A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
146.04175
Summary
In the wake of President Joe Biden's pardon of his son Hunter Biden, some have wondered if the former Vice President would ever pardon his own son. Psychologist Dr. Jillian Manus takes a look at the psychological implications of the pardon.
Transcript
00:00:02.320
Michelin driving expert and former professional race car driver Carl Nadeau
00:00:06.140
shares his tips on winter driving and the difference between all-season and winter tires.
00:00:10.400
All-season tires offer good performance in various conditions, including light snow.
00:00:14.440
However, winter tires excel in true winter conditions like snow, slush, and ice,
00:00:20.360
Winter tires should be used when temperatures consistently drop below 7 degrees Celsius
00:00:26.080
Check out michelin.ca to find the right winter tire for your vehicle today.
00:00:30.740
So, I thought I'd take a crack at assessing the psychological significance of Joe Biden's
00:00:38.740
He said I'd abide by the jury decision, and I will do that, and I will not pardon him.
00:00:46.340
Is there any possibility that the president would end up pardoning his son?
00:00:52.720
It is a no, and I don't have anything else to add.
00:01:06.440
Part of the reason I'm doing this, you see, is because there's been a variety of claims
00:01:11.780
justifying the pardon emerge in the aftermath of its manifestation,
00:01:16.900
including the claims that Joe only did what any loving father would do.
00:01:22.940
And the, I think, less egregious claim that, well, other presidents have done things that
00:01:31.800
It's the former one that particularly, I find particularly appalling and telling.
00:01:43.360
So, we're going to walk through the pardon, and then I'll make comments where I think that
00:01:54.320
Okay, well, there's obviously a problem there, because that's a conflict of interest that could
00:02:00.960
And so, the moral improprieties, and therefore the psychological improprieties, make themselves
00:02:08.660
known in the opening of the written statement itself.
00:02:15.900
From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department's
00:02:23.880
It is the case that President Biden did say he wouldn't interfere with the Justice Department's
00:02:30.400
decision-making, but he said much more than that.
00:02:36.460
And he said that repeatedly, and so did his press secretary.
00:02:40.020
And so, although it may be technically true that he's not interfering with the Justice Department's
00:02:45.600
decision-making, it's completely inappropriate of him to extract out a moral stance from the
00:02:52.620
fact that he's keeping his word in the most minor way and breaking it in the most major way.
00:02:58.880
Because he is pardoning his son, and he said repeatedly that he wouldn't do that.
00:03:03.260
The pardon is bad enough, and we'll get to that, but the pardon in the face of the repeated
00:03:08.580
denials that that pardon would be forthcoming, in combination with the fact that the Biden
00:03:14.720
administration, including the press secretary and the Democrats in general, made a case for
00:03:20.020
the outstanding moral quality of Joe Biden, who insisted, even under substantive familial
00:03:25.820
distress, that he wouldn't give in to these emotionally challenging, admittedly emotionally
00:03:32.520
challenging family circumstances, and use his privilege as the nation's top executive.
00:03:38.120
That's just, all of that's just too much to take.
00:03:42.080
The pardon's bad enough, but the pardon in the aftermath of the lies about the fact that
00:03:47.320
the pardon would not be forthcoming, and the moral grandstanding that was accrued to the
00:03:52.620
Democrats and to Biden in consequence of that grandstanding, that just makes this, as far
00:03:58.620
And we haven't even got to the psychological element yet.
00:04:02.000
And I kept my word, yeah, no, you didn't, even as I have watched my son being selectively
00:04:09.780
Okay, now this gets a little closer to the psychological issue at hand.
00:04:14.340
You see, the Biden narrative has been that the Biden narrative is poor Hunter, poor, unfairly
00:04:24.280
treated, misunderstood, desperately trying, failing heroically, Hunter.
00:04:31.920
Now, I took a good look at the laptop, and I read Miranda Devine's work on Hunter and Joe.
00:04:39.960
And here's what I have to say as a psychologist.
00:04:44.520
Joe and Jill have enabled their son's pathology.
00:04:47.940
And they've capitalized on that enabling politically by presenting their son as a heroic victim, which
00:04:55.780
is something the Democrats are very apt to do to everyone, including the criminal types who
00:05:06.240
And so they're replicating in their family what the Democrats do politically.
00:05:11.260
And the consequences for their family are akin to the social consequence of the Democrats
00:05:20.540
Now, some criminals sometimes are victims in a way that might motivate someone who was attempting
00:05:30.960
to be both just and merciful to moderate, let's say, their attitude with regards to a given crime.
