Hunter Biden Update: Yep, Still Nonsense

At this point, I’ve come to the conclusion that the hallmark of intellectual honesty is willingness to tell the truth about Hunter Biden — that nothing has happened with it and that the Republicans have been using it as nothing more than a distraction against the fact that they are running a luddite isolationist who wants you low on information and believes you should die in a war with China. Let me just give you some of the biggest updates on the claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop proves corruption that we have since learned — just to make sure everyone is caught up.

First off, the idea Twitter censored The New York Post’s article on the subject because they wanted to protect Joe Biden is wrong. It turns out, Twitter has had a long standing anti-leaks rule that they have enforced against people on the left in the past. As The Verge reported on 6/24/2020, Twitter had also been applying these rules to fight anti-police leak groups:

Twitter has banned a group that appeared to leak years of records from 200 police departments. The platform removed the account of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a collective that recently published nearly 270 gigabytes of data under the title “BlueLeaks.” Twitter also added a warning page that appears if you click an existing link to the dataset, and it’s blocking new tweets that include the link, warning that it’s been identified as “potentially harmful.”

BlueLeaks was banned and almost nobody noticed, The New York Post was not even banned. As Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pointed out when he asked by Congress, all The New York Post has to do is delete the tweet which first contained the link to the story and they can tweet again. They can even tweet the same story again if they so choose, but they do not want to actually follow the rules of Twitter, because all conservatives outlets believe they should be above the rules.

I might as well address the arguments of a “public square,” real quick before moving on. For the record, I do believe Twitter should air on the side of freedom of speech, however, not even the most generous “public square” has allowed people to post without evidence claims like this one from Wayne Allyn Root:

BREAKING NEWS. My sources- as high up as it gets- watched videos on Hunter’s laptops TODAY. Just told me point blank…no rumor…they saw Hunter raping & torturing little Chinese children…Chinese govt has the same videos…Biden is compromised. Blackmailed. Can NEVER be Prez.

It’s funny many of these same people want to repeal Section 230, when that’s the only reason Twitter could ever allow them to post statements like this in the first place. What you just saw is an example of libel, someone lying about another human being committing the serious crime of child molestation. If Twitter did not have protection, they would remove this immediately or else risk being sued for libel. Not even the most free speech loving “public square” would ever allow you go up and access someone of being a pedophile without any evidence outside of “sources.”

Since then, we’ve also found out why the mainstream media was been unable to report on these claims — because they’re trying to figure out the truth. NBC has asked various people involved with the case, most notably the person who claims to have found the laptop and Rudy Giuliani who has claimed to have given the laptop to the FBI, for a copy of the hard drive. Nobody that NBC has contacted has offered them a full copy of the hard drive, and as of writing this, no full copy has been released. Giuliani has offered to give NBC a partial copy of certain contents on the hard drive, which NBC refused because that would obviously just be things that advance Giuliani’s — and the entire Trump administration’s — narrative.

NBC has also done some digging on what we do know about the leaks. Turns out that a month before the scandal broke, a conspiracy sixty-four page document, written by a person that doesn’t exist for a company that doesn’t exist. The person in question also had a social media account where the profile picture was created by Artificial Intelligence.

Mind you, the biggest piece of evidence that the Hunter Biden scandal was utter nonsense is the fact that we still don’t have all of it. I’ve pointed this out before (as have some conservatives like Matt Walsh and Misheru Katorin, Michelle Catlin’s latest account — according to rumor, of course) but in an election where early voting is heavy — some states, through early voting alone, have reached their 2016 levels of participation through various forms of early voting alone while Hawaii has even surpassed it — something like this would need to come out quickly, and not to close to the election. Well, the election is less than a week away and some sources, such as One America News host Jack Posobiec keep promising us more to come.

Even Tucker Carlson has said he’s no longer talking about this. Here’s what he said on the 10/30/2020 episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight:

I never thought Hunter Biden was a bad person. I thought he had demons but in the time I knew him he kept them mostly under control. At some point, he lost control of those demons and the world knows that now. He’s now humiliated and alone. Probably too strong to say we feel sorry for Hunter Biden, but the point is pounding on a man, jumping on, and piling on when he’s already down is something we don’t want to be involved in.

Of course, the actual reason was because Carlson had thoroughly embarrassed himself on the subject. I broke down on an episode of my podcast this claim, but earlier in the week he had said that someone had tried mailing him documents that were damning to Hunter Biden, only for someone to snatch them out of the package. At the time, I, like many Americans, had many questions. These questions include “why didn’t the man give Carlson the documents through any other means?” and “how stupid does Carlson think his audience is to believe something like this?” and, of course “how could anyone actually believe this?” Well, it turns out that those documents were found, and just got lost in the mail — oh, and Tucker already had copies of the documents before they were lost in the first place!

In this, only one man is still really defending the Hunter Biden laptop story, and that is co-founded of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald actually left The Intercept over a dispute related to the Hunter Biden email scandal, as he put it:

The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.

The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.

I had no objection to their disagreement with my views of what this Biden evidence shows: as a last-ditch attempt to avoid being censored, I encouraged them to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right, the way any confident and healthy media outlet would. But modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it. So censorship of my article, rather than engagement with it, was the path these Biden-supporting editors chose.

Later, The Intercept bit back with:

GLENN GREENWALD’S DECISION to resign from The Intercept stems from a fundamental disagreement over the role of editors in the production of journalism and the nature of censorship. Glenn demands the absolute right to determine what he will publish. He believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor. Thus, the preposterous charge that The Intercept’s editors and reporters, with the lone, noble exception of Glenn Greenwald, have betrayed our mission to engage in fearless investigative journalism because we have been seduced by the lure of a Joe Biden presidency. A brief glance at the stories The Intercept has published on Biden will suffice to refute those claims.

Yeah, turns out that Greenwald was not allowed to publish claims that he couldn’t prove. And I especially find it odd that Caitlin Johnstone (who I have tons of respect for, but sometimes feel like she’s nothing more than a left-wing contrarian) went up to bat for him on this, considering she finds “Chinagate” to be no different than the Russia scandal she’s called utter nonsense.

Just this week, she wrote:

The same exact low rumble, slowly rising toward the same fever pitch crescendo. First you get a few unexpected comments showing up in your notifications, then a few more, then a lot more, then a whole lot more. It’s one news story, then it’s ten, then it’s a hundred, then it’s completely dominating half of US political discourse.

The increasingly shrill shrieking from rightists about China having leverage over Joe Biden is alarmingly similar to what I experienced from liberals at this exact point in time in 2016 about Russia having leverage over Donald Trump. When I point out these similarities I always get a bunch of Trumpists telling me that their CIA-friendly conspiracy theory about a US-targeted asiatic nation having leverage over a presidential candidate in the form of blackmail and financial ties is completely different from the liberal CIA-friendly conspiracy theory about a US-targeted asiatic nation having leverage over a presidential candidate in the form of blackmail and financial ties, but it’s the same. It’s exactly the same.

This is especially funny because, while mainstream media picked up the Russia stuff, not even Fox News was willing to touch the Hunter Biden scandal until they were forced to. As it stands, this attempt to play Biden as a Chinese operative or a scourge for a Ukrainian energy company for firing a corrupt prosecutor has been a massive failure.

And I could not be happier.