Hunter Biden: Filmmaker for the apocalypse

Beltway Confidential
Hunter Biden: Filmmaker for the apocalypse
Beltway Confidential
Hunter Biden: Filmmaker for the apocalypse
President Joe Biden Easter Egg Roll
Hunter Biden during the White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn on April 18, 2022.

Hunter Biden is the most important filmmaker in America today. Like Francis Ford Coppola with the Godfather movies and The Conversation, Biden’s home movies give epoch-defining insights into the current workings of American power and paranoia. Whereas Coppola worked with a Mitchell BNCR camera with Bausch & Lomb lenses and Marlon Brando, the president’s son works on crack with a laptop and prostitutes. He also works, as the academics say, at the juncture of media and politics. Media are what we are supposed to see, but we are not supposed to see the workings of politics — especially the recesses where politics and money converge. Hunter, like that other impulsive digital performer Donald Trump, lifts the veil.

The Greek for lifting the veil on what is secret is “apokalypsis” — revelation. The New Testament uses “apocalypse” to describe the end of an epoch. We use it colloquially to describe a crash and burn. This is what the Biden presidency has become, but that is symptomatic of a bigger shift in how we communicate and what we can and cannot see. Politics has been reality TV for decades. The smartphone, by inviting everyone to become a performer, turns all life into media. The material is scripted in the secret conclaves of social media, then reflected back to us as both social fact and inner reality. It is neither, but we can no more unsee it than we can unsee images of Hunter Biden having an orgy.

The effect of this shift is that the partition between the public and the private has effectively dissolved. That partition is foundational to liberal politics and the notions of common interest on which it depends. In the dawn of modern democracy, the vernacular Bible and the coffee house drew individuals together in literacy. The glow of its sunset is the screen, pixelating us into atomization. Each of us is at once spectator and performer, like some hybrid beast from Greek mythology — in Hunter’s case, a satyr.

The release of material from Hunter Biden’s laptop just before the 2020 elections exposed the function of media in such a society: how it works and why it exists at all. The Democrats’ old-media outriders, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic, discredited the material as a Russian info op. The Democrats’ new-media outriders, Twitter and Facebook, suppressed its dissemination. Dozens of ex-intelligence community types spontaneously volunteered in agreement. Media exist to prevent us from seeing what we should see and to tell us which way the winds of patronage are blowing.

The office of “first son” does not exist. The crime of “collusion” doesn’t feature in the federal code, either. That didn’t stop pro-Democratic media from conducting the show trial of Ivanka Trump for “colluding” with Vladimir Putin in the 2016 elections, even though she had advised her father in a private capacity. Yet in 2020, the same outlets, confronted with solid evidence, did their utmost to kill the story of Hunter Biden’s collusion with foreign actors and, later, the proof that Hunter, the man Joe calls “the smartest guy I know,” is a pervert, a sadist, and a criminal.

Nearly two years later, the New York Times and the Washington Post tell us that the material is, in fact, authentic. This proof includes emails to Ukrainian and Chinese businessmen in which Hunter Biden touts access to his father, who was then vice president. Hunter speaks neither Ukrainian nor Mandarin. He knows nothing about the energy business. Yet foreign companies have put him on their boards and given him millions of dollars. Whether or not he delivered Joe Biden, and it appears that the president did meet some of Hunter’s contacts, this makes Hunter Biden a security risk.

Hunter’s defenders claim that foreign actors hacked his laptop and timed the release to influence the 2020 election. Given the timing, it wouldn’t be surprising. The same probably goes for the release last week of the torrent of filth that is his iCloud backup. But this only confirms the extent of the problem. Hunter’s personal dissolution has completed the dissolution of the public-private split in his life. And his seamy apocalypse is emblematic of a general collapse. You can see it in split-screen images on Twitter. On the left, Joe tells crackheads he’s going to lock them up and gun owners that he’s coming for their weapons. On the right, a naked Hunter weighs crack and waves a pistol. We cannot but see that there is no equality before the law: This is the quintessence of “white privilege” and oligarchic corruption. We can also see that the new media cannot fully control their message. But they will learn.

Share your thoughts with friends.

Related Content