00:05:38.620
But even if that is true, in some cases, as it is, there are a variety of criminal types,
00:05:44.300
the repeat offenders, the psychopaths in whose existence the hyper-empathic Democrats refuse
00:05:52.040
to even admit to, they're not victims, they're perpetrators, and they use claims of victims,
00:06:07.680
Every clinical psychologist worth his or her salt knows that.
00:06:13.220
And when you turn a perpetrator, especially a repeat perpetrator, or a repeat sadistic,
00:06:20.520
Machiavellian, manipulative perpetrator into a victim, you're nothing but an ally or pawn
00:06:28.500
And if that's your social policy, as it is in the case of the Democrats, who have no imagination
00:06:34.860
whatsoever for evil, then all you do is amplify the consequences of criminality.
00:06:40.100
Now, what happens if you do that within your own family, if you constantly make excuses
00:06:48.860
Well, you might say, well, everyone would make excuses for their son if he was engaging
00:06:57.340
And the proper response to that is, that's a complete bloody lie.
00:07:05.300
Now, look, there are a subset of children who at the age of two are tilted in a criminal
00:07:14.260
Now, everyone's temperament predisposes them to their own particular temptations.
00:07:21.200
So if you're high in neuroticism, that's negative emotion, and you're dependent, you're
00:07:26.140
unlikely to be criminal, but you're quite likely to develop depression or pathological anxiety
00:07:33.500
If you're a more aggressive person, so lower in agreeableness, for example, you might be
00:07:39.940
very competitive and you might be very, what would you say?
00:07:44.480
You might be useful if your aggression is socialized so that you strive forward with your anger in
00:07:52.380
a positive direction, like you might if you were a very good team player, for example, in
00:07:58.360
But that innate aggressiveness, if unsocialized, can lead in a criminal direction.
00:08:05.060
Now, I'm not saying that this necessarily happened in the case of Hunter, because I don't
00:08:08.980
know what Hunter was like when he was a little kid.
00:08:10.840
But I do know that there are little kids who have the precursors to criminal tendencies,
00:08:16.520
and the parents that bring them under control and socialize them properly don't make excuses
00:08:25.800
What they do instead is encourage their children to interact in a pro-social direction and limit
00:08:33.460
them selectively and stringently in the manifestation of their aggression.
00:08:39.240
So if you have a two-year-old boy, because it's almost always boys, it's about 5% of boys,
00:08:44.140
by the way, who in the presence of other two-year-olds would kick, bite, hit, and steal, it's a pretty
00:08:50.380
good definition of childhood criminality, then you remove the rewarding consequences of that
00:08:58.640
And you often do that by careful punishment of various sorts, certainly not by reward.
00:09:10.220
And you certainly don't proclaim that your bratty two-year-old who's aggressive and pushy
00:09:17.160
is a victim who should be pitied because of his pathological behavior and that you are
00:09:25.900
a kind of hero for feeling sorry for being empathic toward the behavior on the part of your child
00:09:34.460
that will do nothing but make his life a misery over the long run and do the same to others.
00:09:40.660
Now, I read the Biden laptop book, Miranda Devine's book, Laptop from Hell, and the Bidens have
00:09:49.380
been making excuses for Hunter of the sort that a relatively unsophisticated dependency-enabling
00:09:58.580
parent could make with some justification the first time their 14-year-old son committed
00:10:06.880
But the manner in which they discuss Hunter's transgressions or Hunter as a person is reminiscent
00:10:13.620
of exactly the language that you might use for a 14-year-old juvenile delinquent.
00:10:18.360
And the problem with that is, I don't know if you've noticed, but he's not 14.
00:10:24.540
And whatever excuses might have been made for his behavior when he was a juvenile delinquent,
00:10:30.580
they're completely off the table at 25, let alone 50.
00:10:37.920
The Bidens portray Hunter as a victim of addiction and his criminal actions as a consequence of that.
00:10:51.580
Bull market, bear market, rates will rise, rates will fall.
00:10:56.980
Until then, over 38,000 businesses have found a way to future-proof their operations with NetSuite
00:11:04.460
Imagine having your accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR all seamlessly integrated
00:11:12.060
With this unified business management suite, you're not just juggling numbers, you're wielding
00:11:15.860
a powerful tool that gives you the visibility and control to make quick, informed decisions.
