I feel like we haven’t talked in months. I don’t quite have my G-File sea legs yet, so be prepared for some zigs and zags as I veer one way or another like Pete Hegseth racing into the Fox & Friends studio the morning after a bachelor party.
We might as well start with the Hunter Biden pardon, but—beyond saying “it’s bad”—I’ll try not to repeat what many have already said.
One of the most common reactions in my corner of the world might be described as “shocked but not surprised.” I expected Hunter to get a pardon or some form of clemency, and flatly predicted it more than once, including on CNN last June. Sarah Isgur on Advisory Opinions, most of the gang over at National Review, and—I’m pretty sure—Commentary have said as much.
The philosopher Katie Stockdale has written some really interesting—and, for an academic philosopher, shockingly readable—stuff about the difference between shock and surprise. Specifically, she distinguishes between things that are not particularly surprising as a matter of probability—someone stealing your parking space, cutting in line at the movies, shoplifting in plain sight—but are so emotionally or morally disturbing that they short-circuit our thinking. “Moral shock is an immediate emotional response, one that occurs without all of the data we need to make sophisticated moral judgments,” she writes.
I’m not sure the Hunter pardon fits her framework—for me or many of my friends. But I do think for a lot of liberals it does. They actually believed that Joe Biden was the high-minded, fundamentally decent, good dude he cast himself as. They took him at his word.
Of course, they did this not just because they liked Joe Biden but also because they hated Donald Trump and wanted to believe that Biden is fundamentally, categorically, a better man than Trump. If Trump is the avatar for the Forces of Darkness in their eyes, then Biden must be the Paladin of Light.
If you want to wallow in the sanctimony and certainty this desire elicited, watch this:
