MAGA Lawmakers Hold Hearing On Their Constitutional Right To Publicly Share Pictures Of Hunter Biden's Impressive Penis
P.S.: Not from The Onion.
He’s not exaggerating. The Republicans have been demanding the right to post and see pictures of Hunter Biden’s larger-than-average penis for months. Hunter’s hog is a top-of-the-list issue — along with unfuckable candy, chocolate milk, and hoarding gas stoves. The survival of the republic teeters on their God-given right to gaze and gawk at the First Son’s gonads.
On Wednesday, the Hunter Biden Dick Pics Committee began its hearings. Aaron Rupar bravely documented the lunacy. The proceeding was performative nonsense — and it went horribly for the far-right — but the whackos still managed to do their job, i.e., craft perfect soundbites to air on Fox. (So consider yourselves owned, libs!)
All day long, the evidence showed the exact opposite of what the GQP kept whining about: Trump bullied Twitter into changing its policies (removing mean anti-Trump tweets), Twitter went out of its way to ignore and allow pro-Trump hate speech, Twitter changed its policies to help Trump. In short, everything the Kooks claim Biden did was actually provably done by Trump. Jamie Raskin summed up: “Rather than conspiring to suppress right-wing MAGA speech, as my colleagues astonishingly claim, Twitter and other media companies knowingly facilitated Trump’s spread of disinformation.”
By the way, this was the tweet that triggered the Orange Snowflake (lol):
And with Dolt45’s account reinstated (as well as the accounts of numerous neo-Nazis and other “fine people”), Twitter continues to be a happy host to MAGA’s seditious chatter about the next insurrection.
But back to Russia Russia Russia Penis Penis Penis . . .
These articles are from December 2022, when Elon et al. tried (and failed) to make “Twitter Files” a thing:
Donald Trump Demands To Be Restored To Power After Americans Deprived Of Constitutional Right To See Hunter Biden Dick Pics
Liz Dye, Above The Law, December 5, 2022
On Friday afternoon, the world’s richest man took to his social media platform to announce an exposé of epic proportions.
“What really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter will be published on Twitter at 5pm ET!” he tweeted, adding “This will be awesome” and a popcorn emoji in case there was any doubt how wild things would get. . . .
In the event, Taibbi delivered rather less than the promised payload. It was more like a slow dribble of undated email excerpts, copy-pasted together under breathless descriptions, with Taibbi congratulating himself on his impressive emission.
For instance, Taibbi admits that both the Trump administration and the Biden campaign made routine requests that Twitter remove content, and that the company generally obliged, but, he insists Democrats got more of what they wanted.
No proof of this is provided . . .
His smoking gun is an email listing five tweets “the Biden team” requested be removed on October 24, 2020 . . .
What might said emails contain? Matt Taibbi, a journalist with 30-plus years of experience, does not say. But he and the Muskies are sure this censorship is a sign of nefarious pro-Biden electoral interference.
In point of fact, the tweets featured both family photos of Hunter Biden’s minor children and pictures of his penis, both inside and outside of women . . .
Publishing nude photos without consent is unambiguously a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, and indeed a private platform is free to censor anything it likes. Nonetheless, these brain geniuses are sure that this is a gross violation of the Constitution which will bring down the Republic. Because if websites aren’t obligated to publish pictures of Hunter Biden’s junk, then what even is the First Amendment for? . . .
The amazing revelation that Twitter failed to show pictures of Hunter Biden’s bits has thus fair failed to restore Trump to power. Even over at Fox, there seems to be a dawning realization that Musk and Taibbi’s package has failed to impress.
But hope springs eternal.
“I feel that Elon Musk has held back some material,” New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, an early proponent of the “laptop from hell” story said wistfully at Fox. . . .
No, You Do Not Have a Constitutional Right to Post Hunter Biden’s Dick Pic on Twitter
Tim Miller, The Bulwark, December 3, 2022
While normal humans who denied Republicans their red wave were enjoying an epic sports weekend, an insular community of MAGA activists and online contrarians led by the world’s richest man (for now) were getting riled up about a cache of leaked emails revealing that the former actor James Woods and Chinese troll accounts were not allowed to post ill-gotten photos of Hunter Biden’s hog on a private company’s microblogging platform 25 months ago.
Now if you are one of the normals — someone who would never think about posting another person’s penis on your social media account; has no desire to see politicians’ kids’ penises when scrolling social media; doesn’t understand why there are other people out there who care one way or another about the moderation policies surrounding stolen penis photos; or can’t even figure out what it is that I’m talking about — then this might seem like a gratuitous matter for an article. Sadly, it is not.