00:11:20.200
It's like having a map in a maze of market uncertainties.
00:11:26.020
It's like peering into the future with actionable data at your fingertips.
00:11:31.200
You'll be closing your books in days, not weeks.
00:11:33.520
That means less time drowning in paperwork and more time focusing on what truly matters,
00:11:39.280
Here at The Daily Wire, we are proud to partner with NetSuite because they are leading the
00:11:42.880
way in future-proofing operations for businesses around the world.
00:11:46.180
Whether your company's earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite adapts
00:11:50.160
to your needs, helping you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities.
00:11:54.700
Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com
00:12:00.940
The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash jbp.
00:12:24.060
I have watched my son being selectively and unfairly prosecuted.
00:12:30.860
When he's acting at 50, like a very badly behaved juvenile, isn't an indication of your admirable
00:12:44.840
It's an indication of your codependency, to use a relatively cliched term, and your pattern
00:12:58.680
One of the things that really struck me about the Biden laptop story was that in the Biden
00:13:05.120
family, Beau had always been put forward as the golden boy who was destined for glorious
00:13:12.340
Whereas Hunter was always mopping up the lavatory, so to speak.
00:13:16.740
He was the black sheep of the family from which little was expected, let's say.
00:13:23.460
And, you know, if you end up playing that role, it's like you're the criminal shadow of your
00:13:31.180
If you end up playing that role, I'll tell you what that's going to do.
00:13:38.400
It's going to produce a kind of hatred of your parents, however unconscious, that's deep
00:13:44.140
And maybe that accounts for why Hunter dropped off three water-damaged laptops.
00:13:54.480
A week before his father announced that he would run for the presidency.
00:14:01.000
Well, knowing comprehensively just exactly what kind of horror show, multidimensional horror
00:14:13.400
Now, you know, as a psychoanalytically minded psychologist, I can't help but see motivation
00:14:21.840
There's a psychoanalytic dictum, which is if you don't understand the motivation, look
00:14:26.880
OK, so why would Hunter drop off three laptops full of compromising information to a repair
00:14:33.520
clinic a week before his father ran for presidency?
00:14:36.680
OK, what was the consequence, the emergence of a massive scandal surrounding Joe Biden?
00:14:45.880
OK, and you think, well, you know, Dr. Peterson, you're reading too much into it.
00:14:51.420
And first of all, if you think no one would possibly act like that, you know nothing.
00:14:56.620
And you certainly don't know anything about malevolence or psychopathology.
00:15:00.600
And then we could add another interesting detail to that, that I think lends credence to my
00:15:06.460
hypothesis, which is that it was very shortly after Beau Biden died.
00:15:12.500
So the golden boy disappeared from the scene and there was no one left but the bag man that
00:15:19.080
Hunter had an affair with his brother's widow, despite the fact that they both had children,
00:15:24.980
then enticed her into a addiction, then filmed them having sex, and then uploaded the video
00:15:38.500
Now, you see, both of those patterns of action are, you might regard as circumstantial evidence,
00:15:45.880
but there's strong circumstantial evidence pointing in the same direction, which was
00:15:52.940
And my reading is it's Hunter was taking his revenge, maybe with his entire style of life
00:15:59.080
on the enabling idiocy of his parents, something which they have yet again engaged in.
00:16:06.020
And now so all the many Democrats have come out and said, well, any father would have done
00:16:16.920
At some point, if you're dealing with not only someone who's addicted in a manner that's
00:16:23.840
tilting them very hard in at least quasi-criminal directions, so consorting with strippers and
00:16:29.700
hookers and so forth and spending way too much money in every possible mafia-like manner,
00:16:35.620
as well as tangling himself up, becoming tangled up in all sorts of nefarious and quasi-nefarious
00:16:44.720
Your obligation as a parent is to stop making excuses and put up some bloody boundaries.
00:16:55.620
The Democrats, who've come to his support, have come to his side, proclaiming his virtues
00:17:02.960
as a loving parent, have enabling and love seriously confused, which is actually a pathological
00:17:15.780
They do exactly the same thing with so-called trans children, confusing their empathy for those
00:17:22.180
children and the moral capital they can generate by proclaiming that empathy with care for those
00:17:29.560
children, which if actual care was being manifested, the care would be don't let 12 and 13 year olds make
00:17:38.140
decisions about their bodies, their sexual function, their reproductive capacity, and their long-term
00:17:46.820
marriage and partnership when they're too young to be legally allowed to make any important decisions
00:17:58.640
And it's precisely the kind of enabling that people do when they have no imagination whatsoever
00:18:07.820
And it's certainly the case that what Joe and Jill Biden manifested in the case of this
00:18:14.300
pardon was the continuance of a pattern of unforgivable enabling of their quite seriously
00:18:22.860
gone astray son, and they do treat him like a kid.
