The Coke-In-The-White-House Story Fleshes Out

As you might expect, the story of where the cocaine was found in or near the White House has been morphing with each new report. Via CBS News, this seems to be the latest reliable veresion:

The substance was found in a common area of the West Wing, which houses the Oval Office and offices of some of the president's top aides and support staff. A senior law enforcement official told CBS News the substance was found in a storage facility in a cubby routinely used by White House staff and guests to store cell phones.

The Secret Service will lead a full review of how the substance got into the West Wing, the law enforcement officials told CBS News, including examining consulting cameras and entrance logs to determine who had access to the space.

I looked up "cubby" and find that Merriam-Webster defines it as "a small, snug place (as for hiding or storage) : cubbyhole." A web search gave the image above. The tweet below from James Rosen gives a little bit more detail:

BREAKING: Multiple officials at @USSecretService tell @NEWSMAX that contrary to more recent published reports, the cocaine was found “in a work area in the West Wing,” not in the @WhiteHouse library—and that the cocaine was “in a baggie” when discovered, not loose or concealed.

— James Rosen (@JamesRosenTV) July 4, 2023

This story at Hot Air draws reasonable inferences:

The drugs must have been brought there quite recently. After all, if they were located in a “cubby” where people drop their phones and other electronic devices before going in to see the President, how long could a clear baggy of an unknown white powdery substance remain there without being noticed?

. . . Even if we assume that it wasn’t Hunter Biden, who else brings a bag of cocaine to (presumably) see the President? You’d have to be pretty seriously hooked on the drugs to be unable to leave them in the car until your meeting was finished. Also, a plastic baggie of coke wouldn’t be picked up by a metal detector. If you had carried them undetected all the way to the Oval Office working area, why would you then take them out of your pocket and drop them off with your cell phone?

By the way, this is an example of how awful the copy editing at Conservative Inc is -- within two paragraphs, they spell it "baggy" and "baggie". These people are paid to do this. It resumes,

. . . This doesn’t sound like any sort of sinister plot or drug smuggling operation. It sounds like a boneheaded maneuver by an idiot. Perhaps someone whose brain is a bit addled by their crack addiction?

Just for fun, I looked up the penalty for cocaine possession on federal property, which would include the White House. For a first offense involving any amount:

Not less than 5 yrs, and not more than 40 yrs. If death or serious injury, not less than 20 or more than life. Fine of not more than $2 million if an individual, $5 million if not an individual,

I agree with the various writers who've surmised that the cubby area must be checked pretty frequently. The current stories say the baggie was discovered by Secret Service uniformed officers Sunday evening as part of a routine sweep. According to the New York Post,

White House pool reporters spotted the 53-year-old first son on Friday [June 30] climbing into the presidential SUV as it departed the White House enroute to Fort McNair, where the presidential travel party will helicopter over to Camp David in Maryland.

According to Newsweek,

Hunter Biden, his wife, and son Beau, returned to Washington, D.C. on Tuesday [July 4], along with the president and first lady Jill Biden.

It seems likely that few people would have been in the West Wing holding area between the Bidens' departure for Camp David on Friday and the discovery of the baggie Sunday evening, so that camera footage and visitor logs should be fairly easy to review.

But even if the culprit wasn't Hunter, that doesn't make the problem go away. The act of carrying the cocaine onto federal property carries a penalty of five years in prison, no matter who did it, and bringing it into the White House can't easily be finessed. In addition, if the individual involved was a federal employee, that person would probably have had a security clearance, and the drug episode would simply cancel that security clearance. If it were a Biden aide, that would also be big news.

Legacy media is now on the story, the long weekend is over, and I have a feeling this won't go away.

UPDATE: Matt Wallace, who as far as I can tell normally tweets on subjects like crypto currency and Elon Musk, was quoted by the UK Daily Mail as tweeting this:

The Cocaine found at the White House is not from Hunter Biden. The real story is actually much worse than that! Many of Joe Biden’s Top Staff regularly use Cocaine and other Hardcore Drugs. The cleaning crews are tasked with hiding all traces but this weekend was especially bad! pic.twitter.com/Wd3HHwzdY7

— Matt Wallace (@MattWallace888) July 4, 2023

For what it's worth.

Bag Of Coke Discovered On White House Grounds

The bare bones are as follows:

An 'unknown item' was found near the White House in Washington D.C. Roads surrounding the area were briefly closed as a precautionary measure.

. . . The DC Fire Department's Hazmat team responded and the White House grounds were evacuated as a precaution, the Secret Service spokesman Anthony Gugliemi added. DC Fire and EMS was contacted to evaluate, USSS said.

