The Ziden family business

 https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/02/the-biden-family-business-2.php?

The Biden family business

Joe Biden is a corrupt politician of the old-fashioned variety. He has no fixed convictions about anything. That’s why he has been on both sides of so many important issues.

Biden has never been in the business of accumulating power in service of a policy agenda. He has always been in the business of accumulating power to feed his ego and enrich the Biden family. 

There’s nothing awful about this. Biden is following in the footsteps of a great many politicians. And unlike some of them — Bill Clinton comes to mind — Biden did no disservice by not being committed to a policy agenda. The man isn’t intelligent enough to have contributed to the common good in that way.

Hunter Biden is the best known, but hardly the only, family member Joe enriched. At the same time, however, Hunter Biden seems impoverished — a drug addict (maybe a recovering one), the target of a criminal investigation (albeit one that Joe Biden is likely to abort), and a laughingstock (or at least a punchline).

Now, Hunter Biden has written a book about his addiction. Joe Biden is touting the work. Yesterday, he told CBS:

The honesty with which he stepped forward and talked about the problem. And the hope that, it gave me hope reading it. My boy’s back. I’m sorry to get so personal.

The last sentence is a lie. Biden went on television precisely to get personal (and to promote his son’s book). This was a publicity stunt.

Miranda Devine at the New York Post wasn’t taken in. Of the Joe Biden interview, she writes:

This is a practiced move by Biden to use sympathy as a shield to protect his family’s corrupt business dealings in foreign countries. 

He cunningly has framed the narrative so that anyone who dares poke into Hunter’s business is crucifying a heroic recovered addict who already has suffered enough. 

Biden probably has suffered over the years watching his son descend into addiction, but his campaign knew Hunter was a liability, so they strategically prevented the dirty family business from becoming a campaign issue by turning scrutiny of Hunter into a no-go zone.

Team Biden could only have accomplished this with the complicity of the mainstream media and Big Tech. Biden’s team could take the former’s complicity for granted. Apparently, it had to work a little to ensure the latter’s. 

Devine says:

Big Tech censorship [of the Biden-China], we now discover, thanks to an extraordinary exposé by Time, was part of the “conspiracy to save the 2020 election . . . a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.” 

The article goes on to explain that the year-long election “fortification” strategy, engineered by the AFL-CIO, involved Silicon Valley as a central player. 

Progressive activists moved to “pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.”

Vanita Gupta, Biden’s nominee for the number three job at the Department of Justice, played a central role, or claims to have done.

Civil-rights attorney Vanita Gupta told Time, “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement.” 

To that end, she attended a dinner of civil-rights leaders where Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was pressured to ramp up censorship in the lead-up to the 2020 campaign, and met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Biden now has nominated her for associate attorney general. Job well done.

It’s a little surprising that pressure was required. 

What leverage did Gupta and her gang have? According to Time, they could offer “protection from a powerful anti-Trump alliance of leftist and racial-justice activists.” With Gupta likely to be installed as a central figure in the Biden DOJ, she will, indeed, be in a great position to protect Big Tech. And Hunter Biden.

Devine concludes:

So now we can understand why Facebook and Twitter moved so rapidly and decisively to censor The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories. And we can see why they deplatformed the sitting president and were unfazed by criticism of that shockingly autocratic move from world leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. At a congressional hearing, they were impervious to the disapproval of Republican senators while testifying virtually about their censorship.

As for Hunter’s book:

It will be nothing but a con job if Hunter doesn’t ’fess up about his $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of a Chinese bank, and all the other lucrative deals in parts of the world where his father had influence.

And Hunter won’t be ‘fessing up.