00:18:35.700
He passed the line from victim to perpetrator long ago.
00:18:40.880
Now, was he selectively and unfairly prosecuted?
00:18:46.380
The penalties, such as they were that were levied against Hunter, were not particularly egregious.
00:18:52.860
And he was found guilty in the course of a perfectly credible legal investigation, as
00:19:00.280
the people involved in the investigation have insisted in the aftermath of the pardon.
00:19:04.600
I don't think that he was selectively and unfairly prosecuted at all.
00:19:08.100
I think that Hunter and Joe, maybe the whole Biden family, were unfairly and selectively shielded
00:19:16.440
from prosecution despite the remarkable magnitude of their continued multi-decade transgressions.
00:19:23.520
And I would say the fact of this pardon, which is blanket, which covers crimes that may have
00:19:29.980
been committed and for an 11-year period, is very strong evidence in favor of that hypothesis.
00:19:37.760
So then there's some boilerplate excuses without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple
00:19:45.340
purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser.
00:19:49.380
People are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out
00:19:55.840
Yeah, that's minimization of the magnitude of offense of exactly the sort that you would expect
00:20:04.100
from precisely the sort of people who enable their children's pathological criminal behavior
00:20:13.420
Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, the thing about that is that
00:20:20.220
as far as I have been able to determine, Hunter was not in the throes of addiction when he was
00:20:29.660
And late only means that he decided to pay them after he got caught for not paying them.
00:20:36.060
Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently
00:20:41.620
with interest and penalties, let's note under duress, are typically given non-criminal resolutions.
00:20:48.140
It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.
00:20:53.640
And it's easy to make an argument as credible that Hunter was let off very lightly with nothing
00:21:00.200
more than a rap on the knuckles as it was that he was prosecuted meanly by people who
00:21:05.920
didn't understand the depth of Hunter's victimization and his heroic attempts to straighten
00:21:12.600
The charges in his cases came about only after several of my, that's Joe Biden's, political
00:21:19.440
opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.
00:21:26.320
I think that the charges in his case arose after the Biden laptop scandal emerged, after it was
00:21:35.460
attributed falsely by the FBI and 50 major members of the intelligence community, falsely attributed
00:21:44.060
and consciously so, knowing it wasn't false in a long-term campaign as Russian disinformation,
00:21:53.560
This was after the New York Post was kicked off Twitter for reporting what was strictly
00:21:59.800
the truth and after evidence had mounted substantively that Hunter was a distasteful character to say
00:22:09.940
the least and that there were all sorts of shady things going on on the Biden family front with
00:22:15.920
regards to the business dealings that Joe should have never allowed Hunter to be involved in, given Joe's
00:22:22.960
knowledge of his addictive propensity and his tilt towards at least quasi-criminal behavior.
00:22:33.420
And I would say that letting Hunter off the hook by saying that my poor son, who isn't poor and who's not really
00:22:41.180
even a son anymore in that he's not a child, he's an adult and should be treated as an equal, to
00:22:47.720
attribute that prosecution to the malign intent of Joe Biden's political opponents while refusing to
00:22:55.520
take any responsibility as a father for the behavior and the enabling of that behavior by his son points
00:23:04.980
to precisely the pathology in the Biden family that generated and abetted the misbehavior of Hunter in the first place.
00:23:14.940
Then a carefully negotiated plea deal agreed to by the Department of Justice unraveled in the courtroom.
00:23:26.460
With a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process,
00:23:32.140
had the plea deal held, which it didn't, by the way, and there's no evidence that there was any
00:23:37.140
impropriety in that, apart from the fact that it didn't turn out the way the Bidens would have wished it to,
00:23:42.660
it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter's cases.
00:23:45.860
Well, that isn't what the people who were involved concluded.
00:23:49.820
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter's cases can reach any other conclusion
00:23:54.000
than Hunter was signaled out only because he is my son.
00:23:57.400
Um, yeah, no, I mean, I don't see how any reasonable person could review the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop
00:24:09.760
and conclude anything other than, um, than that there was something seriously rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak.