. . . DC Fire Hazmat officials report that they have found a substance that tests positive for Cocaine Hydrochloride, a highly addictive and illegal drug. The event has caused people to wonder how a possibly harmful material got onto the grounds of the White House and whether it was done on purpose to damage or intimidate the president or his team.

. . . The Secret Service announced that it was looking into the event and collaborating with other law enforcement organizations to ascertain the object's origin and nature.

. . . Hazmat teams were reportedly seen entering the White House's West Wing, which houses the president's office and residence, according to an eyewitnesses. It is unknown if the president was informed of the occurrence or was present when it occurred in the building. With numerous layers of security and screening, the West Wing is one of the most secure parts of the White House.

Initial reports described the discovery as "at the White House", but later ones, like the one above, said it was "near the White House", but apparently near enough that hazmat teams were seen entering the West Wing. The original statement from the Secret Service said,

"U.S. Secret Service Uniform Division Officers located an unknown item on the White House complex," a USSS spokesperson told Fox News Digital.

The job of the Uniform Division is to protect the White House facilities, as opposed to the special agents, who protect the president, vice president, and their families. Legacy media, insofar as it covered the incident, tried to display confusion about just what "cocaine hydrochloride" is, tentatively suggesting it was some sort of nasal anesthetic. They got the nose part right, anyhow.

Those who watch On Patrol: Live or programs about customs and border enforcement know that when officers discover packets of unkown white powder, they immmediately apply field tests, and the typical positive return is specified as "cocaine hydrochloride", or just garden variety coke, nose candy.

This is almost certainly what took place early in last evening's process. I'm not sure why they called a hazmat team at all; certainly this isn't what the officers on On Patrol: Live do. If they find it in someone's pocket or in his car, they simply test the powder, note the result, read him his rights, and take him downtown, no shilly-shallying about in hazmat suits.

What we can reasonably surmise is that this was cocaine, it was enough to be noticed, and it was close enough to the West Wing and the residence to cause a flurry of activity. What we don't know is how it got there, except that tourists and other random people off the street don't get that close.

The Secret Service is "looking into the event", which suggests to me that we won't hear anything more about it. As of last week, reports were

President Joe Biden had made it clear to aides that he doesn't want to hear that he should keep son Hunter away amid the first son's ongoing legal drama.

. . . Biden is keeping Hunter close because he fears that the former crack cocaine addict could relapse amid the public scrutiny, sources told the network.

The pattern I've been seeing over the past year suggests to me that Hunter has long since relapsed, if he was ever off the stuff for very long. My surmise is that Hunter was able to circumvent his Secret Service minders at the Malibu compound, and it's likely that he hasn't been there much over the past year, while at the same time, it's hard for me not to think he and his wife Melissa have been living separate lives, also potentially due to Hunter's habit. Fox News reported last week,

[A] Fox News Digital review found that the visitor logs from the beginning of the Biden administration through February 2023 have not included any of Hunter Biden’s White House visits or extended stays.

Fox News Digital reviewed several articles to piece together Hunter Biden’s whereabouts during his dad’s administration and found that he has visited the White House over a dozen times through February 2023, the month accounted for in the most recent batch of visitor logs released last month.

A majority of the White House visits that Fox News Digital found were from 2022, which include the annual egg roll, Medal of Freedom ceremony, France State Dinner on the South Lawn, Christmas tree lighting, his daughter’s wedding, among others. However, they are all absent from the visitor logs, including what appear to be extended stays at the White House.

I would think that if Hunter is continuing his drug use, Joe has only two options. If he lets Hunter revert to his pre-2020 lifestyle of fast cars, hotels, hookers, and luxury rehab, that scandal will reemerge sooner rather than later, and it's entirely possible that Hunter's Secret Service minders in Malibu were reporting this could become a problem. If Joe keeps Hunter on a much shorter leash at the White House, this could potentially minimize the likelihood of problems like guns in the dumpster, lost laptops, wrecked rental cars, and the like -- but it doesn't completely eliminate exposure. Thus we'll still get the occasional lost bag of coke.

Both the Secret Service and the White House domestic staff have long traditions of absolute confidentiality over the presidential family's private affairs. I've got to assume, though, that Hunter is Hunter, and ash trays with crack pipes and other paraphernalia are routinely found there, along with heaven knows what else -- and both the Secret Service and the domestic staff are expected to clean up after him and keep it quiet. Did someone finally get fed up, maybe conveniently forget to pick up what Hunter had just dropped, and somehow arrange things so the bag of coke would somehow just randomly get found?

And this leaves aside the intricate question of coabuse and Joe's role in the whole situation.

