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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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I feel the situation is more, as others have alluded to, a bit of a camera issue.

The Hunter Biden stuff and the J6 Trump stuff are wild from a lot of angles. But it seems like the cameras get turned off every time something wild breaks. Similar to European football games where the cameras are turned downward every time someone runs into the field naked or there is a fight in the stands.

Alternatively it's a bit like watching Eurovision the year after Russia invaded Ukraine. There was only going to be one winner and everyone knew it was Ukraine. American politics feel a bit like who is going to get 2nd kind of thing, since everyone knows the big issues aren't affected by the election. As Trump, the ultimate outsider underdog extraordinaire showed.

I haven't really kept up with the Hunter Biden stuff. My surface-level understanding is that Hunter himself has been involved in bad shit, but there's little proof it goes up to the president himself. I heard Hunter got a suspiciously good deal at first, but again this doesn't really implicate Joe.

The J6 stuff has just been glacial legal drama.

Not sure I get the analogy to Eurovision. The president absolutely does matter quite a lot in the US's system since he has a ton of power concentrated in his hands. Some of it is sapped by Congressional deadlock and much can be reversed by a successor, but it's still very important. The fact that Trump barely did anything lasting besides SCOTUS stuff is more of an indictment of him than it is of the institution.

I have to be honest I don’t understand people like you as it seems to be more Joes involvement in Hunters deals has been obvious since 2016. They had Hunters business partner say he was involved at the 2016 debates. There have been wire transfers, request to Hunter to talk to his dad and him making phone calls, emails directly to Joes burner email, shared office space between Joe/Hunter/CCP member, dinners between Joe/Hunter/Business partners. I feel like anyone who spends time in online spaces would be familiar with these things. The left media which probably includes most of the msm likely repeats the no linkages part. They might be right that he could beat a criminal charge but there is a lot of evidence Joe was fully involved.

Perhaps, we just live in a world where repeating a narrative works.

Do you have a link from a neutral source going over Joe Biden's connection?

A neutral source won’t exists. No media entity is “neutral” anymore.

But here’s a partial list. More have been discovered since and I’ve forgotten 90%.

https://nypost.com/2022/04/06/heres-a-dozen-times-joe-biden-played-a-role-in-hunters-deals/

I don’t see why the reporter matters. If things are verified their verified.

"Neutral" was probably the wrong word. "Not right-wing" would be better. Really just anything established that's not on the same tier as Infowars or Breitbart. NYP is... alright I guess.

Almost all of this list is Hunter himself selling access. I don't like it, I wish it wouldn't happen, and Joe should probably kick Hunter to the curb over this stuff. But the access seems pretty limited (typically just a meeting), and Kushner was absolutely doing this sort of thing during Trump's tenure way more egregiously. Major policy decisions actually came from Kushner's doings. If you ever wondered why MAGAworld seemed weirdly obsessed with Israel to the point of exhausting lots of political capital on the topic, that was basically just Kushner.

The one area where this exceeds "just a meeting" would be if Joe got money from one of these deals, as that would skirt close to "bribery". There was the thing over "payments for the big guy" but I've never heard of much evidence supporting it, and it hasn't gone anywhere.

There was holding ten for the big guy, and then there was Hunter in his texts crying about everything he does for his family, including giving half of his salary to "pop": https://nypost.com/2022/04/09/hunter-biden-frequently-covered-family-expenses-texts-reveal/

Wasn’t that pretty transparently because every dollar Hunter has ever made fell through his hands and Joe wanted him to pay his debts, save his money and leave something to his children?

Forbes claims Hunter is worth like $200M -- considering that he managed this while already at a pretty high hookers-blow index (and one usually either ages out of this sort of thing or has an unexpected heart attack and dies around his age), it seems likely to last a while?