Why We Blind Ourselves to the Biden Scandal

What explains the lack of outrage and attention in certain circles to the scandal of the Biden family’s corruption? It’s a puzzle. It’s understandable to be skeptical about what are billed as bombshell disclosures in the closing days of a campaign. The evidence has only mounted since then.Yet certain publications and broadcasters and their highly educated audiences have remained reluctant, long past the 2020 election, to reckon with the emerging reality that President Biden’s son was selling foreign customers access to his father and through him to the government.The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, summed up his findings recently on a podcast with Senator Cruz: “I think that Joe Biden has been selling access….” Mr. Comer said more than $25 million had flowed from foreign nations to Mr. Biden and his family.Burisma, a gas company active in Ukraine, was paying Hunter Biden $83,000 a month to serve as a director while his father was vice president. A China-backed firm was to save 10 percent “for the big guy,” an apparent reference to the current president.Why don’t a certain segment of people want to see or hear about it? No doubt the details of the Biden business deals can seem convoluted. That doesn’t explain, though, why the same people and press who are looking away from the Biden story found complexity no obstacle in tracking, say, presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s attempts to refinance 666 Fifth Avenue during the Trump administration.One possibility beyond mere partisanship is that when it comes to politicians, Americans have been, in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s phrase, defining deviancy down. At this point, no one expects anything close to Eagle Scout-level integrity from nationally elected figures or their families. A non-grifter presidency might qualify as a newsworthy and welcome surprise, but the status quo generates just a shrug.Another part of the answer could be conformity. A recent interview by David Samuels in Tablet refers to a “kind of controlled consensus that the press maintains, which is obviously garbage. But if you question it, you are some kind of nut.”A book I read recently helps explain the phenomenon. “Where the community feels and thinks — or at least talks and acts — pretty much one way, to say or do differently means a kind of internal exile that most people find unattractive to undertake,” the book explains, and continues:“Having fixed our faith in a father-figure — or in a father, or in a mother or a wife — we must keep it fixed until inexcusable fault (and what fault of a father, a mother, a wife, is inexcusable?) crushes it once and completely. This figure represents our own best selves; it is what we ourselves want to be and, through identification, are. To abandon it for anything less than crushing evidence of inexcusable fault is self-incrimination, and of one’s best, unrealized self.”Or as Vice President Gore used to say, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”So much hope by so many people was invested in President Biden as the person who could rescue America from Donald Trump and Trumpism. Those people are choosing to look away now. It sums up an element of the country’s mood during the Biden presidency. Americans are getting accustomed to averting our gaze.We pretend not to see the disclosures about Hunter Biden’s laptop. We look away from the fentanyl addicts shooting up on our sidewalks. We put out of our minds the Chinese spy balloon overhead, the consequences of our rout from Afghanistan, the looming long-term budget risks of mounting debt and future entitlement obligations. We’d prefer not to think about any of it.The book I mentioned earlier reports that “one day, too late…the burden of self-deception has grown too heavy…suddenly it all comes down, all at once.” The book is by Milton Mayer: “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45.”The title makes clear enough what the book, published in 1955, is about. Mayer, an American Jewish journalist of German descent, went to a small town in Germany for a year in the early 1950s and, without disclosing that he was Jewish, interviewed ordinary Germans to try to understand what had happened.No one, least of all me, is saying the Democrats are like Nazis, or that America is like World War II-era Germany. Sadly, though, self-deception is a remarkably universal, and human, phenomenon. Looking away works as a coping mechanism for a while, but it has its own delusional dangers. It lasts only until “suddenly it all comes down, all at once.”

Why We Blind Ourselves to the Biden Scandal

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