Be honest: you can’t tell. Hunter, the former-addict son of Sleepy Joe Biden, is Succession’s failson made flesh. In the HBO series, Kendall (played by Jeremy Strong) is another damaged and furious second son, a meme-literate ex-crackhead who specializes in spectacular curtain-pulls, exposing the soiled halls of power to the hate-watching public. Biden, who resurfaced on X last week to celebrate seven years of sobriety before embarking on a trolly tirade against the Trump administration, is experiencing his KRoy rebellion moment: after holding a patricidal press conference calling his father Logan Roy a “malignant presence, a bully and a liar”, Kendall sets about plotting a sick social-media persona for the PR battle to come. His vision: “Good tweet, bad tweet, cool tweet, get-on-the-right-side-of-history tweet.” 

The purpose of Kendall’s too-online self-image is to broadcast edgelordy, trauma-inflected truth, dine out on family mythology and turn acrimony into audience capture. This, too, is the instinct of Biden: he too has no independent role, no electoral mandate and no coherent program, only his identity as the weirdly magnetic fallen son. His natural medium is not the Burisma boardroom (the Ukrainian natural-gas company to which Biden was accused of selling access to his father in exchange for an executive role) or the courtroom (he graduated from Yale Law and worked for the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner before an extensive lobbying and business career). It’s the internet, that great hospice for aggrieved nepo babies with axes to grind. X rewards crashouts — posters by turns pathetic and lucid. Hunter, like Kendall, is confessional, vindictive and showmanlike, looking to expose the corruption of his father’s Washington world while benefiting from it. 

Hunter’s apparently spontaneous return to social media coincided with the release of his stepmother’s much-criticized memoir View from the East Wing, in which Jill details the fraught final stretch of Joe’s cursed presidential campaign, his prostate cancer diagnosis and ailing cognitive condition. In the memoir, Hunter’s role is as an exposed nerve for parents under pressure; his addiction and legal troubles are subsumed in the earnest Biden tableau, part of a family’s struggle. The X Hunter comes from a less stage-managed and more chaotic place — perhaps in huffy response to the media clucking around Jill’s book. It began with a mic-tap on 19 May: “I’m Hunter Biden. You’ve never actually heard from me.” Get in, losers: next stop Truth Town. Then came the aforementioned tweet on 1 Jun celebrating his sobriety, to which one Xeeter responded with the infamous conspiracy theory that Hunter left a bag of coke in the West Wing in 2023 during his father’s presidency (a Secret Service investigation never found its owner). “It most definitely was not [mine]. I would never have forgotten my drugs,” was his banger reply; it has 246,000 likes and counting, making a bigger splash than any official or dignified confession — such as his 2021 addiction memoir Beautiful Things — ever could. Several Hunter Home Truths followed, with a focus on the Trumps. On 5 June, he posted: “[Jeffrey] Epstein didn’t hang himself. The Trumps and Epstein were best friends for decades.” Ventriloquizing Kendall, he explained his MO: “Be yourself. Radical honesty. No fucks given, no fucks taken. Everything else is just noise.” Realtalk straight from Little Guy Lane. 

Along the way he cuts through with serious Recovery Realness: “I smoked crack. I would never have wasted cocaine by putting it up my nose.” When a user reassuringly called “Least Retarded Liberal” accuses him of being “part of the Epstein class”, he pleads to the “exact opposite” with a Bukowski-worthy grope for anti-glamor: “I wasn’t on a private island smoking crack. I was at the Super 8 off I95 in West Haven. Very different class of people, and with more integrity than any of those people.” Like any white-bread Yalie ironically slumming it with the povvos at Popeyes, Hunter thinks he’s communing with the Real America; he doesn’t get that with the click of his fingers he could have switched the strip lighting of a budget motel for the tinkling pianos of a Georgetown steakhouse. Searching for crack rocks on the soiled floors of Super 8s isn’t the flex you think it is when the deep-pile carpets of DC were a phone call away. But the often-insufferable language of recovery provides all the Real Boy cover he needs: like his HBO hologram Kendall Roy, Hunter tells himself he’s more authentic than his privileged peers because he’s been a junkie.

And just like Roy, Hunter sees the revelation of the “real him” as an important moment for a waiting America. In a tweet from Sunday — one of many, by the way — he addresses his “haters”, promising “total transparency. Finally on my terms. Not yours.” Yet Biden is one of the most tragically overexposed figures of the 21st century — compromising material allegedly from his laptop was leaked to Maga figures and the New York Post in 2020, and chaotic images of drug use, sex and other humiliating acts have circulated ever since (the scandal has a strange afterlife as a feature on gay X, where posters thirst over his nudes). All this lends him a strange nihilistic freedom: the worst is surely already out there — and besides, he was pardoned on gun and tax cases by his father shortly before he left office, meaning he is immune from related federal charges between 2014 and 2024. Go nuts!

Hunter’s sense of injury has long family roots; his personal struggles lie along a continuum of clan tragedy. Joe Biden’s political story began with catastrophe: in December 1972, just weeks after being elected to the Senate at 29, his first wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash. His sons Beau and Hunter survived but were badly injured; Biden was sworn into the Senate from Beau’s hospital bedside. The widowed young father commuting home from Washington to Delaware every night became the picture of resilience, of moral authority. Then, in 2015, Beau died of brain cancer at 46. He was the golden son: attorney-general of Delaware, Iraq vet, the natural political heir. Hunter was the surviving son under impossible pressure; he was the anti-Beau: a damaged addict, a liability. Since then, like the Roy boy, he has veered between rebelling against the family empire and identifying as its chief victim. 

All this pulls focus from the bone-dry Democrats because unlike them, Hunter isn’t bloodlessly boring: his persona is not focus-grouped but fuming. This enfant terrible aside, Maga has mainly had a monopoly on wildcards: its streamers, memers and reply guys have always snubbed the institutional sobriety of professional Dems. Hunter provides the chaotic charisma otherwise seen as copyrighted by loose-cannon Trump kids, or Hillbilly Vance, or the million digital demagogues who n-word their way into the social-media rage cycle every day. Hunter is a drop of deranged water in the desert, precisely because his tirades reek of 2am. 

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For Hunterheads, who appear to skew young, Dem and male, Biden isn’t a political force as much as a fandom object — endlessly quotable and beyond embarrassment. These guys don’t love Hunter as straightforwardly as Maga fans love Trump; “loving” Hunter isn’t about endorsing or agreeing with him, just thinking he’s hilarious. Hunter’s fanbase fetishizes his damage and laps up his anti-pious spirit. But this distance poses a new danger: detachment and the wafting away of accountability. “Did Hunter cash in from his father’s power” is not being asked; “did you see his last tweet” is.

Meanwhile, Hunter’s return to social media has perturbed Republicans, who have come to see him as a malign symbol of Democrat decadence and corruption. But in terms of real political influence, they surely have nothing to fear from this slightly mad scion spitting facts to the lounge lizards of X. As a Washington dynasty, the Bidens are donezo; Hunter may be gunning for the Trumps on the Epstein scandal but as an effective court jester he is unlikely to shift the dial in the midterms. 

If Hunter Biden is Kendall Roy, what does that make us? Well, spectators. Fans. “He got me feeling like Lana Del Rey,” said one. This is not the mentality of a voter. Voters expect outcomes from Washington — lower taxes, abortion rights, border control, healthcare etc. Fans, however, demand only drama: continued installments, villainous turns, betrayals, quips, catchphrases. We want our politicians to resemble HBO prestige-television characters. We enjoy the parasocial sense that we know Hunter Biden intimately, we like following his self-flagellation and watching him pants his enemies. Politics is slow, procedural and boring; becoming fans prods us awake with plot twists. The reason the public keeps up with Hunter’s mental X timeline is that these days nowhere does the drama of wounded heirs, ailing patriarchs, revenge, secrets and humiliation play out better than in real-life politics. Well, not unless Succession gets another season. 

And what of it? Well, in time we might watch the Democrats reorganize themselves around the sordid appeal of figures like Hunter, lauding charisma, humiliation and narrative propulsion above expertise and competence. This has already happened within Maga. The Biden boy, like second-term Trump, is enacting a revenge fantasy; both, to the watching “fans”, are not ridiculous but iconic. This should worry us. My advice to Hunter: remember how Kendall Roy gets on. It’s not pretty. 

Sunstein imagined that Biden might not remember him, as they hadn’t seen each other in years. Yet Biden took Sunstein’s arm and recited his whole biography to the French President, including “details about my life that I only vaguely remember[ed].” But that was only a rare glimpse of a Biden who was no more. A younger Biden would have been able to assert leadership, make the case for his policies, and take arguments about his vision directly to voters. That is not the man we got. Rather, we ended up with a greatly diminished to barely functioning commander in chief.

Yet contrary to the cartoonish narratives of the Right, the debacle revealed not only the weaknesses of the Democratic coalition and mainstream media — but also some of their strengths.

Biden’s deterioration over the course of his presidency is a Shakespearean tragedy. His whole life, he enjoyed being around, and sometimes helping, other people. He finally achieved the position where he could best indulge his sociality and lift up his fellow citizens. Yet by then, Biden simply couldn’t function in the job, as recounted in Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin.

The authors’ portrait of Biden shows a man who is still gregarious and optimistic. But he is unable to reliably go even minutes unscripted without embarrassing himself or causing political headaches. This forced Biden’s top aides to hide the once charming and charismatic politician from the media and the public as much as they could possibly get away with.

Throughout the process, however, there was always dissension within liberal ranks, and much of the media and Democratic establishment were just as fooled as members of the public. There are certainly villains in this story, but also some heroes. These are realities we cannot forget in the Trump era, when previously unthinkable levels of corruption and fealty toward one man have been normalized. 

Original Sin offers necessary background on Biden’s life, followed by a mostly chronological account of his downfall, covering his 2020 campaign through the end of his presidency. It is now clear that the problems that became so glaringly undeniable in the June debate with Donald Trump had been brewing long before Biden won the Democratic nomination. Those close to him trace his mental deterioration to the death of his son Beau from glioblastoma in May 2015, which was followed by Hunter’s downward spiral. 

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The Hur Report, released in February 2024 after a probe into Biden’s mishandling of classified information, cited tapes from 2017 and described them as revealing “significant limitations” in Biden’s memory and speaking ability. During debate prep in 2019, Biden forgot the name of Mike Donilon, whom he had worked with since 1981. Tapper and Thompson speculate that if it hadn’t been for Covid preventing a traditional campaign that year, Biden would have shown himself unqualified and never become president. 

At one point, the campaign decided that the candidate would have a Zoom meeting with a group of Americans and then release the footage. Yet the product was unusable in the end, with one top Democrat sighing that Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” Another Democratic figure told the authors that, even at that early point, it was clear there was no way Biden could be president. In the end, staffers were only able to release a few minutes of exchanges on the topics of racial justice and health care.

