what they did wasn’t censorship at all, there wasn’t nearly enough of it being done.

It’s not shocking to me that some of the High Priests of Tech Censorship would say their work was important and necessary. Neither is it surprising that the sniveling Democrats on the oversight committee would agree with them, and performatively rend their garments like the celebrated AOC over the loss of the power to silence those with whom they disagree.

The censorship that has come to define the 2020 presidential election was a brazen and blatant operation to control the public square to benefit one candidate over another. There’s typically a word thrown around when describing this kind of thing, and for some reason it’s vanished from the vocabulary of the modern press now that the Orange Man is out of office. If those spouting the line that censorship somehow secures democracy believe in anything, it clearly isn’t democracy.

It is astounding that the outcry against this isn’t louder. That may just speak to how demoralized the average American is. At least we still have good old Sy Hersh fighting the good fight for us, if only for the time being. The man can’t live forever. So it goes.