Because among Republican members of Congress, leading conservative media commentators, contrarian substackers, conservative tech bros, and friends of Donald Trump, the ability to post Hunter Biden’s cock shots on Twitter is the number-one issue in America this weekend. They believe that if they are not allowed to post porno, our constitutional republic may be in jeopardy.
I truly, truly wish I were joking.
Here’s a synopsis for the blessedly uninitiated:
On Friday, Elon Musk promised to reveal “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter.” It turns out that he had provided a trove of internal corporate documents to the Tulsi Gabbard of Substack, Matt Taibbi, who said they amounted to a “unique and explosive story”—revealing the juicy details inside Twitter’s decision to suppress the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, which had previously been rejected by such liberal outlets as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal due to its suspicious provenance. . . .
The documents Taibbi tweeted on Friday . . . mostly relitigate[] two facts that have already received much ink across the media: 1) How Twitter throttled the New York Post’s initial story about Hunter’s laptop based on what we now know was an incorrect assessment of its source; and 2) How political campaigns and government agencies have worked with social media companies—in this case Twitter—to flag troubling content.
On the first point, the emails confirm the essential consensus that has come into focus in reporting on the matter: Twitter got out over its skis on the ban and a typical corporate bureaucratic goat rope ensued as the company tried to “unfuck” the situation, as one employee put it. To say that this is not a new revelation would be an understatement given that Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that this was a mistake over a year ago. . . .
The most retweeted installment in Taibbi’s thread (so far) was this, which purported to show the Biden campaign directing Twitter to delete specific tweets:
[Taibbi Tweet #8, above]
This supposed smoking gun resulted in Musk responding to his own journalistic stenographer on Twitter with a fire emoji and the comment “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s first amendment, what is.” Musk was so impressed with this digital citizen’s arrest, that he made it his pinned tweet, after which the MAGA attaboys for Musky came hot and heavy.
Right-wing commentator Buck Sexton (real name), said this was a “bright red line violation” and that Biden should be IMPEACHED for it. Rep. James Comer (R-TN) was on Fox promising that everyone at Twitter involved with this would be brought before the House Oversight committee. Rep. Billy Long retweeted several MAGA influencers praising Elon for, among other things, “exposing corruption at the highest levels of society” (Projection Alert). Meanwhile Kari Lake hype man Pizzagate Jack Posobiec declared this the “biggest story in modern presidential election history,” claimed that “we can never go back to the country we were before this moment,” and donned this “a digital insurrection.” . . .
The offending material that Taibbi revealed was removed by Twitter at the Biden campaign’s request turns out to have been a bunch of links to Hunter Biden in the buff.
There was a tweet from a Chinese account featuring a naked woman on top of Hunter Biden, as well as a family photo. Two pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, one with another woman in the background. Taibbi’s next list of material was removed by Twitter after being flagged by the Democratic National Committee. They include a picture of Hunter Biden smoking crack and getting his feet rubbed and a link to a Hunter Biden sex tape. . . .
As someone who once consulted for social media companies on content moderation issues, let me tell you, the amount of eggplant-related terms of service violations that these platforms review in a given year is so voluminous that we have not yet invented an artificial intelligence machine capable of counting them.
Yet Taibbi and Musk are trying to turn this mundane moderation matter into the story of the century by emphasizing a few misconceptions about how platforms work with political campaigns and what First Amendment obligations they do or do not have. To debunk a few of them:
1. Campaigns of all ideological stripes have direct lines into social media companies and make requests about offending content. There is nothing at all strange about what is shown in these emails. . . .
2. In this specific instance, the requests came from a campaign that has absolutely no government authority at all. At the time of the correspondence in question, Joe Biden was a private citizen running for office, while Donald Trump was the president. Taibbi acknowledges that Trump’s White House made requests that “were received and honored” and that “there’s no evidence—that I’ve seen—of any government involvement in the laptop story.” So if there are any First Amendment issues at play here—and I don’t believe there are since neither Musk nor Taibbi have demonstrated that the government made any mandates on Twitter—they would, in this case, only relate to the material that Trump wanted removed.
3. Why MAGA Republicans and Elon Musk are so adamant that people be able to post photos of Hunter’s johnson is something that should probably be explored with their respective preachers or psychiatrists, but it is certainly not a matter for constitutional scholars or litigators. . . .
Musk and Taibbi have promised more editions of the “Twitter Files” in the coming days, maybe next time they won’t come up so limp.