The Zoom debacle was one example of a half-decade-long effort to hide Biden’s shortcomings from the world. The presidency was an endless minefield. Those who led him through it were referred to internally as “The Politburo,” which was composed of Donilon, counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, and White House deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, with other aides, such as Anita Dunn, just outside that innermost circle.

It fell on this group to constantly find ways for Biden to shirk his expected duties. Biden couldn’t pronounce the names of world leaders, so by 2021, staff would write out “President / Prime Minister of X country” on texts he was supposed to read. An organization would ask for a five-minute video from the President; but the White House would only produce one or two minutes, and even then, Biden would botch his lines.

There would be fundraisers at which a politician would normally be expected to deliver off-the-cuff remarks. But Biden aides would ask for a teleprompter setup and insist that the demand was nonnegotiable. The White House was in a constant state of crisis management, always ready to mislead journalists or go on the offensive to try to discredit reporters who raised uncomfortable questions about the President’s age.

What lessons are there to draw from this tragicomedy? The Right has a ready and predictable answer. Once again, the Establishment lied to us. There was an important fact about the world that the vast majority of the American people could see with their own eyes, and Democrats and their media allies wouldn’t acknowledge said reality for partisan and self-interested reasons. There is certainly some truth here. Original Sin makes apparent that things were much worse and for much longer than those of us on the outside had reason to suspect.

Yet to turn this into another elite-bashing narrative would be an oversimplification. Yes, there were real malefactors: Donilon, Richetti, Reed, and First Lady Jill Biden — not to mention the former President himself. They misled the public, and there should be reputational consequences for this. But there were also heroes, and ultimately, the party did push Biden out of the 2024 race.

We learn throughout the book that Democratic members of Congress and journalists had their own suspicions, which is why they were kept away from the President throughout his administration. Presumably, had they known how bad things were, the idea of Biden running again would have been untenable within the party much earlier.

Nonetheless, there was pushback even before the debate with Trump that ultimately led to Biden’s downfall. In June 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that behind the scenes, there was the widespread impression that Biden’s mind was slipping. Journalists added up the number of news conferences and interviews Biden had done, and told the world that he compared unfavorably to recent presidents. Ezra Klein used his position as a New York Times columnist and podcaster to take the remarkable step of calling for the President not to seek re-election — all the way back in February 2024. 

Then, too, Biden’s political, legal, and personal problems in large part stemmed from the fact that Democratic and media elites demanded some adherence to the rule of law and the idea of impartial justice. 

Hunter was put on trial in the summer of 2024, and members of the Biden family sat in the courtroom as they were publicly humiliated. The defendant had lied on his application for a gun by claiming that he wasn’t a drug user. The trial ended up drudging out the skeletons in the Biden family closet. The prosecution recounted how after Beau died, Hunter began an affair with his widow, introducing her to crack.

Hunter’s daughter Naomi took the stand and claimed that her father was progressing in his recovery when he bought the gun. But she was revealed to be lying when prosecutors presented texts showing that he was ignoring her pleas to get together around the same time he had given a drug dealer access to his bank account. Hunter was convicted — and still awaiting sentencing, along with a trial on tax-evasion charges — when his father pardoned him just after the election. 

Biden had the power to stop this at any point, but he chose not to. He could have pardoned Hunter earlier. Going back further, the President himself made the decision to keep Trump-appointed US Attorney David Weiss in his role as he was investigating his son. Biden could have stacked federal law enforcement with complete toadies like Trump later did through appointing figures like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel as top law enforcers.

The Hur investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents similarly required the President to take a hands-off approach throughout the process and refrain from exercising powers he technically had. It was even Biden’s personal attorney, Patrick Moore, who originally found classified documents stored in the President’s former office at the Penn Biden Center. Moore contacted Biden aide Bob Bauer — Anita Dunn’s husband, another one of the staffers responsible for hiding his condition from the world — who informed White House Counsel Richard Sauber.

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This eventually led to an FBI investigation, and ultimately, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into the matter. From this came the Hur Report, which concluded that Biden likely violated the law but would be difficult to prosecute because a jury would have too much sympathy for him as an old man with memory problems, which provided fuel to those who questioned his mental capacity.

Needless to say, it is impossible to imagine any of this happening with Donald Trump. 

I have yet to meet a single Trumpian who disagrees with the proposition that Trump would have ever let one of his sons be prosecuted. This isn’t simply because Biden is more personally ethical than Trump, although that is likely true. Democratic elites and the media care about the rule of law, about maintaining fundamental norms, as can be seen in the ways in which law enforcement caused headaches for Biden and his family even as he was in control of the executive branch.

Republican and conservative elites don’t care nearly as much about legal procedure. At least, not under the current populist dispensation. They complain about the politicization of the justice system and corruption among Democrats, and then look the other way as Trump doesn’t even pretend that the DOJ and FBI should operate independent of his personal will; encourages people to send him bribes through purchasing his meme coin; and sits back as his sons strike real-estate deals with foreign governments that he directly benefits from.

Don Jr. and Eric Trump openly attend conferences centered around crypto ventures and the opening of new Trump properties abroad. Trump’s eldest son has even joined forces with members of the administration and donors to start a social club in DC with a $500,000 membership fee. Trump accepting a “palace in the sky” jetliner for his own use from Qatar is only the latest outrage that would have been unthinkable in any other administration. Activities involving far worse corruption than even the worst-case scenario of Biden and his son — if the accusations were proven true — are daily occurrences in Trump World, carried out without the least bit of shame.

There is no political pushback from Republicans to any of this. Trump will, of course, never be in a position to decide whether he will have to pardon his son, because he has made personal loyalty to himself the main criterion for appointing law-enforcement officials and government attorneys, showing few scruples about firing those who refuse to do his bidding. 

In our current moment, it is important to keep two contradictory ideas in mind. Yes, elites make a lot of mistakes, and those responsible for them should suffer consequences. At the same time, things could have been much worse. Indeed, they are much worse with gruff populists.

Democratic elites and the media for the most part didn’t cover themselves in glory when discussing Biden’s mental state. But there was internal dissension throughout the entire unfortunate course of events, as liberals who loved Biden and wanted Democrats to win at least sometimes did their jobs as journalists, attorneys, law enforcement officials, and political leaders. This is not something we can take for granted, and presents a striking contrast to the administration in power now. 

History will remember the personal failures of Biden, and those who worked to cover up his limitations. Yet we cannot blind ourselves to the nature of the developing counter-elites who seek to replace the old liberal establishment. If they have their way, they will bring about a new order with many of the same flaws as the old one, and none of its virtues.

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Uncritically reported by Politico at the time, their claims helped legitimate the Big Tech censorship of the New York Post — America’s oldest continuous daily newspaper, where I serve as a columnist — which broke the laptop story. The emails put the lie to Joe Biden’s claims that he knew “nothing” about his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings and apparent influence peddling, not least Hunter’s 2015 role in connecting his father, then Barack Obama’s vice president, with executives from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm on whose board Hunter served.

Thanks to the combined efforts of Twitter (now X), Facebook, the mainstream media, and the Deep State, all this was buried, and Biden eked out a win.

Four years later, a resurrected Trump piled on the punishments for the “spies who lied”, as the Post dubbed the 51 officials. “The signatories willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions”, he wrote in his Day One executive order, followed by last week’s memorandum banning them from secure buildings.

Trump believes that the actions of the ex-spooks was a major reason why he lost the blisteringly close election of 2020, in which fewer than 45,000 votes in five states made the difference. Yet with Biden out of office, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the magnitude of the crisis that goes beyond a single election: the corruption of both America’s security apparatus and its establishment political class as embodied by the Biden family.

In hindsight, the letter signed by the 51 spies should be seen as a domestic CIA election-interference operation in cahoots with the Biden campaign. It was part of a coordinated Deep State effort to ensure that Donald Trump wouldn’t win a second term and that the sins of Joe Biden remained hidden from the American people.

Five former CIA directors or acting directors signed the letter: Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, John McLaughlin, and Mike Morell. That last was the principal author, who hoped he would lead the CIA if Biden won the election. In all, 41 of the 51 signatures came from the CIA.

Morell told congressional investigators from the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 that the letter had been solicited by the Biden campaign adviser and future secretary of State, Antony Blinken, in a call to Morell, who quarterbacked it through the CIA classification review process in record time.

We now know, thanks to Andrew Makridis, then the CIA’s chief operating officer, testifying before the Judiciary committee last year, that the letter was cleared for publication by then-CIA director Gina Haspel, a protégé of Brennan’s, who also had her fingerprints on Operation Crossfire Hurricane. The operation was the foundation of Russiagate, which framed the 2016 Trump campaign for “collusion” with the Kremlin, when she was CIA station chief in London in 2016.

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Morell told colleagues in an email that the letter was timed to appear on the eve of the final presidential debate to give Biden a “talking point to push back on Trump on this issue”. It worked like a charm, allowing Biden to deflect the bombshell revelations about his family’s international influence peddling.

“Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant”, Biden coolly told the debate moderators. “Four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage”.

Trump kept harping on the laptop, with all its evidence of diamonds and millions of dollars that Hunter was paid by Chinese energy company CEFC, whose executives Biden had met in Washington. But Joe Biden denied it all: “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about? — China”. He concluded his performance by looking down the barrel of the camera and addressing American voters at home: “You know his character. You know my character. You know my reputation is for honor and telling the truth. The character of the country is on the ballot.”

Yes, it was.

Getting Biden to his false vindication during the debate took a months-long team effort. In one of the regular meetings the FBI conducted with social-media companies to sound the alarm about supposed disinformation in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, somebody warned of a “hack-and-leak operations” by “state actors” involving Hunter Biden and “likely” to take place in October, according to a sworn declaration by Yoel Roth, who headed Twitter’s trust and safety department at the relevant time. The warnings were so specific that when the Post’s scoop first appeared, Facebook and Twitter recognized it and immediately throttled its reach.

Twitter claimed the story violated its “hacked-materials” policy. Officials with the company claimed that they couldn’t permit the release of journalistic material not authorized by the subject — a stance that would have rendered impossible the Pentagon Papers, the Abu Ghraib disclosures, and every other legendary scoop celebrated in journalism seminars across the land.

In the event, the laptop hadn’t been hacked. Rather, Hunter Biden had abandoned the waterlogged device in April 2019 at a Delaware repair shop without paying for services, granting the owner what lawyers call “constructive ownership.” Moreover, Twitter executives knew even at the time that their hacked-materials excuse was so much bosh, as we now know thanks to Elon Musk’s disclosure of the #TwitterFiles. But that didn’t stop them from locking the Post’s account for two weeks, silencing the newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton.

Something similar unfolded at Facebook. “Right on schedule,” a Facebook employee said of the timing of the laptop story in an internal chat obtained by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government. “FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote in another internal message.

