HATING WOMEN (OTHER THAN THEIR MOTHERS) IS STRANGER:

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.

Sometimes campaigns win that argument, sometimes they lose. I've had a few of those kinds of conversations myself over the years. They can get heated. But they never have anything to do with the First Amendment. They're about exercising news judgment and defining what's in the public interest. But it's very easy for cynics to make idiots who don't know what the First Amendment does and does not cover believe that they're about the First Amendment.

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.

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