Twitter: The Hunter Biden ‘bombshell’
We were promised “the political scandal of the decade,” said Blake Montgomery in Gizmodo. But there were no “bombshells” in the document dump Twitter CEO Elon Musk heavily hyped last week as proof of “a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.” The 40-tweet thread released by former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi includes internal company documents about the New York Post’s October 2020 story on a laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware repair shop. It contained videos of Joe Biden’s son “naked, smoking crack, cavorting with prostitutes,” along with an email about a potential introduction between his father—then the vice president—and a Ukrainian oil executive. At the time, the FBI was warning Twitter about Russian election interference, and the Post refused to let other newspapers examine the laptop. That led even Fox News and The Wall Street Journal to refuse to run stories. When the Biden campaign asked Twitter content moderators to remove pornographic photos of Hunter in the Post’s tweeted link, they agreed. Is it really a scandal that Twitter declined to publish photos of Hunter’s penis?
What the “Twitter files” exposed, said David French in The Atlantic, are “new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s profound misunderstandings about the First Amendment.” Joe Biden was a private citizen in 2020, and “Twitter is a private company.” The First Amendment only prohibits the government from censoring free speech. Private social media companies are free to make content-moderation decisions. Twitter also honored requests from then-President Donald Trump’s campaign to remove tweets. Still, it’s “atrocious” that Twitter’s management tried to suppress the laptop story, said Jim Geraghty in National Review. Twitter should have let its users “see the Post’s reporting and draw their own conclusions.”
Why are right-wingers so obsessed with Hunter Biden’s laptop? asked Mona Charen in The Bulwark. It’s pretty obvious: “For seven years, the Right has been explaining, excusing, avoiding, and eventually cheering the most morally depraved figure in American politics.” Their enabling of Trump’s litany of moral, ethical, and legal horrors “gnaws at them.” While Hunter was no doubt a drug-addicted influence peddler, his sins do not amount to a fraction of Trump’s assault on democracy. Still, Trump’s enablers have “a deep psychological need” to prove that Joe Biden and his family are just as immoral.