The FBI, too, knew the Post story was not Russian disinformation. The agency had had possession of the laptop for 10 months, as prosecutors would tell a Delaware court during Hunter’s 2024 gun trial. The FBI’s forensic analysis, moreover, had concluded that the device belonged to Hunter, had not been tampered with, and was fit for use as evidence in court. CBS News reached the same conclusion after commissioning its own independent analysis of the laptop in 2022.

How did the FBI have possession of the laptop so much earlier? The Delaware store owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, became alarmed by content he found on the computer that he feared was a national-security risk. He handed the laptop to the FBI in December 2019. Nine months later, Mac Isaac handed Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of the hard drive, believing a batch of Ukrainian invoices would exonerate Trump during his first impeachment.

At the time, the Internal Revenue Service was investigating Hunter for tax violations related to his international dealings. But every time investigators Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler tried to follow a trail of evidence that led to Joe, they were obstructed by prosecutors in the office of the US attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, as Shapley and Ziegler would later tell Congress.

After they blew the whistle, Shapley and Ziegler were dismissed from their jobs. Still, their testimony derailed the suspicious sweetheart plea deal that the Biden Department of Justice had stitched up with Hunter’s lawyers, which would have amounted to probation on a couple of tax misdemeanors and immunity from future prosecution over other crimes.

The FBI knew something else, too. It had been spying on Giuliani in 2020 using a covert surveillance warrant on his iCloud. Agents thus had access to an email from Mac Isaac to Giuliani, from August 2020, disclosing information from the laptop that would damage Biden’s campaign. The FBI also would have had access to messages between me and Giuliani two months later, indicating that the New York Post was interested in the story.

To sum up all this in other words: The American security apparatus knew that the laptop was authentic; and that buried in the laptop’s treasury of bank statements, corporate documents, and homemade porn were emails that made the Democratic nominee for president look pretty bad. Nevertheless, intelligence officials at the highest levels pretended that the laptop was “disinformation” and prevailed upon Big Tech to censor the Post, with the mainstream media dutifully justifying the censorship in the name of protecting democracy.

Which brings us to Joe Biden’s grift. Depicted through the adventures of Hunter and his fast-talking uncle, Joe’s brother Jim Biden, the scale of the family’s corruption has slowly dripped into the public consciousness over the last four years. This is mainly thanks to congressional committees with subpoena power that sprang into action once Republicans retook control of the House in 2022.

But back in October 2020, the Post was on its own. In its first story, the paper revealed a 2015 email from an executive of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm, which was then paying Biden’s son $83,333 a month to serve on its board (his pay was cut in half after his father left the vice presidency). Vadym Pozharskyi, the executive, thanked Hunter for “the opportunity to meet your father” the previous evening in Washington.

That meeting, we later discovered, was a dinner organized by Hunter in a private room at Café Milano in Washington on 16 April, 2015, at which his powerful father met some of his colleagues from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. Upon the story’s publication, Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told the media: “They never had a meeting”. Months after the election, the White House admitted that Joe Biden did attend the Café Milano dinner.

It was just one of the dozens of meetings he had during his vice presidency with his son’s foreign partners, after which millions of dollars would flow into the family coffers. Hunter would also call his father and put him on speaker phone when he wanted to impress a prospective client or partner, according to Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner. Another email published by the Post described a plan to allocate 10 percent of a lucrative Chinese venture to “The Big Guy” — the code name Hunter’s partners used to refer to Joe Biden.

It would take another three years for James Comer, chairman of the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee, to identify 20 shell companies created by Hunter and his partners, into which more than $30 million flowed from Chinese and other foreign entities after Joe Biden became Obama’s vice president. Incremental payments were made from those companies to at least 10 Biden family members, including Joe Biden himself.

Comer released bank records revealing that “Joe Biden received $40,000 in laundered China money from the account of his brother, James [Jim] Biden, and his sister-in-law, Sara Biden, in the form of a personal check”. He uncovered another $200,000 check to Joe from Jim. Both checks were labeled “loan repayment,” and the White House maintained that Joe had kindly helped his brother when he was in need; Comer could find no proof to suggest otherwise.

Even so, evidence from the laptop suggests that Hunter had paid for upkeep and maintenance of Joe Biden’s Delaware estate, as well as the monthly bill for his father’s private cellphone. Hunter footed the bill for a lot of family expenses through the years and often griped in family discussions that he never got sufficient credit. In one message on the laptop, he complains that he has had to “pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years”.

For months after Joe was sworn in as president, Democrats and their media allies ignored the laptop. Some were still in denial right up until the moment last December, when Joe Biden broke his promise not to pardon Hunter.

Days before Hunter was to be sentenced over a felony gun conviction in Delaware and felony tax fraud in California, Joe Biden gave his son an unprecedented “full and unconditional pardon” for any crime he might have committed stretching back 11 years to January 2014, the year of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution, which brought the country under the influence of the vice president from Delaware and opened the door to Biden-family self-dealing.

The pardon timeline covered all the Ukraine grift, and most of the China grift, everything that would implicate Joe Biden in Hunter’s influence-peddling. That’s another way of saying that Joe Biden effectively pardoned Joe Biden.

Then, on 27 December, new photographs emerged from an activist lawsuit against the National Archives showing then-Vice President Biden introducing Hunter to Chinese President Xi Jinping and other Chinese Communist Party dignitaries in Beijing a decade earlier. To Chinese eyes, it was clear when Hunter followed his father off Air Force Two that this was American power come to do private business. A few days later, Hunter would receive a 10 percent stake in the Chinese equity firm BHR. Hunter’s business partner in the venture, Jonathan Li, is pictured in several Beijing photographs gladhanding Joe Biden.

But the scope of Biden’s pardons went far beyond Hunter. Preemptive unconditional pardons were also granted to his brothers Jim and Frank and their wives, and his sister Val and her husband. Jim, who was deeply involved Hunter’s China dealings and had been under investigation by the Department of Justice over various deals invoking Joe’s name. Frank, the youngest, spent years avoiding paying a court-ordered $1 million to the children of a Florida man killed in a high-speed hit-and-run. A few years later, at age 49, he was arrested for shoplifting in a Florida Blockbuster when he allegedly stuffed two DVDs down his pants.

As with Hunter, Joe pardoned his siblings for all nonviolent crimes they may have committed going back to January 2014, in what seems to many like an implicit admission of guilt for the period when Joe’s power and influence in the world garnered a fortune for his family.

For many Democrats on the day of the pardon, disappointment with Joe turned to bitter rancor. Big Tech, the Deep State, and the corporate media conspired to suppress evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, and then he made fools of them all. He refused to give up power when he should have, and when they discarded him too late, he snookered them with an unelectable nominee, Kamala Harris, whom he had selected as his veep to fulfill a pledge to hire a woman of color.

“No one fucks with a Biden,” he is reportedly fond of saying. You could see in the old man’s sly, lopsided grin as he turned away from the camera one last time after his party’s election drubbing, that the muscle memory of a machine politician was in full working order. In his one last act of political bastardy, Joe Biden blew up the Democratic Party. Now, as Donald Trump lays waste to all their works in Washington, they only have themselves to blame.

Yet on Monday, with Democrats still reeling after their unimagined electoral loss against Trump, they woke to the astonishing news that Biden had broken his promise. But should anyone have been surprised by the volte-face? In many ways, this was just the final flourish in the disastrous failure that has been his entire presidency.

Biden was a political no-hoper even before he got to the White House. He only won the presidency thanks to two outsiders unbalancing the political system: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. As the 2020 presidential election loomed, the Sanders campaign emerged even stronger and more organised than in 2016. And, for a short while, it seemed like the progressive outsider might genuinely run away with the nomination. At this point, facing both Trump in the White House, and an insurgent from inside their own party, Democrats closed ranks and essentially crowned Biden their champion.

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Yet faced with the nightmare of Trump to their Right, and Bernie to their Left, Democrats started rewriting the past. Biden was the father of the nation, the successor to George Washington and Abe Lincoln; he is a visionary the likes of whom hasn’t been seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the reforming zeal of Lyndon B. Johnson. Never mind that Biden’s extreme pettiness, vengefulness, and covetousness were extremely well-known on Capitol Hill as far back as the Nineties and that even Barack Obama once quipped that you should “never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up”.

The political Left of the Democratic party — which hated and openly ridiculed Biden in 2020 — was passed a new hymn sheet. And then even Obama started singing from it. All of this was a lie, of course. But people couldn’t cope with the truth: America was burning.

The idea that Joe Biden was the man to put out the fire — that he would restore America to its former glory — was always a madness. All the same, it’s extraordinary to see how he has fanned those flames. The things he was elected to “fix” have simply got worse. Consider foreign affairs. It’s certainly true that the world is exhausted by the shambling corpse of the “rules-based” international order. But by his own action, Biden has made America’s diplomatic position worse by its action in Ukraine, the Middle East and over Nord Stream.

He’s also screwed the American economy. His inflation reduction act was supposed to combine muscular action on national security with concern for America’s working men and women, all in the form of re-shoring industry and greening the economy. But the IRA has proven to be yet another costly boondoggle, filled with roads and bridges to nowhere and subsidies that never seem to pay out. Like at the State Department, meanwhile, the fundamentals at the Fed make for bleak reading. Inflation is up, re-shoring is down, while the US military becomes ever more dangerously dependent on Chinese manufacturing.

Obama was right: never, ever, underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up. But all these failures pale in comparison with a secondary much more subtle, almost spiritual failing of his presidency.

Ever since 2016, the sickness eating away at the American body politic has been cast in openly moral terms. Donald Trump is a bad, evil person, and it is his personal failing that’s slowly corrupting the land. This was always a dangerous fantasy: far from being the cause of the country’s problems, Trump was merely its symptom. Yet between his vulgarity and his vindictiveness, it was easy for liberals to blame the former businessman’s personal conduct for the slow unravelling of the American Empire. The lawfare against him during his first term, and the attempts to keep him off the ballot after 2020, all assumed that the Democrats were simply morally superior.

As a parting gift, Joe Biden has finally crushed this shallow morality tale. The forgiveness he’s shown his son is arguably the farthest-reaching pardon in all American history. The closest parallel is the pardon Gerald Ford offered to Richard Nixon — but even that only spanned the years Nixon was in office, rather than the entire decade bequeathed to Hunter. No less important, Nixon was actually president during Watergate, and could potentially be excused for thinking that the illegal things he did were legitimate exercises of power. It’s clearly much harder to make that case for Hunter Biden, a private citizen condemned for drugs and guns. Even worse, the start date of the pardon — 2014 — coincides with the time that the Biden clan got really involved in very shady dealings inside Ukraine. The fact that he is immunising his son from corruption charges that he himself is deeply tied up in is partly an act of Joe Biden pardoning himself.