There’s Nothing Stranger Than the Right’s Fixation With Hunter Biden
Michael Tomasky, The New Republic, December 5, 2022
What exactly is at the root of the right’s Hunter Biden obsession? At its simplest level, the Hunter saga is just a potential Achilles’ heel for a president they want to defeat in 2024, assuming Joe Biden runs. But that has never quite explained the manic quality of the drive to turn Hunter into the symbol and standard-bearer of the Democratic Party and of liberalism generally. It had to have something to do, I always thought, with the notion that Hunter represents the licentiousness with which conservatives associate liberals—his drug use, his sketchy affair with his dead brother’s wife, and now his entry into the effete and vaguely un-American Manhattan art world.
But this weekend, things got even weirder—and in ways that were so sordid it took me a while to even understand what was going on.
If you had the good fortune or sense not to crawl down this particular rabbit hole over the weekend, fear not, I won’t drag you into the depths that I descended. The briefest recap is this. On Friday, Elon Musk tweeted that he was going to reveal how Twitter supposedly covered up the Hunter Biden scandal in October 2020. Matt Taibbi (“the Tulsi Gabbard of Substack,” as The Bulwark’s Tim Miller icily dubbed him) posted some of the emails found on Hunter’s hard drive. Some showed the Biden campaign asking Twitter to refrain from posting certain material.
That’s basically it. In some quarters of the right, this is the biggest scandal in the history of the republic, because it allegedly proves that Biden used his governmental power (a neat trick for someone who, at the time, controlled no part of the government) to set fire to the Constitution. “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s first amendment, what is,” Musk tweeted.
What this actually proves is two things about Musk. First, he is a constitutional illiterate. The First Amendment enjoins only the government from suppressing speech. During his 2020 campaign, Biden was a private citizen, so he had no means by which to violate the First Amendment at all. It also proves that Musk knows nothing about how politics and journalism work. Throughout history, media, and now social media, have gotten hold of material that might embarrass a campaign. The campaign learns of it, and the campaign pleads its case that the material is merely prurient and that publishing it would be gratuitous and not in the public interest. . . .
Now: Here’s the psychotic part. As Miller put it: “The offending material that Taibbi revealed was removed by Twitter at the Biden campaign’s request turns out to have been a bunch of links to Hunter Biden in the buff.” And these photos revealed to the world that Hunter has … well, you know … let’s just say that he has been blessed by nature. The New York Post reported over the summer on its actual size. You can go look that up if you wish.
So here, clearly, is still one more thing for the right to hate about Hunter. Don’t laugh. Men don’t talk about it much in polite company, but this is something many men think about to the point of obsession. And isn’t it particularly acute among conservative men, all full of that macho swagger? Isn’t that swagger a form of compensation, like that bright orange Dodge Charger the 61-year-old balding man suddenly decides he can’t live without? And isn’t Donald Trump, who still smarts 30 years later from being dubbed “short-fingered” by Spy, the most insecure of all men along these lines? You surely don’t forget the time he actually made his penis a campaign issue in 2016. It’s not the kind of thing you can unremember.
OK, I’ll admit that I can’t look deep into the psyches of all these right-wing men and so I should not overgeneralize about them. I am not asserting that James Comer, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee who has vowed to make the 118th Congress entirely about Hunter Biden, is thinking about how the first son holsters his Dillinger as he contemplates how he’s going to cut him down to—as it were—size. But I am saying, absolutely, that there is something strange and psychological about the Hunter obsession.
Perhaps it comes down to simply this: It’s all they have, and that makes them insane. Joe Biden has been in public life for half a century and has never been attached to a whiff of financial scandal. It makes the right, especially the Trumpy right, nuts. In Trumpworld, everyone is corrupt; that’s a given. Only schmucks aren’t out to cut corners and game the system. The only difference is between those smart enough to get away with it and those dumb enough to get caught.
So the right tried to connect Biden’s urging of the firing of that Ukrainian prosecutor to some notion that he was protecting Hunter from scrutiny, but that wasn’t true. Then, in 2020, the discovery of Hunter’s laptop in that Delaware shop, and its subsequent authentication, was touted as a huge scandal in and of itself. This was because most of the mainstream press was slow to acknowledge that the laptop really was Hunter’s. They were slow, in other words, to follow the lead of Fox News and the New York Post and Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. Gee, I wonder why that would be. . . .
No one has turned up any evidence of anything . . . [R]emember, Rudy Giuliani had that laptop before the last presidential election. If something really incriminating about Joe Biden had been on there, it seems to me likely we’d have learned it then. . . .
The Hunter crusade is thus driven not only by pursuit of scandal to hang around his father’s neck; it is rooted in the right’s antique and cruel values system, which most Americans no longer share. . . . [They are] left wondering why America doesn’t share their seething hatred of a man whom the Jesus they claim to worship would have counseled us to regard with compassion. These would-be Javerts with their weird psychosexual obsessions are the ones who are truly out of touch.