00:24:19.320
I mean, that bloody laptop reads like a mafia crime movie.
00:24:24.260
It's really ugly, and it's ugly in a low-rent, pathetic, cringing, victim-claiming, despicable,
00:24:33.220
hooker-toying-with, cocaine-snorting sort of manner that has nothing whatsoever heroic about it
00:24:39.920
and nothing that speaks of anything approximating victimization.
00:24:45.280
So, I would say any reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter's cases
00:24:50.260
would reach the conclusion that there were plenty of reasons to single Hunter out.
00:24:57.080
And the fact that he was Biden's son mitigated strongly against the detrimental consequences
00:25:03.560
that he should have reasonably faced, not least on the reputational front.
00:25:08.060
The fact that the bloody story was suppressed and the New York Post seriously punished
00:25:13.320
for daring to put the facts forward, and then that it was blamed on the Russians,
00:25:19.020
um, means that it isn't reasonable people who look at the facts of Hunter's cases
00:25:23.540
and conclude that poor Hunter Biden, poor Hunter, poor Hunter Biden was signaled out
00:25:32.880
And then, here we get to the real meat of the matter,
00:25:35.480
as far as I'm concerned, from a psychological perspective.
00:25:38.380
When we think about wildly successful businesses,
00:25:42.880
we often focus on their great products, cool branding, and brilliant marketing.
00:25:47.060
But there's an unsung hero in their success stories,
00:25:49.820
the business behind the business that makes selling simple.
00:25:52.980
For millions of entrepreneurs, that business is Shopify.
00:25:56.040
Shopify is home to the number one checkout on the planet.
00:26:00.980
With ShopPay, they boost conversions up to 50%.
00:26:03.700
That means fewer abandoned carts and more completed sales.
00:26:06.820
Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise,
00:26:10.720
and we love how easy it is to add more items, shift products, and track conversions.
00:26:15.480
In today's market, growth-minded businesses need a commerce solution
00:26:18.680
that's just as flexible and dynamic as they are.
00:26:21.440
Whether your customers are browsing your website,
00:26:23.660
scrolling through social media, or wandering into your store,
00:26:30.620
Upgrade your business today and get the same checkout Daily Wire uses.
00:26:33.800
Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.
00:26:40.140
Go to shopify.com slash jbp today to upgrade your selling.
00:26:54.620
Well, first of all, I don't think anybody's particularly interested in breaking Hunter.
00:26:59.260
And if anybody has broken Hunter, it was Hunter, and it was his parents,
00:27:09.520
even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution.
00:27:15.740
Well, any person radically less heroic and admirable than Hunter
00:27:20.980
certainly would have succumbed to addiction and criminality of the most second-rate and low-rent type
00:27:30.540
because they were unrelentingly attacked and selectively prosecuted.
00:27:38.000
Hunter was doing pretty well, living the high life with millions of dollars
00:27:41.260
in high-flying apartments and hotel rooms for a very long period of time.
00:27:47.620
And as I said, he's not 16 or 18 or even 25 or even 30.
00:27:58.200
and he should be able to tolerate a little bit of unrelenting attack
00:28:01.980
and selective prosecution because that's part of life.
00:28:06.360
And so the idea that there has been some kind of conspiracy to break poor Hunter
00:28:13.660
who's been doing nothing but striving mightily to put his life together
00:28:17.920
in the face of insuperable obstacle is the kind of sob story
00:28:22.700
that the Democrats love to, what would you say, love to worship, let's say,
00:28:28.640
and that the Bidens have been making political capital of for decades.
00:28:33.560
And the thing that appalls me as a clinical psychologist is this is what they've done.
00:28:39.320
They have sacrificed their son to their own moral pretensions.
00:28:44.760
And now they've done it on a national scale and as publicly as possible.
00:28:49.720
I think that Joe Biden and Jill hurt their son more desperately with this latest knife in the heart
00:28:58.780
than they have with anything else they've done in their entire life.
00:29:04.740
If Joe loved his son, he would have shut the hell up about what happened to him on the legal front
00:29:14.920
And he would have stood by him and encouraged him when he was attempting to do the right thing
00:29:21.600
And he would have let him take his bloody medicine
00:29:23.920
because that's actually what you do with someone you love.
00:29:31.300
And the reason you don't is because you care for them and you care for who they should be.
00:29:36.940
And so this whole idea that any father would have done that?
00:29:43.940
No good father would have done what Joe did with Hunter.