What the Biden clan has accomplished here is banana republic-style corruption, pure and simple. Moreover, after using lofty rhetoric about how democracy was on the ballot, Trump was an evil fascist, and the future of America itself was imperilled, we now know that Biden went deliberately out of his way to sabotage the Kamala Harris campaign — out of sheer bitterness. So, either Biden never believed any of the stories he was selling, or he wilfully sought to doom America out of sheer meanness. Whatever the case, the upshot is clear: the Biden hagiography won’t survive even half a year of him being out of office, and people will need to reckon with the ashes of its political culture. Perhaps, finally, they’ll grapple with the idea that their problems can’t be blamed on the powers that be. The failures are too systemic for that.

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Unfortunately, root and branch reform now looks unlikely. The temptation to conjure fantasies and blame the moral failings of the enemy is too easy to resist. And it applies to both sides of the political divide. For just as America’s problems could not be fixed by attacking Trump or his supporters, the problems with the US military cannot possibly be solved by launching a crusade against “the woke”. Nor yet can the impending US sovereign debt crisis be prevented simply by skewering only the programmes that liberals are fond of.

Though it seems like Biden himself either did not believe in (or care about?) the rhetoric coming from himself and his party — that democracy was on the ballot, that the republican values of America were being destroyed, and that another Trump win could usher in a new era of political dysfunction — it’s not necessarily true that these were all just fantasies. The Trump years did see a massive loss of small “r” republican virtue in the US, though it’s very much up for debate whether Trump was the perpetrator or the victim of that process.

From 2016 to 2020, it’s quite easy to say he was the victim, but will that hold true for 2024 to 2028? With all the lawfare, the internecine fighting inside the US bureaucracy, and the general lack of trust and growth of polarisation, Republicans may be more interested in revenge than reconciliation. And revenge can be very, very seductive, especially when you’ve given up on actual reform: if you don’t believe that the US budget deficit can be closed, or the Empire can be saved, at least you can have some fun seeing your enemies suffer on TV.

The question for Democrats, then, is what they will do now that they’ve temporarily been shorn of their moral self-righteousness. But this applies to the Republicans, too. Will the incoming Trump administration be strong enough to resist the tempting morality tales that so bewitched the Bidens? Will the Republicans, now that they are faced with almost insurmountable structural problems, fall for the quick expedient of simply blaming them on the moral failings of the other side? We probably won’t have to wait very long for our answers.

As former Trump chief strategist Steven Bannon said, “I don’t care about Hunter’s feelings. This is war.” Hunter is treating it as such and has been preparing a legal counteroffensive in the form of his own threats of prosecution and defamation lawsuits against prominent conservatives. With these opening moves, the battle lines of the 118th Congress have been set, and Americans can expect to hear more and more about Hunter and his laptop (and all its tawdry contents) in the months ahead. Whatever else Joe Biden hopes to accomplish in the second half of his term, his administration will now be weighed down by the need to fight a daily rearguard battle against a Republican House determined to illustrate just how far his second son has fallen from grace.

Occasions like this may help to remind Americans of how their forebears came to found a government rooted, at least in theory, in a rejection of monarchical and aristocratic principles. Members of the founding generation apparently even rejoiced that the father of the nation, George Washington, could not father any children of his own. Many, including Washington himself, saw his infertility as a providential blessing on America’s republican experiment, lest the general’s heirs form the basis of a new kingly dynasty or, more likely, trade in the prestige of the Washington name for personal profit. Which is precisely the charge that today’s Republicans have levelled against the Bidens and the Clintons, and what Democrats have, in turn, accused the Trump children and in-laws of doing.

What Tolstoy wrote about unhappy families rings truer still for political families. Though patricians and political dynasties are — despite its professed ideals — as old as America itself, no one among them has yet written a manual for how to manage the merciless pressures of public life, which inevitably strain the bonds that are supposed to hold families together as well as keep them grounded. Furthermore, the often grossly uneven distribution of talent within such dynasties (which may produce an abundance of leadership traits in one child and a total absence of them in another) leads to expectations that are impossible to fulfil and throws the inadequacies of the “failson” into even starker relief. Indeed, the term “failson” may be a recent coinage, but the archetype it describes — “an incompetent, unsuccessful middle-class or upper-class man who is protected from… duress by his family’s wealth or influence” — is an all too familiar sight in the annals of American politics. Hunter Biden may be its ultimate Platonic form but presidential history furnishes plenty of examples of this dynamic.

Theodore Roosevelt had to deal with the alcoholic excesses of brother Elliott (father of Eleanor), whom he called “a maniac, morally [and] mentally” before his untimely death; the Kennedys had one fabled generation with Jack, Bobby, and Ted, only for Camelot to be inherited by a largely mediocre and often no less controversy-prone successor generation. Among George H.W. Bush’s sons, it was widely assumed that Jeb would take the mantle of leadership while eldest George W. was “the family clown” who threatened to disgrace the Bush name with beer-fuelled antics (to his credit, George W. overcame his alcoholism, became the 43rd president, and managed to disgrace the Bush name while sober). Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, and the Rodham brothers, all with their own questionable business ventures, can similarly stake a claim to being their family’s designated failsons.

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But perhaps the most poignant historical parallel to the current president’s dilemma vis-à-vis his deeply troubled son can be found in Joe Biden’s predecessor as both vice president and president, John Adams. Like Biden, Adams had one son who excelled in all the virtues of statesmanship, John Quincy, and another who utterly failed in the race of life, Charles. While the former went on to succeed his father as president and became a political titan in his own right, the latter, a rakish drunkard and philanderer, was disowned by President Adams (a dramatic rendition was performed to heartbreaking effect by Paul Giamatti in the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams). Charles Adams died a broken man not long after.

In the case of the Bidens, the part of the natural leader belonged to Joe’s firstborn, the late Beau Biden, who was said to have had all the father’s virtues and none of the flaws, very much the John Quincy to Hunter’s Charles Adams. The contrast between the two could not be clearer: when Hunter flailed in business, sunk into addiction, and began to meet with foreign oligarchs (around the time Joe Biden became vice president), Beau built a profile in Delaware as Attorney General, served in the Iraq war, and was considering a 2016 run for governor just as he was felled by cancer in 2015. He died aged 46.

This was the crowning tragedy in the life of a political family defined by the concurrence of tragedy and triumph. Four decades previously, in 1972, Beau and Hunter survived a car crash that killed Joe’s first wife Neilia and their infant daughter; the accident took place just weeks before the beginning of Joe Biden’s first term as senator. When Beau died, the path opened for Joe to run for president for a third time and win, although the ex-vice president always felt that he was a placeholder for his dead son: the day before his own inauguration, Joe reportedly said: “We should be introducing him as president”.

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Beau had also been a caring and attentive brother to Hunter who made sure he stayed on the wagon and attended Alcoholics Anonymous. Beau’s death only accelerated Hunter’s decline. His involvement with Ukrainian and Chinese energy firms and various tax troubles, for which he is under investigation by a US attorney, as well as the more lurid accounts of his drug and alcohol addictions have been reported on extensively and need not be repeated here. Twitter’s rash decision to censor the New York Post report about “Hunter’s laptop” (which, like “Hillary’s emails”, is now a rallying cry for Republicans) in the middle of the 2020 election campaign turned what could have just been a personally embarrassing story into a far more politically compromising affair. The tragic lot of Hunter Biden, especially in the shadow of his brother’s death, was given expression by Hunter himself when he said to a friend after having just purchased a new .38 handgun, “I know you all think the wrong brother died.” Unlike the Adams’s family, it was the future president who perished and the failson who lived.

Republicans have yet to prove that Joe Biden had any complicity in the suspicious business activities of his son. It is more likely the case that, rather than being the “chairman of the board” and mastermind of a criminal outfit, as the Republican narrative holds, the President’s pitfall, if it can be called that, is in being too doting a father to his delinquent son. There is not enough of the stern Puritanism of John Adams or the cold Victorianism of Theodore Roosevelt in Joe Biden for him to be able to say to his flesh and blood what Adams said to his: “I renounce you.” The excerpt of a call released last year in which Joe Biden offered some tender words of support to his son (which was mocked on conservative media) was simply what any loving American parent (who didn’t subscribe to John Adams’s colonial-era social values) would say to a child, no matter how far lost or broken.

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Do the unwholesome actions and overpriced artworks of Hunter Biden warrant the attention and scrutiny of the press and — where evidence for potential criminal wrongdoing exists — of the relevant authorities? Absolutely. Should the House of Representatives (as all the evidence indicates is the plan) now spend the bulk of its political energies over the next two years on revisiting every sordid twist and turn of the Hunter Biden story before the American public? Absolutely not.

If Republicans were smart, they would know to focus their fire on the President’s policy record, not the human frailties that afflict his already scarred family. A discerning opposition would know how to separate the personal from the properly political, the petty issues from the truly meaningful ones, and this goes for Democrats obsessed with Trump’s tax returns just as much as for any Republican. While the instinct to remain vigilant against corruption is a sound one, taken too far, it can devolve into desperate conspiratorial scandalmongering.

Keeping the focus of politics on actual issues around the functioning of government, instead of on such personality-driven tabloid stories at least helps to make sure that the American people are well-served at an everyday institutional level by their elite, whatever their personal failings or vulnerabilities. For in spite of what Americans have been telling themselves since 1776, “the iron law of oligarchy” ensures that all societies must have an elite composed of elite families, whether it be the Adamses, the Clintons, the Trumps, or the Bidens. And if the country is to have a ruling class, at least make them rule well. Failsons and all.

But if there’s one lesson we should take from the ongoing spectacle surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop, it’s not the avalanche of claims and counter-claims about censorship or bias, or the sulphurous accusation of stolen elections. It’s that polite proposals about a bit more Christianity in the public square are hopelessly behind the times. All of politics is already post-liberal, and mainstream power has already explicitly embraced a faith-based moral order.

That is: American Church and American State have already ended their three-century separation. And Laptopgate is most significant in what it reveals about the contest now on for a suitable post-liberal political regime: a battle that pits the “human” against something more like a “swarm”.

To recap, shortly before the 2020 election, a laptop was discovered in a computer repair shop which was later verified as belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Emails and other information were found on the laptop that revealed Biden fils to have been up to some dodgy stuff. The story was broken by the Right-wing New York Post, shortly before the 2020 election. It was swiftly censored on Twitter, where for some time it was impossible even to share the story via direct message.

Now, Elon Musk has released internal Twitter emails from back then to journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. Last week, Taibbi published a lengthy Twitter thread based on this data, setting out his view of the context and events surrounding Laptopgate. And these confirm the extent to which the Biden laptop story was censored, and how flimsy the pretext was for doing so.

