With the Republicans now in charge of the House and running investigations, Hunter Biden’s laptop will be in the news much more than ever, so I want to give a few thoughts on the subject:
- Legitimacy
- Sex & Drugs
- Corruption & Investigations
- Corruption Hypocrisy
- Vote Changing
Legitimacy
The Hunter Biden laptop story has been a legitimate news story since it arrived because the contents of the laptop are legitimate. We know this because of two key reasons:
- To this day (much like the Democratic Party never denying anything that Wikileaks has leaked) Biden and his administration have never denied a single piece of content on the laptop. A lack of denial is essentially an authentication, in this case. (Matter of fact, they reached out to Twitter to have them censor some of the nude photos thats leaked.)
- Virtually all news organizations have now confirmed the authenticity of it by this point of February 2023.
Because the story was legitimate from the start, Twitter should have never censored it on their platform, and news organizations should have covered it. Instead, because the NY Post broke the story, and they’re often viewed as a garbage news organization (justifiably) it was completely censored on Twitter for a period of time and other news organizations did a large blackout on the subject, refusing to cover it.
The main reason they didn’t want to cover it is because the media was sensitive to accidentally handling the election to Trump by covering the laptop since the story broke weeks before the election: an October surprise.
Though I can understand this instinct, it’s not up to the news agencies to refuse to cover things because of how it may affect politics: This itself is extremely biased and highly politicized, furthering our divide and mistrust in media, which itself is contributing to the notion that we live in different realities, unable to agree on basic facts and helping elevate a demagogue like Trump in the first place.
The laptop was and is legitimate, and should be covered.
I get many things wrong, but I’m happy to say that I was against the censorship of this from the very beginning. This take has held up well:
Sex & Drugs
In addition to potential corruption evidence, the laptop features a lot of personal info and pictures about Hunter Biden. Namely, his sex vids, pics, and him doing drugs. This material should be off limits because it’s about one man’s struggles with his health and drugs, things completely irrelevant to Joe Biden’s likely corruption. If the corruption stuff is to be discussed or investigated, so be it – but the sex and drugs stuff is off limits. Anyone using this to attack Hunter or Joe Biden himself is a bad faith, immoral jackass.
Corruption & Investigations
There are legitimate reasons to believe that Joe Biden (and Hunter) are corrupt. There’s enough that we’ve seen like Hunter’s energy board $1 million dollar wage (despite no energy experience and this wage ending 2 months after Joe Biden was done being VP…), the shady dealings for Hunter’s art collection, and Hunter’s dialogue asking different people for things and referencing speaking to “the big guy” about it.
All that said, it’s’ perfectly reasonable to do investigations into Joe and Hunter. I think that there’s extremely little “there” there and they’ll come up empty, but there’s nothing wrong with investigating when there’s enough evidence. I believe there is.
Corruption Hypocrisy
Though I support the notion of a legitimate investigation into the Bidens’ corruption from an objective standpoint, I can’t help but laugh at Trump supporters pretending to give two shits about corruption.
The President who personally enriched himself further by getting licensing and trademark deals for his kids in foreign countries, the President who had official government meetings in his Trump Hotels, the President who named fellow billionaires to his administration after the millions they donated to him, the President who scammed his own supporters with the “build the wall” fundraising, the President whose organization just got charged with tax fraud, and the President whose family (like Kushner’s business dealings) has personally benefited from him being POTUS and many more examples…
THIS President, THIS man has supporters who suddenly give a shit about Presidential corruption and using the office for their own personal gain? Give me a fucking break. If you supported Trump in any way, you have absolutely 0 right to care about Biden’s (likely) corruption. Trump offered an abundance of corruption, enough to drown you in an ocean of “big water” – and none of these people who care about Hunter cared about that. Instead, they made endless excuses for it. It’s quite pathetic and oozes of hyper partisanship “Rules for thee, not for me.” You either care about corruption or you don’t.
Vote Changing
Trump and many of his supporters proclaim if the laptop *was* covered fairly in October of 2020 that it would have swung enough votes to change the outcome of the election, but this is complete nonsense. We know that the majority of people who voted for Biden don’t even like him and aren’t excited or energized by him, and voting for him was a vote against Trump, not a vote for Biden.
Biden is awful. I had to look past so many things in order to vote for him (for example, I believe Tara Reade) but I happily did so because I believe he’ll harm less people (still some people, but *less* people) than Trump. You can show me direct evidence that Joe Biden is corrupt and I would say “Yes, I agree” and cast my vote for him anyway.
I believe almost everyone else who voted for him would have done the same – do you think these voters looked at Trump and *didn’t* come to the conclusion he was corrupt? Laughable.
The idea that these Republicans believe “if only” the laptop was covered things would have been different, is accomplishing two things: everlasting allegiance to Trump to not alienate his base, and to do *something* while they’re in power, to make it look as if they actually care about corruption. Instead, this is just simply because they are void of any substantive policies to improve the country, so the next best thing is to perform theater.
The show must go on.
Capacity Boost 