These right wingers still don’t get it after all this time
Republicans desperately tried to make the 2020 election all about Hunter Biden. Persuadable voters didn’t care atall, and their presidential candidate lost by seven million votes. Instead of learning the lesson, they blamed the media, and blamed Twitter. Then they tried to make the 2022 midterms all about Hunter Biden, and they once again massively underperformed with voters.
Now that Twitter is owned by someone who’s fully under the spell of right wing conspiracy theories, he spent yesterday “exposing” the “internal scandal” within Twitter’s ranks when it decided to block the New York Post’s bullshit story about Hunter Biden in October 2020. Right wingers are now absolutely convinced that Twitter and the United States government conspired to violate the First Amendment and rig the 2020 election against Donald Trump.
Except of course, back in the real world, none of that actually happened. The endlessly lengthy Twitter thread “exposing” this scandal didn’t contain anything scandalous, or anything of interest (beyond the part where the person posting the thread accidentally doxxed a Congressman and the former CEO of Twitter). Instead it simply revealed that various political figures have periodically asked Twitter to look at certain tweets that appeared to violate the site’s terms of service, and that Twitter took action when those tweets did violate the terms of service. Some scandal, eh?
Yet right wingers have come away from this non-event absolutely convinced that Twitter and “the government” conspired to violate the First Amendment. Of course by “the government” they mean Joe Biden, who was not in office in October 2020. These right wingers are so far gone, they’ve somehow convinced themselves that Biden was President at this time instead of Trump. And this is before getting to the part where the First Amendment doesn’t apply to privately owned platforms like Twitter.
None of this is stopping right wingers from deluding themselves into thinking they’ve somehow struck gold. They’re so certain they’ve uncovered the crime of the century, they’ve got “Watergate” trending on Twitter. Really? This is Watergate? It’s not even a scandal. There’s no story here. There never was.
Maybe Hunter Biden committed crimes and maybe he didn’t. That’ll be up to federal prosecutors to figure out. But either way, it’s painfully obvious at this point that it has nothing to do with Joe Biden or his presidency. Nor is any persuadable voter ever going to care about it. Not in 2020, not in 2022, and certainly not in 2024. But House Republicans are about to waste two years of their lives playing up this phony scandal anyway.
House Republicans like Jim Jordan used to be savvy when it came to phony scandals. They’d float one, and if it didn’t penetrate the mainstream media, they’d move on and try some other phony scandal. They’d never have wasted two-plus years trying to get something like the phony Hunter Biden scandal off the ground, after seeing that it wasn’t going to gain them a single additional vote. So what changed?
For one thing, Donald Trump is obsessed with Joe Biden’s kid because Trump’s own kids – who unlike Hunter Biden actually were involved in a presidency – have been the subjects of such controversy. But it goes beyond that. Even House Republicans know Trump is finished, and there’s no reason for them to take their cues from his ineffective babbling.
The real problem is that Trump drove the right wing Republican base completely bonkers insane. He turned them all into unhinged, hallucinatory conspiracy theorists. It no longer matters to right wingers that there’s nothing to this “Hunter Biden / Twitter” scandal. Nor does it matter to them that it’ll never change the mind of a single voter. All that matter is that they get to sit around all day convincing themselves and each other that this imaginary scandal is real.
For right wingers, it’s no longer about winning. It’s not about getting their people into office, or enacting their policies, or any of that. It’s about getting to pretend that Donald Trump secretly won in 2020, pretend that Twitter executives secretly installed Joe Biden as President, pretend that Joe Biden is pulling the strings in some Hunter Biden international conspiracy.
It’s not about trying to win. It’s about getting to feel superior. Getting to feel justified. Getting to feel like winners. Not in any real world way. Just in a self-satisfied, hallucinatory way. And now the Republican Party, what’s left of it, is stuck pandering to a right wing base that would rather sit back and pretend it’s won an election than show up and try to win an election. Good luck!