Needless to say, the story has reignited Right-wing grievance. Blake Masters fumed: “Any candidate who explained how Big Tech put its thumb on the scale was called an ‘election denier’ — but the simple truth is that the Hunter Biden laptop censorship put Biden into the White House, full stop”.

What is Elon Musk playing at with this intervention? He has claimed that his aim in buying Twitter was to hold it to public neutrality: that is, to the order governed by liberal proceduralism. But this can’t actually be done, thanks to the digital revolution in which Musk himself is an active, heavyweight player. I doubt Musk is unaware of this. Instead, we should read the Twitter files as an intervention in the bitter contest over the form politics should take after liberalism.

If post-liberal theorists called for a re-convergence between political power and an overt moral framework, they got their wish during the pandemic — in classic Monkey’s Paw style. For Covid-19 did indeed prompt Western governments to bypass liberal norms in the interests of a common good. The twist is that as it turns out, Christian-flavoured conservatism isn’t the only moral matrix in town. Rather, to escalating murmurs of disquiet from liberals on both Left and Right, the moral outlook that reached pandemic-era hegemony was the fusion of progressivism with the interests of technocapital whose core credos make up the now-famous “In this house, we believe…” lawn sign.

We might characterise this as progressive post-liberalism, colloquially known as “wokeism”. Its proponents, like all post-liberals, believe that authoritarian measures are just fine, provided they’re ordered to the right moral priors. Because from a post-liberal perspective, whether progressive or otherwise, some values are so existential that “neutrality” is itself a moral failure: “bothsidesism”.

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This re-moralisation of power is chiefly driven by progressives, not conservatives, and constitutes the nuclear core of contemporary “culture wars”. It’s also the backdrop to the Hunter Biden story, and why that story matters beyond American electoral politics. For since 2016, Twitter has emerged as one of the most powerful digital-era mechanisms for elite consensus-formation, with a reach well beyond the United States.

Twitter leaders have justified this role with a claim to liberal neutrality — even as it has grown increasingly clear that content moderation decisions taken by the platform’s employees in fact skewed progressive post-liberal. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that the younger graduates who flock to the tech sector skew progressive — especially the graduate women who, in that sector, cluster in non-coding roles (such as, for example, content moderation). But when a platform that serves in effect as public square is governed according to an overt moral framework, what you have is something like a soft theocracy.

So is Elon just trying to end this theocracy, purge the bad actors, and make Twitter into a liberal neutral space again? Perhaps. But I think it likely he knows how futile such an attempt would be. For there’s no putting the post-liberal genie back in the bottle: it is to a great extent an effect of our transition from print to digital, a profound shift that makes key liberal ideas increasingly untenable.

For example, some censorship is an inevitability in the digital era. At the same time, the digital public square undermines trust in institutional authority — and also objectivity as such. It hollows out localism, attenuating electoral politics and virtualising “communities”, which in turn compromises: “losers’ consent”. At the material level, these shifts combine with the brute fact that the post-industrial masses are genuinely less essential to the functioning of the overall economy than industrial workers, meaning their voice can often safely be ignored.

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Taken together, this all suggests that electoral democracy may continue to grow, if not toothless, steadily less toothful. What, then, might emerge in its stead? If the front-runner for the successor moral freamework is progressive post-liberalism, the front-runner for the corresponding post-democratic political system is still undecided. And Musk’s latest contribution to the Hunter Biden story makes most sense understood as an intervention in this contest.

The Biden administration is fond of talking about “democracy” versus “autocracy”, but it might be more accurate to talk about swarmism and Caesarism. Swarmism is a kind of post-democratic democracy: a mutant form of liberal proceduralism, characterised by collective decision-making in which no one is ever individually accountable. Instead, consequential decisions are as far as possible pushed out to supposedly neutral procedures or even machines. When NGO officials whom you can’t vote out of your political ecosystem talk about “our democracy”, they’re talking about swarmism.

Caesarism, on the other hand, looks substantially the same at lower levels. The main difference is that you get named humans in key decision-making roles — complete with human partiality, eccentricity, and occasional fallibility. Twitter was, until recently, a key vector of elite swarmism. And to swarmists, such rule by a named individual, rather than a collective and some committee-generated “guidelines”, is by definition morally wrong. This core assumption oozes, for example, from this report on the takeover, with its empathetic depiction of the anonymous, collegiate collective of sacked Trust and Safety workers sharply contrasted with the autocratic, erratic individual Elon Musk.

Some defenders of Twitter decision-making over the Hunter Biden case point to the fact that the emails reveal no overt demands for censorship from the CIA or any other political agency. But this is the point: swarmism doesn’t work like that. Consensus-formation is mystified and de-personalised at every turn. The Twitter Files are explosive because they afforded a peek under the purportedly neutral swarmist carapace, revealing not just the named individuals involved in steering it but also human fallibility and political affinities.

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The Hunter Biden censorship was justified by a claim of “hacking” which (according to a source who spoke to Taibbi) was already understood as nonsense excuse after a few hours. But in true swarmist style, once that policy was agreed “no one had the guts to reverse it”. This is a world in which no one is ever directly responsible for anything — even as the things that no one in particular is responsible for come to be the very nuts and bolts of politics itself.

For example, former Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde, who played a key role in Laptopgate and was reportedly behind the decision to deplatform Donald Trump a few weeks later, was subsequently whisked through the revolving door into a Biden White House advisory gig shaping policy on “disinformation”. As a relatively faceless collective, this committee itself constitutes a kind of swarm. The rules it sets in turn constrain the larger nationwide digital swarm, by setting the parameters for “disinformation”, which is to say the moral hierarchy of the tech-enabled attention politics that has supplanted “freedom of speech”. Thus constrained, then, the digital swarm then coordinates public opinion, and by extension delivers something like the successor to “democracy”: a collective hive-mind whose currents and influencers are often mystified, but which has considerable influence, for example in shaping public policy during Covid.

The Twitter Files are Musk’s Caesarist counterpunch. Their explosive power lies in the insight afforded into how that supposedly neutral, procedural, pre-political swarmist sausage is made. By publicising individual, named actors who operated under the bonnet in a crucial swarmist political stronghold, Musk pulled back the curtain, re-humanising the swarm’s supposedly impersonal manoeuvres.

And viewed close up, this reveals that there’s nothing magical or morally refined about swarm governance at all. Rather, it’s a miasma of petty bureaucrats and petty rules, coordinated by class interests and greeting-card metaphysics, plus some algorithms and a desire to look good. It’s powered by the same backroom deals and self-interest as politics since time immemorial. In its way, it’s just as arbitrary. The only thing that’s different about it is that it pretends to emerge spontaneously.

Meanwhile, the truth is that the alternative isn’t much better. It’s just more human — something made explicit by Musk’s autocratic approach to un-banning deplatformed accounts. Musk is, after all, far from being always a populist: he may have tweeted “Vox populi, vox dei” before reinstating Donald Trump after a Twitter poll, but no such amnesty has been forthcoming for Alex Jones. It’s a fairly explicit statement about what (or rather who) serves as the backstop to vox populi, under digital conditions.

Most of Musk’s Twitter interventions make sense in this light: not as a return to liberal proceduralism, or direct democracy, or even against humans merging with the machine (something Musk seems to be actively championing elsewhere, with Neuralink). Rather, it’s a play to re-normalise accepting a final human arbiter for important decisions — even if in practice that sometimes looks disturbingly autocratic from a liberal perspective.

I’m not cheerleading for Musk as Caesar. Just because I dislike faceless proceduralism doesn’t mean I have much appetite to see political authority gathered into the mercurial hands of a transhumanist billionaire who wants to implant microchips in human brains. But the critical thing to recognise is that none of the post-democratic options are, well, very democratic at all. And short of unplugging the internet, there’s not a great deal we can do about that.

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And that greed could prove fatal. China’s “civilisation state”, deeply rooted in thousands of years of history, represents the most profound philosophical challenge to liberal values since the end of the Cold War. But our oligarchs choose to ignore this, preferring instead to genuflect to Beijing for financial gain.

The cost of such avarice is slowly coming into focus: China’s economy may surpass the US by as early as 2028, and by some measurements already has. Of course, China deserves credit for its remarkable performance, which is mostly thanks to the efforts of its citizens, in particular its rural migrants, the key fodder for the country’s dominant manufacturing base.

But the Middle Kingdom’s ascendency would not seem as inexorable if not for the efforts of the West’s ‘kowtow crowd’, a group of self-interested cheerleaders and enablers of China’s autocratic state. At the height of the Cold War, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev threatened that the USSR would “bury” the West. China’s President Xi can count on the West burying itself.

Some of this can be traced to naivety and an underestimation of Chinese capabilities. Rather than recognising a potential threat, our political and financial elites saw a potential economic partner and huge market. China was still a poor, developing country; when welcomed into the World Trade Organisation 20 years ago, it dutifully supplied cheap products to a welcoming market. In the meantime, it was hoped that exposure to the West would create an increasingly liberal China.

Yet for at least a decade, particularly since Xi Jinping assumed control of the Communist Party, these assumptions have been proven fatally wrong. Xi and the Party have clearly made clear that their ambition is not any old seat at the table, but the one at its head.  

Given what seems a clear and present danger to the West and its East Asian allies, one would expect our ruling class to seek ways to fight back. Donald Trump may have been a blustering fool but at least he saw, and identified, the threat. President Biden, to his credit, has also proposed some steps to reinforce US competitiveness, and there is rare bipartisan consensus, including on the Left, to resist China’s hegemony.

Yet prospects for standing up to China from the White House are limited. As recently as 2019 Biden, a stalwart cog in the Washington consensus, minimised the Chinese threat to our economy, recently claiming, incredibly, that: “you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” More worrisome still has been the Biden family’s close business ties with Beijing. The somewhat dissolute Hunter, in particular, has profited hugely and gained expensive gifts working for the Chinese. Most recently, he helped a Chinese firm to corner the cobalt market, a key component in the administration’s  green energy strategy.

But kowtowing is hardly a partisan phenomenon. Prominent figures from both parties, including former GOP Speaker John Boehner, and many connected Washington think tanks receive funding from Beijing. Even members of the Bush family have cosied up to CCP apparatchiks, including one with strong ties to that country’s rising military.

Europe’s leaders, if anything, are even less committed to confronting the Chinese challenge. Some, including Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, seek to play the US against the Chinese civilisational challenge by treating them as moral equivalents of their long-time American allies. Meanwhile, Beijing is busily extending its presence on the continent with infrastructure investment to weak European countries such Greece, Hungary, and Romania.

Nowhere is the ineptitude of the Western policy towards China more evident than in climate change. Like its human rights record, China’s environmental footprint should be a source of embarrassment and condemnation. While the West hamstrings itself with its eco-commitments, China, not mandated to reduce its carbon emissions till 2030, continues to build coal plants to maintain its industrial engine. By 2030, when China will be able to shift to nuclear and other alternatives, the West will be effectively de-industrialised, and hopelessly dependent.

