

Alistair P-M
Dec 12, 2024
On December 1st, Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter for the federal gun conviction for which Joe said in June he would not pardon Hunter. On December 2nd, Fox News were kind enough to make an amusing montage of clips from June of liberal news anchors lauding Joe’s promise as proof of his fitness for office, mere weeks before that debate with Trump.
Joe’s Full and Unconditional Pardon of Hunter didn’t just cover the gun charges, it covered “those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024”. The pardon whines, in Joe’s trademark crybully style, about how Hunter was targeted “selectively and unfairly” and “treated differently” to how anyone else would have been, which is true: most people would have been in jail by the time Joe issued the pardon.
It’s an extraordinary act of dishonesty for Joe Biden to go from publicly stating that he would not pardon his son for a crime for which he had already been convicted, to actually issuing a pardon for anything that Hunter did or may have done over a ten-year period that covers the time he committed that crime. That period includes most of the time for which Hunter was on the board of Burisma, back when he was talking about giving “10% to the big guy” as he said in his emails, which we know about because Hunter left his wet laptop in a repair shop and forgot about it and the repair guy, who had to look at some of the data in order to recover it, saw the emails, as well as pictures of Hunter smoking crack, waving a gun around and masturbating.

This is the man that we are supposed to believe Burisma were paying $80k a month for his ‘expertise’ in the field of natural gas, rather than for his close connection to Joe Biden. Joe boasted in 2018 about getting Viktor Shokin (the Ukrainian Prosecutor General who was investigating Hunter’s employment at Burisma) fired by threatening to withhold $1B in aid, which he even framed as “countering corruption” - you simply cannot make it up, nor do you need to.
You’d think that any self-respecting adult would see all that and be disgusted by it for any number of reasons, chief among them the rather obvious fact that in pardoning Hunter for anything he might have done in 2014-2024, Joe was also precluding himself from being implicated. Coming to that conclusion really shouldn’t be affected by what your political affiliations are, but if you had voted for either Joe or Obama (with Joe as VP), or considered yourself a Democrat, then one would think you should be if anything more disgusted that your elected representative would do that. You should be angry that your trust, and your vote, had been abused in such a disrespectful way.
But US politics doesn’t work like that, and certainly not when it involves the Democratic party. It seems that a lot of Democratic voters tie their voting Democrat to their essential sense of goodness as a human being, and will defend anything the Democratic party does in the way normal people might defend the actions of an unhinged close relative (like a son, for example). Supporting either side in a duopoly is making a deal with the devil, but at least Republican voters have some concrete policies in mind that they expect their representatives to enact, even if they are just reducing taxes or stopping immigration. Democrats vote for abstract feelings and concepts, like joy, or ‘decency/democracy being on the ballot’, which cannot be quantified, only felt and believed, and the actual facts of what the party does are secondary to that.
When Democrats do awful, corrupt things, there is a conspicuously uniform response from their wretched supporters, which is that whatever the Democrat(s) in question did, Trump and the Republicans - but mostly Trump - have done much worse, whether it’s his 34 guilty verdicts earlier this year, his support for the Jan 6 ‘insurrection’ or his general unseemliness. So it was, that after Joe pardoned his son there was a flurry of articles from the liberal media talking about it ‘making history’, or comparing it to pardons that Trump issued. More disappointingly, there have also been a lot of articles posted on Substack echoing these sentiments, from supposedly independent writers. These people probably are independent, too, which just goes to show how effective the propaganda has been thus far.
I stumbled upon Biden Is a Hypocrite, But Here’s Why it Doesn’t Matter last week and couldn’t help but comment, because I was so disgusted and flabbergasted by the tone of the post. The message is clear: what Joe Biden did is less bad than some things Trump did, so everyone should stop talking and thinking about what Biden has just done, and remember things Trump did instead.
Anyone “whining and throwing fits about President Biden pardoning his son” is a “Trumper”. Apparently Trump “pardoned much worse people while he was in office”, although the author just leaves it at that and doesn’t say who, or what they did, and even so - the Biden affair has nothing to do with Trump. Yet the first and only reaction of these Biden fanboys is say that Trump did something worse.
What kind of absolutely pathetic, sniveling coward do you have to be, to rush to defend corruption just because it’s the party you voted for that’s doing it? You should be burning your Democrat card and vowing never to fall for their bullshit ever again! In his reply to my comment asking why he would defend Joe, the author said that the Hunter pardon “reeks of corruption” and “the optics still aren’t great”, but not as bad as the “lying felon, rapist, and insurrectionist” Trump. Again, always talking about Trump, obsessively.
‘Bad optics’ (otherwise known as ‘bad things looking bad’) is something that Joe Biden and his political staff might make excuses for, but it’s not something for which Democrat voters or even local operatives should be making excuses. They should be furious that they’ve been made to look like complete idiots by the party leadership - again - and they should leave the party immediately. Instead, they insist on defending the inexcusable behaviour because… why, exactly? Money? Maybe some of them are getting paid to post this kind of thing, but we all know enough real people taken in by it to know that they’re not all being paid - some of them do in fact represent the return on the investment of the ones who are being paid. ‘Grassroots activists’, as they’re called.
The reaction to the pardon was entirely consistent with the reaction to Trump’s election win. It felt a little more muted than the first time round, but there is nonetheless an edge of gritted-teeth nastiness to it, like the accusations that Trump-voting women have let other women down, because Trump is inherently bad for women. This ‘Trump is bad for women’ trope is never really explained, but some people seem to have decided that Trump is definitely going to ban abortion nationally, not because he said he will, but because he took credit for the judges who overturned Roe vs Wade, which protected abortion at a federal level. Allowing states to make the decision is not at all the same as banning it at a federal level, and making that observation doesn’t mean that I think abortion should be banned, but you can bet that that’s the assumption that any of these hysterical Democrats would make if I challenged them on why they think Trump will ban abortion.
Another bizarre reaction to the Trump win, also based on the assertion that he will be somehow ‘bad for women’, was interest in the 4B Movement, an online trend apparently originating in South Korea, whereby women shave their heads and proclaim themselves unavailable for sex, dating, marriage and pregnancy, in protest at men voting wrong. The idea is that because men don’t respect women’s rights, they should all be punished by women removing themselves from the dating/gene pool. Of course, most of the men these women would come into contact with would absolutely have voted the way the women think they should have, so it ultimately ‘punishes’ the wrong people, in the most passive-aggressive way possible. The ensuing jokes and memes practically wrote themselves:

