The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 09, 2024


A (Psychological) Reaction to the Biden Pardon


Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

146.04175

Word count

5,241

Sentence count

289

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

20

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:30.740 So, I thought I'd take a crack at assessing the psychological significance of Joe Biden's
00:00:36.820 pardon of his son, Hunter.
00:00:38.740 He said I'd abide by the jury decision, and I will do that, and I will not pardon him.
00:00:43.420 And have you ruled out a pardon for your son?
00:00:45.680 Yes.
00:00:46.340 Is there any possibility that the president would end up pardoning his son?
00:00:50.180 Our answer stands, which is no.
00:00:52.140 No.
00:00:52.720 It is a no, and I don't have anything else to add.
00:00:55.180 Will he pardon his son?
00:00:56.680 No.
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
00:01:29.740 were equally bad or worse.
00:01:31.800 It's the former one that particularly, I find particularly appalling and telling.
00:01:38.660 And so, I think I can explain why.
00:01:43.360 So, we're going to walk through the pardon, and then I'll make comments where I think that
00:01:48.140 would be helpful and appropriate.
00:01:50.360 Today, I signed a pardon for my son, Hunter.
00:01:54.320 Okay, well, there's obviously a problem there, because that's a conflict of interest that could
00:01:59.700 hardly be clearer.
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
00:02:19.680 decision-making.
00:02:20.720 That's half-truth at best.
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.
00:02:32.620 He said he would not pardon his son.
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
00:03:57.240 as I'm concerned, unforgivable.
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
00:04:08.320 and unfairly prosecuted.
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
00:05:03.140 are akin in many ways to Hunter.
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
00:05:17.360 insistence that criminals are victims.
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,
00:06:00.320 they use claims of victimhood to victimize.
00:06:03.480 That is what psychopaths do.
00:06:05.300 That is what narcissists do. 0.99
00:06:07.680 Every clinical psychologist worth his or her salt knows that.
00:06:10.700 Every criminologist 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
00:06:26.660 of the perpetrators.
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
00:06:45.580 for the criminal misbehavior of your children?
00:06:48.860 Well, you might say, well, everyone would make excuses for their son if he was engaging
00:06:56.220 in criminal conduct.
00:06:57.340 And the proper response to that is, that's a complete bloody lie. 0.91
00:07:02.020 And it's a deceptive and destructive lie.
00:07:05.300 Now, look, there are a subset of children who at the age of two are tilted in a criminal
00:07:13.260 direction.
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
00:07:31.640 or dependent personality disorder.
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
00:07:56.800 a sports situation.
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
00:08:23.280 for their aggression or enable it.
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
00:08:57.920 behavior.
00:08:58.640 And you often do that by careful punishment of various sorts, certainly not by reward.
00:09:05.340 You don't reward it.
00:09:06.540 You don't feel sorry for it.
00:09:07.980 You don't enable it.
00:09:09.000 You don't justify it.
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
00:10:05.160 a juvenile offense.
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.
00:10:22.280 He's 50.
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.
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00:12:06.820 Victim-producing addiction.
00:12:13.260 He's not a victim.
00:12:15.960 And addiction's no excuse for criminality.
00:12:19.580 And making excuses for your son.
00:12:24.060 I have watched my son being selectively and unfairly prosecuted.
00:12:28.940 Making excuses for your son.
00:12:30.860 When he's acting at 50, like a very badly behaved juvenile, isn't an indication of your admirable
00:12:43.140 empathy as a parent.
00:12:44.840 It's an indication of your codependency, to use a relatively cliched term, and your pattern
00:12:52.280 of pathological enabling of your son.
00:12:55.660 Now, here's a hypothesis.
00:12:57.240 And I'm not saying this is right.
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
00:13:10.260 things such as the presidency.
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. 0.96
00:13:23.460 And, you know, if you end up playing that role, it's like you're the criminal shadow of your 0.74
00:13:29.840 father.
00:13:31.180 If you end up playing that role, I'll tell you what that's going to do.
00:13:35.400 That's going to make you unbelievably angry.
00:13:38.400 It's going to produce a kind of hatred of your parents, however unconscious, that's deep
00:13:43.460 beyond belief.
00:13:44.140 And maybe that accounts for why Hunter dropped off three water-damaged laptops.
00:13:51.780 How do you water damage three 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
00:14:08.200 show was available for view on those laptops.
00:14:13.400 Now, you know, as a psychoanalytically minded psychologist, I can't help but see motivation
00:14:21.380 there.
00:14:21.840 There's a psychoanalytic dictum, which is if you don't understand the motivation, look
00:14:25.720 at the outcome.
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?
00:14:42.940 What was the motivation?
00:14:44.380 How about that?
00:14:45.880 OK, and you think, well, you know, Dr. Peterson, you're reading too much into it.
00:14:49.760 No one would possibly act like that.
00:14:51.420 And first of all, if you think no one would possibly act like that, you know nothing.
00:14:55.840 That's for sure.
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, 0.76
00:15:24.980 then enticed her into a addiction, then filmed them having sex, and then uploaded the video 0.75
00:15:34.500 to Hub with the title Lonely Widow.
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
00:15:49.820 revenge, revenge, revenge.
00:15:52.940 And my reading is it's Hunter was taking his revenge, maybe with his entire style of life 0.99
00:15:59.080 on the enabling idiocy of his parents, something which they have yet again engaged in. 0.98
00:16:06.020 And now so all the many Democrats have come out and said, well, any father would have done 1.00
00:16:11.860 what Joe did.
00:16:13.240 And that's not true.
00:16:14.940 It's simply not true.
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, 1.00
00:16:35.620 as well as tangling himself up, becoming tangled up in all sorts of nefarious and quasi-nefarious