But such dependency is nothing new. For decades American companies have been handing Beijing the basis for economic hegemony: since 1990 US deficit in trade goods with China has ballooned from under $10 billion annually to $419 billion last year. China’s ratio of imports to exports was four to one in 2018. This has enriched many of our leading manufacturing companies — notably Apple — while costing an estimated 3.4 million job losses in the US since 2001.

Meanwhile, these corporate kowtowers actively promote China’s model. Apple, for instance, props up and profits from China’s ever-expanding surveillance state. Acting as if it were its own country, Apple has essentially negotiated its own $275 billion deal with China, promising to keep production there while assisting with the country’s unhidden goal is to supplant the West as a tech leader.

For its part, Wall Street, even amid the threat of government interference, plays its part the kowtow crowd. Ray Dalio, founder of giant Bridgewater Associates hedge fund and self-promoting author, has dismissed China’s repression of its Uighur population as the result of a “sacrosanct” desire for sovereignty. Even powerful figures such as Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan have decided to publicly apologise after upsetting the CCP. It’s in their interest, after all. Xi knows fully well that Western investment bankers and tech companies will do his bidding, as long as they get what Mafia dons may call “a taste”. China may be miffed if US diplomats boycott the 2022 winter games, but they can be sure that the corporations and investment bankers will likely be there, heads bowed on the floor.

All of this is made even more humiliating by the fact that China’s rise may not be as unstoppable as its Western admirers believe. China’s economic growth rate is slowing, its bloated real estate markets are showing signs of implosion, and industrial production has slowed to the lowest level since 2004. Meanwhile, its tech and innovation sector is being pummelled by continued government crackdowns.

More serious still are demographic forces. By 2050, China is projected to have 60 million fewer people under age fifteen, a loss approximately the size of Italy’s total population. The ratio of retirees to working people is expected to have more than tripled by then, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. By 2050 it will be roughly 20% higher than that of the US; 15 years after that, according to the South China Morning Post, China’s population will be very old and about half its current size.

None of this suggests resisting China will be easy, particularly given the disposition of our rulers. But it does mean it’s possible.

That is the real tragedy of the kowtow crowd. Just as in the Thirties, their prostration only makes their adversary stronger and more confident. Inevitably, it will be the rest of us, and future generations, who pay the price.

It’s also a tradition that extends beyond the halls of government. Members of famous political families who don’t run for office still tend to crop up in other influential positions: the upper tiers of journalism, or the media or the arts. Jenna Bush Hager, one of George W.’s daughters, has, since 2009, been an anchor for NBC — which counted Chelsea Clinton among its special correspondents between 2011 and 2014. In 2017, Malia Obama interned at The Weinstein Company. Even the also-rans bestow a certain kind of dazzle on their children: Meghan McCain, daughter of the John, who lost out to Malia’s dad, has had a prolific career as a TV host.

And historically, Americans have always been fairly fine with this — we keep voting them in and watching their shows and buying their books. Despite being founded on the explicit rejection of hereditary monarchy — on the notion of power conferred by birth — we are also a nation that thrives on the inherited wealth of self-made men. As long as you can trace your family dynasty to the hardscrabble origin story of an enterprising striver, who built something from nothing and then passed it down the line to his children and grandchildren, that’s not nepotism: it’s the American dream.

And if your family business is politics, there’s still the spectacle of public elections to offer the pretence of fairness: even with all the money and name recognition in the world, the only way to hold elected office is for the people to put you there. It’s perhaps because our leadership has to regularly win the hearts of the public in a nationwide popularity contest — with the most expensive, most televised, most exacting campaigns in the world — that the U.S. has always conferred a sort of second-tier celebrity cachet on its presidents. And, by extension, on their families.

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The latest presidential progeny to make headlines by cropping up in a position of cultural prominence is Hunter Biden, who announced earlier this month that he’d be showing — and selling — his paintings in a solo exhibition at a New York gallery in October. The elder of the President’s two surviving children, Hunter has no formal artistic training. He had also been keeping a relatively low profile since October 2020, when emails from an old laptop of his surfaced under mysterious circumstances that threatened to torpedo his father’s shot at the presidency.

While the serious allegations of corruption that emerged from the laptop scandal ultimately amounted to nothing, the incident was still embarrassing to Hunter, who has always been a bit of a black sheep. Before his foray into painting he was a lawyer, investor, lobbyist and, briefly, naval officer (he was discharged from the position after less than a month, after testing positive for cocaine). Harsher critics have accused him of being a shady businessman and shameless grifter, using the Biden name for his own benefit. And indeed, the asking prices for Hunter’s paintings are astronomically high for an unknown artist — which only serves to highlight his peculiar brand of celebrity. His work will fetch a high price for the same reason that people pay thousands of dollars to own a teacup stained with Lady Gaga’s lipstick or a jockstrap once worn by Russell Crowe: the little thrill of knowing that a famous person touched it first.

Hunter Biden’s foray into art has been met with some criticism, including a subdued but disapproving editorial in the Washington Post. But the media response to him stands in stark contrast to that received by the large adult Trump children, whose every foray into public life was met with generalised outrage, breaking the age-old tradition of accepting that the ambitions of presidential progeny will always be supported. From Ivanka’s fashion line to Don, Jr.’s books, nobody wanted the Trumps to become as culturally and politically ubiquitous as the Kennedys.

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But that’s only because nothing about the Trump administration, including this, was business as usual. Trump’s first family was in itself unprecedented: never before had a U.S. president boasted five children from three different marriages, most of whom were already at least a little bit famous by the time their father took office. By the standards of previous presidents, it was semi-scandalous if not outright trashy — and worse, Trump’s audacious offspring seemed to share their father’s sensibilities: a hunger for global influence, a contempt for elites and a narcissistic sense of entitlement. It wasn’t just the nepotism; it was that they were so obvious, so shameless, so transparent in their expectations.

Ivanka, especially, seemed to believe that her mere status as presidential progeny meant that she should enjoy a position of influence in national affairs. But here too, it was the entitlement (and the Trump name) rather than the notion of a politically-involved First Daughter that raised hackles. In fact, the latter is something of an American tradition: Maureen Reagan moved into the White House during her father’s presidency and informally advised him on women’s issues. Woodrow Wilson’s daughter, Margaret, took over the role of First Lady after her mother died. Alice Roosevelt once led a diplomatic tour of five Asian countries in 1905 while her father, President Theodore Roosevelt, was trying to negotiate a peace between Japan and Russia.

And yet, Ivanka’s involvement in the Trump administration was seen as so embarrassing, so outré, that her presence at the G20 conference sparked not just wall-to-wall negative media coverage but a viral meme. “How Much Did Ivanka Embarrass Herself at the G20 Summit?” asked The Cut, rhetorically, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “It may be shocking to some, but being someone’s daughter actually isn’t a career qualification.”

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In light of all this, it was easy to imagine that Trump’s presidency represented some sort of turning point — that however much nepotism and corruption and power-grabbing cruelty were once par for the course in American presidential politics, they wouldn’t be once the bad orange man was gone. Indeed, for as long as Donald Trump was in office, the notion persisted that everything would change for the better, and the classier, if only we could vote him out.

The candidate who could remake the presidency into something better, brighter and more noble would have been a game-changer. There was just one problem: in 2020, nobody wanted that. They just wanted to Make America Normal Again — and nothing is more normal, and more American, than a good old-fashioned dynasty from a known and trusted brand. It’s why we embraced Meghan McCain as a media figure in the wake of her father’s death. It’s why nobody finds it especially weird that almost every presidential race since 1992 has included a Bush or a Clinton in the mix. It’s why Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter walked away from the Inauguration with a cult following and a modelling contract.

And it’s why, as sketchy as it might seem, nobody is going to get too upset about Hunter Biden’s new surprise career turn as an in-demand contemporary artist.

That would require dismantling the longstanding American tradition of blurring the lines between politics and celebrity, of being fascinated by, even obsessed with, the families who live in what Jackie Kennedy once called “the People’s house” (in the way that Brits obsess over the residents of Buckingham Palace but can rarely name the children of Prime Ministers). It would also require us to confront some deeply uncomfortable truths about how even in a democracy, dynasties are inevitable. Power pools and cascades down, inter-generationally, always landing in the lap of someone with a familiar last name — giving the lie to the all-American notion that hard work and big dreams are all it takes to succeed. And all of us go along with it, but all of this is familiar.

Hunter Biden’s play for art world grandeur won’t provoke that kind of reckoning. It’s too much business as usual. But the appearance of Donald Trump, Jr. as a top contender on the 2024 Republican primary ticket? Yeah, that might do it.

In December 1972, Hunter’s mother Neilia was driving her three children — Beau (“Beautiful”), 3; Hunter (self-explanatory), 2; and Naomi, the baby, to buy a Christmas Tree in Delaware. Her husband Joe, newly elected to the Senate at just 29, was interviewing staff in Washington. Perhaps Neilia, with three children under 3, was exhausted. She ignored a stop sign and crashed into a tractor. Neilia and Naomi died. Beau and Hunter awoke in a hospital room. Their father was sworn into the Senate there. They subsequently lived inside the narrative of Joe’s rise to power. Willingly or not, they were seconded to public service. “Delaware’s residents placed their sorrows and their hopes in a dashing young widower suddenly left with two toddlers,” Hunter writes. “Our survival became a source of state-wide pride”. Delaware “adopted” the children. Gratitude was the only polite response.

But it wasn’t a truthful one. Two things interest me about Hunter’s childhood. The first is that he was, in his words, “practically raised” by his aunt and uncle. He was also “raised on politics like farm kids raised on sweet corn”. So, they were raised by an extended family, or the people of Delaware, or politics. I suspect Joe was so overwhelmed by Neilia’s loss he abandoned his children for office. He took them to the Senate — where they played in the sauna — and to endless public meetings. But is that, really, presence?

He couldn’t save Neilia or Naomi, so he would save America. It isn’t exactly selfishness, but it isn’t exactly sacrifice either. It laid on his children a terrible guilt, for having childish needs. “Beau and I never really grieved the loss of our mother and baby sister,” Hunter writes. “We were almost ashamed to admit to any sadness we might have felt because of how enveloped we were in that familial embrace.” There is withholding in that kind of love. It concealed Joe’s grief, but it concealed him, too.

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Hunter has the misfortune to be surrounded by saints. His father is the anti-Trump. His mother is sanctified by death. His brother Beau was saintly too: he was attorney general of Delaware, scourge of sex offenders, preparing to run for governor in 2016. (If Joe didn’t win the presidency, Beau was next in line, his father’s choice). But Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 and is likewise beyond reproach.