I recently listened to an episode of the relatively-not-Trump-deranged Chapo Trap House for the first time in a couple of years, because they spent the episode discussing an episode of another podcast, Pod Save America (hosted by a bunch of former Obama staffers) on the topic of “why Kamala lost the election”. According to the Chapo hosts it was full of the kind of mealy-mouthed non-answers you’d expect from Obama staffers, all about messaging, targeting demographics and the like. Nothing about policies, of which Kamala had none, and no real plan for what to do next.
The most interesting thing about the Chapo episode, though, was what they didn’t say. They talked a lot about Gaza and Ukraine - which neither Kamala or Trump have any solution to - but there was no mention of how Trump survived an assassination attempt in July that killed two of his supporters, and made him look like a hero. Chapo also brought up Trump’s “Kamala stands for they/them, Trump stands for you” slogan, but only to dismiss people’s myriad concerns about ‘trans rights’ as transphobia, despite Amber conceding that trans women in women’s sports is “kind of unfair”.
In doing so, they gave away what it is that people like about Trump: people are sick of being gaslit and spoken down to, for wanting leaders to address their concerns about things that affect them personally. Chapo might be of ‘the left’, but it’s not a left that working people want to be a part of because it still demands adherence to liberal shibboleths, so while Jill Stein is still seen as a bit of a crank, Trump is the only halfway-sensible option.
It remains to be seen what actually happens under Trump’s second presidency, but you can be pretty sure that it will be basically the same as would have happened under a Kamala presidency, except the liberal media will be full of bitchy articles again, criticising Trump for everything that they would have made excuses for Kamala doing. Those of us who pay attention will be appalled by what the US empire continues to do, and those who don’t will call us conspiracy theorists. No lessons will be learned, and echo chambers will continue to reverberate with half-truths and hearsay.