00:29:53.300
I'm telling you, everything I know as a clinic psychologist tells me deeply,
00:30:01.040
that Joe did something last week to make his son hate him even more than he already does.
00:30:08.100
And all that's going on underneath the surface.
00:30:11.780
And it breaks out in Hunter's affair with his brother's widow.
00:30:16.840
And it breaks out in Hunter's release of the laptops just before his father's presidency.
00:30:23.280
And in all the misbehavior that Hunter has made manifest and documented and recorded and stored on his computer,
00:30:30.440
which is not what a wise person would do if they weren't trying to cause a lot of trouble for everyone around them
00:30:37.120
while they're engaging in their low-rent, quasi-criminal behavior.
00:30:42.540
In trying to break Hunter, more whining, more victim-claiming.
00:30:48.740
And if you can't see the pattern of Democrat policy in that, you're not looking.
00:30:53.180
In trying to break Hunter, they've tried to break me.
00:31:00.980
It's so self-serving and self-congratulatory and victim-proclaiming.
00:31:05.920
All with this insistence that underneath that, I'm bravely, what would you say?
00:31:12.240
I'm bravely striving forward along with my son, arm in arm in the face of these pathological attacks
00:31:18.040
on the integrity of our admittedly imperfect family.
00:31:28.180
But, you know, I think pity is the wrong emotion to feel with regard to Hunter because at some point
00:31:37.800
But I got to tell you, man, I thank God that I wasn't cursed with the kind of father that Hunter Biden was cursed with.
00:31:46.500
And there's no reason to believe it will stop here.
00:31:51.720
There is no reason to believe it will stop here because what you've done with your latest act is to continue the patterning of enabling
00:31:58.860
that has encouraged your son to make his most pathological side manifest for the last 30 years of his adult life.
00:32:07.420
And that won't stop because you didn't allow it to stop.
00:32:11.080
And not only that, you accrued moral capital as a father loving his son and therefore pardoning him.
00:32:18.620
You accrued moral capital to yourself, as you indicate in that last sentence, by the way,
00:32:23.560
in a manner that's extraordinarily destructive to your son.
00:32:27.600
You know, you think that pity is the right emotion for your intelligent and privileged 50-year-old son.
00:32:36.120
It would have been better if you would have punched him.
00:32:41.900
That would have been a much more compelling demonstration of love.
00:32:47.040
Yeah, well, that's what you should have bloody well said.
00:32:49.100
Instead of saying that to your son, you said it to the people who were holding him accountable for his actions because you wouldn't.
00:32:57.780
It should demolish whatever little reputation you have left as the leader of the United States because it's a hell of a note to go out on.
00:33:05.800
And for my entire career, I have followed a simple principle.
00:33:12.500
Like you said repeatedly, as did your press secretary, that you wouldn't pardon your son.
00:33:24.360
And you did pardon your son, and that's going to hurt your son.
00:33:30.440
And then, you know, the example that you're giving to the American people that, well, if you're a loving father, what you do is you violate the principles that should govern your conduct as the holder of the highest office in the land.
00:33:45.460
And you do that to pretend that you love your son while enabling his participation in an ever-ending sequence of self-destructive behaviors.
00:33:55.880
So you haven't followed a simple principle for your entire career, the simple principle of telling people the truth.
00:34:04.500
And you certainly haven't followed that principle with your son.
00:34:07.340
In fact, everything you've done with your son has encouraged the development of the worst in him.
00:34:12.740
And it's no wonder he released those laptops, because you probably deserved it.
00:34:24.480
The American people as a whole will be fair-minded.
00:34:27.460
But I don't think the conclusion they're going to draw, Mr. Biden, with all due respect, is that what you did was appropriate or loving.
00:34:41.900
You sacrificed your son to your own delusions of morality, and you've done that your whole life.
00:34:46.800
And you've done that in part to have a compelling story about the depth of your love that you could tell the American people and yourself.
00:35:04.180
I also believe raw politics has infected this process.
00:35:09.480
but not in the way that you're leading the American people to believe.
00:35:14.720
Yeah, many, but not the ones you're pointing to.
00:35:18.260
And once I had made this decision this weekend,
00:35:27.440
When you decide to go back against your word and to stab another knife into the heart of your son.
00:35:34.260
I hope Americans will understand why a father and a president would come to this decision.
00:35:40.980
but I don't think my understanding is the same as yours.
00:35:48.320
And as I said, man, I thank God I didn't have a father like you.