If you are among saints, and you are not like them, what are you? A sinner, and Hunter couldn’t exist without his better half. When Beau dies, he asks himself: “If we weren’t the three of us anymore, what were we?” His father, meanwhile, “sat on his porch for hours and took one call after another from current and former leaders from every hemisphere and every country.” This repression is the family way. Hunter and Beau never asked each other what they remembered about the accident. And here again, “Dad and I never really sat together to have a heart-to-heart, to talk about what we were going through. Words,” he writes, “almost felt risky”.

Instead, emboldened by the public response to his eulogy, he asked his wife Kathleen if he should run for office on the wave of grief and sympathy. (It’s the other family way). She replied: “Are you serious?” After that, “We didn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the ride. Or, really, ever again”. Bereft of both Beau and Kathleen, his addiction took flight.

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The first part of the book deals with his childhood — the enforced gratitude for their privileges and the conditional love of the people of Delaware — and loss of Beau. This part feels stymied. Hunter describes the relationship between the three men like this: “It’s a Biden love story, of course, which means it’s complicated: tragic, humane, emotional, enduring, widely consequential, and ultimately redemptive.” They all talk like this: in broad concepts of love, loss and courage. Do they talk like this in private? They might do. How do they order soup?

There is also a defence of his business dealings in China and Ukraine, which were used to attack his father by his opponents. It’s an across-the-board denial of wrong-doing, too comprehensive and outraged in tone to feel true. But if it isn’t entirely true, he cannot say otherwise. He is, again, constricted by his father’s need for power. (There are no politics in this book at all. It is the most telling blank.)

Only in the second part — when Hunter details his relapses and half-life inside hotels rooms with criminals — is the prose alive. For using is his most vivid life, the only place where he is allowed to be angry at the things that are denied him. His writing on this is raging and horrifying. His description of his relationship with Rhea, a street homeless crack addict who moves in with him, is the best thing in the book: a bizarre and functional marriage, with crack as their beloved child.

Hunter is not long sober, if he is at all. He gave a long interview to the New Yorker in 2019 but reveals here that he was high during every interview. (He has been using, with gaps of varying length, since his father became Vice President; since he ascended to the mountain-top.) I would not comment on a fellow addict’s sobriety, but he is a Biden and therefore public property: I am invited to comment.

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Hunter does not sound well. He still hates the drug dealers he was dependent on, though they were as addicted as he, and with none of his privileges. If he had what recovering addicts call emotional sobriety — or if he were truly a progressive — he would try to understand their behaviour. He married a second time, to Melissa, who had “the exact same eyes as my brother”, after knowing her for a week. He did not thank his first wife Kathleen, who suffered at his hands, in his acknowledgements. His thanks to Melissa, “the love of my life”, feel like whiplash.

And he never tells us what I most want to know as he tells of hotel tabs and hangers-on and profligacy: where did he get the money? There is a seemingly inexhaustible supply for his using. Its source is not divulged.

He is honest, though, about his love affair with his brother’s wife Hallie after Beau’s death. It was a pitiful attempt to reanimate the man they both loved. He wanted, he writes, to be close to Beau’s children: “I was seduced by the idea of providing the same kind of extended family that surrounded Beau and me after we lost our mommy and sister.” It’s a re-imagining of the extended family he was gifted to after the death of his mother, but here it feels explicitly insane.

Joe is the most interesting character in this book, of course, and he is not in this book. He is God on his mountaintop. You cannot be angry with God, though watching God try to operate amid the wreckage of his own distant benevolence is bleakly funny. How would it be if your father the Vice President arrived at your crack house with his security detail to ask: “Are you OK?” It’s a weird question to ask a child you know is using drugs. It invites a positive response, a rescuing. Hunter has none for him. Joe cries once, when Hunter runs away from an intervention: “I don’t know what else to do, I’m so scared, tell me what to do”.

Hunter emerges from this rowdy memoir not as a kind man — look to Beau and Joe for that — but as an angry man destroyed, though guiltily, by the imperatives of those he loves. Joe Biden fused his personal narrative into political success long ago because people are sentimental. It worked for the father. It does not work for the son. Here is the evidence, and in his own hand.

American polarisation pre-dates Trump by decades, but in the past few years it has intensified to such an extent that a paper on US tribalism from Cambridge University says it is now approaching levels of ethnic parochialism seen in Bosnia and Kosovo — two countries noted for their recent political stability. However, even before Trump’s election, a study of Democrats and Republicans showed similar levels of distrust as exist between Israelis and Palestinians.

Yet while many people recognise the symptoms of this American balkanisation, they do not recognise the cause. It is not just that people believe in different things, it is that they believe in different facts — there is no longer any agreement on what has happened and what has not. This applies from the most serious and major event to the most mundane, but it starts with the words people believe were said or not said

Take two of the claims about Trump that most enraged the Left in recent years: that he described all Mexicans as rapists and that he refused to condemn white supremacy. Both these are false. Neither accurately reflects what Donald Trump said, at the bottom of the escalator in Trump Tower on the day he announced his candidacy in June 2015, or in his response to the events in Charlottesville two years later.

Yet for four years the anti-Trump “Resistance” was happy to run with these claims. In the last couple of days, broadcasters on major American networks have claimed on air, on the basis of Trump’s Mexicans comment, that Hispanics have suffered more prejudice than at any point in their lifetimes. The same Hispanics who just voted for Trump in record-breaking numbers.

Meanwhile, Trump’s supposed failure to denounce white supremacy is such a part of the historical narrative that it came up in the presidential debates and was raised by Kamala Harris in her vice-presidential debate with Mike Pence. The transcript (what we used to call “the record”) shows that the claim is false; Trump condemned white supremacy clearly in his post-Charlottesville statement. As has been observed by others, Trump has not only said more lies than any other president, but he has also had more lies said about him.

And now the man who looks set to become the next president of the USA announces that he wants the country to heal?

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This split version of reality extends beyond words. In the past month, American politics witnessed a scandal of potentially enormous proportions, a story that once would have exploded across the political scene to be met with the usual cycle of allegations and denials.

Hunter Biden’s laptop contained an awful lot of things, including photos of Biden Jnr allegedly smoking crack and exposing himself. But more damaging was the allegation that it contained emails suggesting not only that Joe Biden’s brother and son enriched themselves by selling their access to foreign powers, but that the man himself — “the chairman” — enriched himself through these means, too.

It may be said that the timing of the story was awfully advantageous to the Republican cause — and that would be right. Such a story emerging right before an election would have a major impact on a campaign; and obviously the Republicans wanted it to have such an effect. But in the end it did not — almost as if it never even happened.

Of course, the American public may well regard Hunter Biden’s personal life — quite rightly — as entirely a matter for himself. But these emails contained claims that in any healthy democracy would require serious investigation, implying monumental levels of corruption at the top.

The American Left, however, decided to pretend that the whole thing was either a Russian disinformation drop, that it was simply a matter of personal intrusion, or that there was otherwise nothing to see. With the help of social media, it smothered the story.

Twitter and Facebook decided to censor all references to the corruption scandal. It even locked the New York Post — America’s oldest newspaper — out of its own account and muted the Post’s story on their platforms. So except for the small number of people with unusual interest in hard-to-access stories, that portion of the country which gets its news from Twitter or Facebook did not actually know what the Biden laptop story was about. It simply doesn’t exist in that universe.

Half the country knows that the laptop scandal appears to contain questions about the Biden family’s search for funds. The other half either believes that the story is entirely fabricated or was content to pretend to believe that right up until the day of the election. Because whatever the Bidens may or may not have done, it was worth ignoring in order to see Donald Trump and his family leave the White House.

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And now we have the biggest disagreement of all about reality. One portion of the country — some way over half — believes that Joe Biden won this election. Another portion — nowhere near a majority, but possibly a majority of people who voted Republican — believes that Donald Trump won. Trump himself is irresponsibly laying the groundwork for the next four years of his career by sticking to this claim. And while he may at some point say that he is stepping aside for the good of the nation — which would not entirely be in character — he and his many supporters are likely to hold to the idea that this election was stolen from them by a corrupt and rigged system.

The only counter that the Biden camp currently has is to pretend that this is wholly untrue and that there is no corruption in the US voting system, especially not when it comes to mail-in votes. And all the while, that crucial middle ground, those people who recognise that there certainly are voting irregularities in the American system and that, notwithstanding, Donald Trump lost the election, is vacated.

At such a moment, a society enters a crucially dangerous juncture. Because once we no longer share the same reality, we can no longer empathise with our opponents or compromise, and from that point on absolutely anything can happen.

The incoming president and vice-president will naturally state that they now seek to put an end to all this. In his first speech since the vote appeared to go his way Joe Biden invited the United States to end what he called the “grim era of demonisation”. The President-elect begged: “Let’s give each other a chance.”

And yet that is exactly what he and his party spent the last four years not doing. After the election of their adversary in 2016, the Democrats came up with a fake allegation about Russian interference in the election. They claimed that Trump and his family colluded with the Kremlin to get him into office, and when the official investigation into that bogus claim found it was indeed bogus, the same people then attempted to impeach the president on the basis of a phone call with his counterpart in Ukraine. And now they say that people’s families are off-limits and that it is time to come together? It is obvious that Biden and the Democrats only want the “era of demonisation” and divisiveness to come to an end so long as it does so on their terms.

What if the Republicans decide to do to the Bidens what the Democrats did to the Trumps, by delegitimising the election result and with it the democratic process. And why not? Since the Democrats spent four years pretending that the last election was fixed, why shouldn’t the Republicans spend the next four pretending that this one was, too? Even if they do not believe so — as many Democrats doubtless did not sincerely believe their own claims about 2016 — that’s the game now.

And if the Democrats can pursue Trump and his sons over claims of collusion with a foreign power, why should the Republicans not as a first order of business order an official investigation into Joe Biden and his family? Indeed why should they not announce (as Democrat operatives did after the last election) that they intend to impeach President Biden the moment he enters office?

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All of this would be to play the game in kind — it would indeed be “fair” — and would have as much point to it as the Democrats’ Russian vendetta had between 2016 and 2020. It would also tear this country further apart.

The problem is that neither side is any longer dedicated to viewing the truth in neutral terms — and the Democrats are still at it. At the weekend, one former National Security Council spokesman for President Obama condemned Boris Johnson’s message of congratulation to Joe Biden. Calling the British Prime Minister a “shapeshifting creep”, Tommy Vietor said “We will never forget your racist comments about Obama.”

But Johnson never made any racist comments about Obama — the Prime Minister had remarked in 2016 that Obama’s far from warm attitude to Britain may have been influenced by his Kenyan heritage, something no one would find remarkable if applied to, say, an Irish-American like Joe Biden. Vietor had simply elevated his personal interpretation of Johnson’s words into the status of fact and then used them as a political weapon to use against the enemy. He does so at the moment of his own side’s victory and triumph, a lack of magnanimity that bodes ill for the future.