00:16:43.720 business affairs.
00:16:44.720 Your obligation as a parent is to stop making excuses and put up some bloody boundaries.
00:16:52.620 And yet again, Joe failed in that.
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
00:17:11.240 element of the Democrat political platform.
00:17:15.780 They do exactly the same thing with so-called trans children, confusing their empathy for those 0.99
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 0.55
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
00:17:53.260 whatsoever.
00:17:53.940 That's not love.
00:17:55.140 It's not empathy.
00:17:56.060 It's not admirable.
00:17:56.900 It's enabling.
00:17:58.640 And it's precisely the kind of enabling that people do when they have no imagination whatsoever
00:18:03.820 for evil. 1.00
00:18:04.940 And that means that they're naive cowards. 0.97
00:18:07.820 And it's certainly the case that what Joe and Jill Biden manifested in the case of this 0.95
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.
00:18:29.100 He's not a kid.
00:18:30.340 He's a 50-year-old man.
00:18:32.540 And what he does is not excusable.
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?
00:18:43.900 Yeah, I don't think so.
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
00:19:55.080 a gun form.
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
00:20:10.520 while claiming to be moral while doing so.
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
00:20:27.500 late paying his taxes.
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.
00:20:51.300 Yeah, it's not so clear.
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
00:21:11.820 himself out.
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.
00:21:23.900 Yeah, no, I don't think so.
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,
00:21:52.000 even though that was a complete lie.
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.
00:22:29.440 So no, that doesn't fly either.
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.
00:23:21.720 Yeah, well, that's lie.
00:23:23.460 That's lie by omission of detail, I would say.
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. 0.98
00:24:24.260 It's really ugly, and it's ugly in a low-rent, pathetic, cringing, victim-claiming, despicable, 0.99
00:24:33.220 hooker-toying-with, cocaine-snorting sort of manner that has nothing whatsoever heroic about it 0.99
00:24:39.920 and nothing that speaks of anything approximating victimization.
00:24:44.100 Quite the contrary.
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
00:25:29.520 because he was Joe Biden's son.
00:25:31.800 Yeah, no.
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.
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00:26:49.080 There has been an effort to break Hunter.
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,
00:27:06.620 who has been five and a half years sober,
00:27:09.520 even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution.
00:27:13.820 Well, what's the subtext there?
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.
00:27:36.920 I don't know.
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.
00:27:54.380 He's actually a relatively old man, you know,
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.
00:29:03.100 And that's really saying something.
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
00:29:12.440 and he would have let him take his medicine.
00:29:14.920 And he would have stood by him and encouraged him when he was attempting to do the right thing
00:29:20.080 in the midst of his despair.
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. 0.98
00:29:27.380 You don't make pathetic excuses for them.
00:29:31.300 And the reason you don't is because you care for them and you care for who they should be. 0.77
00:29:36.940 And so this whole idea that any father would have done that?
00:29:41.740 Nope.
00:29:42.620 Wrong.
00:29:43.940 No good father would have done what Joe did with Hunter.
00:29:47.340 And certainly not this final travesty.
00:29:53.300 I'm telling you, everything I know as a clinic psychologist tells me deeply,
00:29:59.200 this is why I'm making this video,
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.
00:30:57.640 God, what a way to end the pardon. 0.99
00:30:59.980 That's so pathetic. 0.99
00:31:00.980 It's so self-serving and self-congratulatory and victim-proclaiming. 0.99
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.
00:31:24.720 Yeah, no, no, absolutely not.
00:31:28.180 But, you know, I think pity is the wrong emotion to feel with regard to Hunter because at some point
00:31:33.580 you cross the line from victim to perpetrator.
00:31:36.340 He crossed that long ago.
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.
00:31:45.140 How does he conclude?
00:31:46.500 And there's no reason to believe it will stop here.
00:31:49.200 That's true, Joe.
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. 0.51
00:32:36.120 It would have been better if you would have punched him.
00:32:39.380 It would have been better, you know.
00:32:41.900 That would have been a much more compelling demonstration of love.
00:32:46.120 Enough is enough.
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.
00:33:09.320 Just tell the American people the truth.
00:33:11.380 Yeah, right.
00:33:12.500 Like you said repeatedly, as did your press secretary, that you wouldn't pardon your son.
00:33:19.880 And so that was a lie.
00:33:24.360 And you did pardon your son, and that's going to hurt your son.
00:33:28.220 And that's the unforgivable part of that.
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.
00:34:19.800 They'll be fair-minded.
00:34:21.080 I think that's true in all things considered.
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.
00:34:36.700 It was neither appropriate nor loving.
00:34:39.400 It was unbelievably self-serving.
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.
00:34:53.440 It's quite sickening to be blunt.
00:34:56.560 Here's the truth.
00:34:57.460 I believe in the justice system.
00:34:59.460 Yeah, do you?
00:35:00.800 But as I have wrestled with this,
00:35:02.860 yeah, have you?
00:35:04.180 I also believe raw politics has infected this process.
00:35:08.020 Yeah, that's certainly the case,
00:35:09.480 but not in the way that you're leading the American people to believe.
00:35:12.520 And it led to a miscarriage of justice.
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,
00:35:21.340 there was no sense in delaying it further.
00:35:23.840 Yeah, I know.
00:35:25.060 You're just as decisive as hell, aren't you? 0.99
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.
00:35:38.740 Yeah, well, I think I understand it,
00:35:40.980 but I don't think my understanding is the same as yours.
00:35:44.600 So shame on you, Mr. Biden.
00:35:47.920 Seriously.
00:35:48.320 And as I said, man, I thank God I didn't have a father like you.