Trump has gone, but if anyone thinks the age of vitriol and division is over, then they are truly living in a different reality. If you liked the last four years of American politics, you’re going to love what comes next.

The journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the most vocal Left-wing critics of the tech companies’ actions, asserted that they “never wanted this role.” Instead, he said, “[i]t was foisted on them by people, led by journalists, demanding they censor.” And indeed, since the 2016 election, much of the Left-of-centre media has faulted social media platforms for what they see as overly permissive policies on political speech.

As many have previously pointed out, support for restricting speech is a sharp pivot away from principles once common on the Left. Notably, one of the most iconic protest events of the 1960s was the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a revolt against the University of California’s limitations on political speech. (In recent years, in contrast, student radicals have been more likely to protest their universities’ unwillingness to restrict expression on campus.)

What’s less well-remembered about the Berkeley Free Speech Movement is that then, as now, debates about the freedom of expression revolved around technology — specifically, information technology. A hint of this emphasis is apparent in the movement’s best-known statement: the famous speech in which activist Mario Savio proclaimed: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part”.

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Today, most would probably interpret Savio’s use of “machine” as metaphorical, but to its audience at the time, it would have also had a literal referent: the IBM computers that were increasingly central to the university’s operation in the 1960s. For course registration and other purposes, students were issued IBM punch cards, which were the prevalent means of digital data storage prior to magnetic disks.

The radicals seized on these objects as a symbol of the repressive institution they were fighting. As Savio put it in an interview with Life magazine, “[a]t Cal, you’re little more than an IBM card.” He elaborated: “the university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in the military-industrial complex. They’ve got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions.”

In line with Savio’s thinking, Berkeley militants turned the ubiquitous IBM punch card into the object of many gestures of rebellion. They burned piles of the cards in public spaces; they punched out the words “Free Speech” on them, then hung them around their necks and attached them to their lapels. They adopted the phrase “do not fold, spindle, or mutilate,” which appeared on IBM’s cards, as a slogan, putting it on placards to indict a system that valued the smooth functioning of the machine over the full expression of humanity.

In satirical cartoons, they represented the university as a factory flattening human beings into two-dimensional punch cards. An album of protest songs from the movement featured punch cards marked with slogans on its cover art. The Free Speech Movement activists, it would seem, intuitively viewed centralised information systems like IBM’s as inimical to freedom and individuality. For them, the punch card embodied the prospect of the “one-dimensional man,” in the phrase of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose book of that title appeared in the same year as the Berkeley protests.

Marcuse’s account of how advanced industrial society turned people into mere commodities profoundly influenced the 1960s Left. Computerisation, which seemed to insert individuals into abstract mechanisms subject to hierarchical control, offered a particularly vivid illustration of the dangers he identified.

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More than 50 years later, the coordinates of this argument look both strange and familiar. In the 1960s, people feared the reduction of their identities to the size of a punch card issued by an institution; today, most of us have willingly allowed ourselves to be slotted into flat, standardised profiles controlled by private corporations with far more reach and influence than IBM ever had in the 60s. Far from resisting this fate, we embraced it as a means of enhanced individuality and freedom — or so we imagined.

A shift in the popular perception of information technology made this possible. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner details the remarkable evolution by which California radicals went from rejecting computers as instruments of state oppression to hailing them as vehicles of collective liberation. “Two decades after the end of the Vietnam War and the fading of the American counterculture,” he writes, “computers somehow seemed poised to bring to life the countercultural dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion.”

By the time social media emerged in the early 2000s, this positive view of information technology, surprisingly in line with the values of the Free Speech Movement, had become default. We felt that slotting ourselves into graphically enhanced virtual punch cards was a new means of self-expression, rather than a danger to it.

As Twitter and Facebook lurch towards more extensive control over content posted on their sites, we are in the midst of a new and even more disorienting shift in public opinion. What has emerged lately is a bewildering synthesis of the techno-dystopian views of the old counterculture and the techno-utopianism of the later cyber-culture documented by Turner.

In recent years, plenty of voices across the political spectrum have decried the power accrued by the major tech corporations, echoing 60s-era anxieties about IBM. On the other hand, those on the Left in particular now worry less about the repressive capacities of new technologies than their excessive permissiveness. This puts them in the peculiar position of, in effect, wanting to grant more power and control to the same unaccountable corporations they might otherwise criticise.

Information technology does not enable either freedom or control: it facilitates both at once. Because they did not recognise this dual potentiality in 1964, Savio and his fellow activists could not foresee that that the insertion of human beings into technological systems would not be imposed by faceless, repressive power structures.

Rather, the public would eventually embrace this integration, ironically seeing in it the realisation of a countercultural dream of free expression and enhanced individuality. For their part, the techno-utopians who brought us the internet were naïve about the dangers of placing mechanisms that now govern much of human life under the control of large private companies.

As the inheritors of these two outlooks, we now suffer from both blind spots. Most of us can agree that big tech has accumulated too much power, regardless of how and to what degree it chooses to use it. But no one is in a position to challenge this power effectively, because we all still want what big tech promises us — for ourselves, if not for our political enemies.

Recent developments suggest that many are willing to cede far more power to Silicon Valley, under the impression that this will preserve the dream of the internet it once sold us. This view is just as short-sighted as the ones that preceded it.

But developments this week may have changed that, with the tech giants daring to make their biggest encroachments so far in deciding what the public could and could not know.

On Wednesday, the New York Post published a major exposé on the activities of Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The investigation, based on leaked emails, revealed the manner in which Biden Jnr had used his father’s connections to pitch for lucrative contracts with Ukrainian businessmen. Since then, more news has emerged of the younger Biden seeking remuneration from Chinese firms, among others. In an election season this is, of course, explosive stuff — but it is also information that the American public have a right to know.

Since Joe Biden presents himself as the honest candidate in this election, the fact that his family members may have been enriching themselves through their connections is relevant to the decision the voters are about to make.

But Big Tech decided that they couldn’t know it. On Wednesday, after the New York Post story emerged, both Twitter and Facebook made an unprecedented move into overt censorship, with the world’s largest social media companies deciding to prevent the dissemination of the story. They did everything they could to stop it from getting out, with Twitter in particular blocking users from posting links to the Post’s article, initially claiming that sharing of the piece violated the platform’s rules on the use of hacked materials.

The idea that the Hunter Biden emails are the result of a hack is disputed. But even if the claim were accurate, it is not the case that these platforms usually take a strong line against stories based on hacked material. Over recent years, there have been numerous stories, from celebrity gossip to major political stories like the DNC nomination scandal at the 2016 election, which have come about solely because of the use of hacked information. Yet Twitter did not prevent people from sharing them, so the claim that “hacking” is the justification on this occasion is in fact nothing other than a retro-fit.

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Yet on this spurious basis Twitter took a range of extraordinary actions, which included locking the accounts of the official Trump campaign and of the White House Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, because they had dared to share the story. Such is the extraordinary power that the tech companies now have and the extraordinarily brazen behaviour they feel that they can get away with.

It is conceivable that Twitter might rightfully act if there were knowingly false information being disseminated ahead of an election by obscure or unknown actors seeking to affect an election. But it is quite another thing for the social media giant to decide that the reposting of a story in the New York Post — one of America’s oldest and most venerable papers, founded by Alexander Hamilton — should be cause to suppress the speech of the White House Press Secretary. This is not an attempt to prevent interference in an election — it is itself interference in an election. Interference carried out by Facebook and Twitter, tech giants and monopolies in possession of unprecedented amounts of power.

Perhaps people should have woken up to such actions by Big Tech earlier — but too often the platform’s targets seemed to be too obscure or unpleasant to find defenders. So they slowly — and occasionally in sudden purges — chucked out people who they decided to be “hateful”, so people such as Katie Hopkins or Milo Yiannopoulos.

Yet on top of this, Twitter went for a less overt form of control by using its power to quietly muffle accounts (“shadow-banning”) without anybody noticing. In the last year, this has been formalised by the site, which has made its users sign a new agreement conceding that the platform has the right to filter and manipulate which voices its users do or do not hear. But, most people decided, things go on as before and shadow-banning was just for other people.

So while the platform picked off or muted obscure or unpleasant figures, they — and the rest of us — clearly lost sight of exactly where a line could be drawn. And inevitably the bloated, over-rich, overpowerful and under-informed tech entities thought that they should decide where that line was.

So here we are, in the weeks before the election, with the platforms suppressing a story that affects one candidate, trying to pretend that one of America’s great papers is an unreliable source (and if they want to play that game, then wait until they discover the New York Times), and blocking the social media account of the White House Press Secretary.

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Pity poor oppressed Prince Harry

By Douglas Murray

One other turn in this story deserves to be noticed. On Wednesday Twitter had as its top story a minor exchange in the confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett for a position on the Supreme Court, during which Senator Mazie Hirono claimed that the use of the term “sexual preference” was an anti-gay slur. Hirono said that the phrase — which Amy Coney Barrett had only used earlier in passing — is “an offensive and outdated term”.

The claim itself is of course a crock. “Sexual preference” has been used for years and has no pejorative connotations. Indeed it has been used multiple times recently by no less a figure than Joe Biden; and just last month The Advocate (America’s main remaining legacy gay publication) used the term in a Tweet. So the story about Senator Hirono “calling out” Amy Coney Barrett was nothing other than a piece of political posturing.

If Barrett had been a man, the Democrats would have accused her of misogyny by now. If she had not adopted two black children and loved them, cared for them and brought them up as her own, then doubtless they would have attempted to accuse her of racism. But neither of these charges being available they instead made an attempt to accuse Barrett of homophobia, based on nothing more than the use of a term which everybody used until yesterday. Meanwhile Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary chose to update their entry on the term “sexual preference”, in order to pretend that the new “offensive” spin on the term was widely, indeed authoritatively recognised.

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Facebook is radicalising your parents

By Gavin Haynes

That this story — the most minor imaginable exchange which relied not just on a misrepresentation but a nasty little untruth — should have been the top chosen story on Twitter on Wednesday tells us something. This was not the story which users had put at the top of the site — it was the story that Twitter chose. And it did so on the very same day that an actual story from the New York Post could not be shared on the platform.

There have been many eye-opening moments with Big Tech in recent years. The companies have been repeatedly caught out lying, cheating and attempting to exert political influence under the guise of fact-checking. But Wednesday should be seen as a watershed moment — the moment when the last remaining pretences of the platforms were finally shed.

People may still use Twitter and Facebook. They may continue to find some value in them. But after this week there is no way of avoiding the fact that in doing so they are helping companies which have chosen to make overt interventions into the political process — and to do so in order that their chosen candidate wins.

We hear a lot about purported, exaggerated “foreign interference” in elections, but here is the real interference. It is done by an organisation more powerful than any government, more unaccountable than any politician and more sinister than anyone but the most crazed conspiracists could ever have guessed.