The Sparkle Creed

A small data point caught my eye last week: A viral video of a pastor at Edina Community Lutheran Church in Minneapolis reciting the Sparkle Creed has left netizens enraged. In part, this was because as a dedicated Fringe fan, the only other place named Edina I'm aware of appeared in Season 2, Episode 11 of that marvelous show, which starred, among others, the late Lance Reddick.

The original title of the episode was to have been "Edina City Limits", and it took place in the fictitious town of Edina, NY, which was home to a phenomenon called "the Edina hum". According to the Wikipedia link, the hum was the result of an experiment

done by the army in the late 1970s to test how electromagnetic pulses can camouflage soldiers and was conducted on the townspeople; the army was unaware of the long-term effects of the study until it was too late, and the people were stuck in a deformed state. The "hum" hides their deformities from the human eye through a massive electromagnetic pulse that runs through the town, and once they leave and are out of the pulse's reach, their true deformities show.

Thus does life imitate art. The deformed people at Edina Community Church recite the Sparkle Creed, which apparently seems normal to them, but reveals their deformity to those outside, or something like that. But the Sparkle Creed has some bearing on the 303 Creative LLC v. Eleni case on which the US Supreme Court ruled Friday, when it held that a Christian website designer couldn't be complelled to make wedding websites for same-sex couples.

And this in turn reflects the trend of same-sex affirmation: a movement that began in a spirit of live-and-let-live in the 1960s attempted to hitchhike on the natural-law foundation of civil rights for the descendants of African slaves, but it has always faced the contradiction that same-sex conduct is against natural law. In spite of that -- or I would suggest, actually because of that -- same-sex affirmation has always needed to move into prescriptive territory. It can never be live-and-let-live, because it involves conscience, which derives from natural law. This requires an "Edina hum" to distract attention from the problem.

It isn't enough that citizens tolerate same-sex attraction or discount it as a factor in, say, hiring decisions. Instead, citizens must positively endorse it, for instance by sponsoring drag queen story hours at local libraries, or include positive portrayals in grade school curricula. That a main line Protestant denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, should add a creed endorsing same-sex lifestyles to its liturgy is simpy a reflection of this trend. The Edina Lutheran Community Church

is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and has been a part of the denomination’s Reconciling in Christ initiative, which seeks to foster “the full welcome, inclusion, and equity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual/aromantic (LGBTQIA+) Lutherans,” since 1985.

According to the link, "The “Sparkle Creed” was originally penned in 2021 by Rev. Rachel Small Stokes, pastor of Immanuel United Church of Christ in Louisville, Kentucky." The UCC is another main line Protestant denomination. Oddly, I can't find any reference to the Sparkle Creed on the web from Episcopalian parishes or clergy, even though The Episcopal Church is thought to be the most same-sex-accepting. Certainly inserting the "Sparkle Creed" into the Eucharistic rites in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer could cause complaints to the local bishop, but it's likely there would be no repercussions.

And it's worth pointing out that various observers have called the Sparkle Creed "heretical", but the formal definition of heresy is "theological doctrine or system rejected as false by ecclesiastical authority". Martin Luther was a heretic insofar as he specifically opposed Catholic dogma, was recognized as opposing same by the Church, was offered the opportunity to recant, and rejected the opportnity. Anything short of that isn't "heresy", and here, Protestants are basically out of luck, especially since the early 1900s.

Any structures by which main line Protestant denominations can escalate heterodox practices like inserting the Sparkle Creed into the liturgy toward formal disciplinary proceedings have simply fallen into desuetude, and they would generate controversies that those denominations would prefer to avoid.

The problem that remains is the question of authentic Christianity as a credal religion. The Nicene Creed, for instance, has nothing to say about same-sex attraction or AIDS quilts. On the other hand, it does say, "I believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible," which carries a strong connotation of natural law, which in turn is elaborated in the Ten Commandments, which in turn in the case of Roman Catholicism are elaborated in the John Paul II Catechism, which does define same-sex attraction as objectively disordered.

But this brings me to the central problem of same-sex affirmation that I've elaborated above: in asserting things like "trans rights are human rights", it masquerades same-sex affirmation as a narural-law issue equivalent to civil rights, when both same-sex attraction and transsexualism are against natural law.

But we have an additional problem, as St John Henry Newman pointed out, that God created humans with a conscience, a natural faculty that works from natural law. Not only can you not get around natural law, but conscience won't let you do it -- or more accurately, conscience will give you a hard time if you try. And I think the whole purpose of same-sex affirmation as we've come to experience it has been an attempt to discount or somehow erase conscience as a factor, because I think what happens with the same-sex lifestyle is that it troubles the conscience.

The Sparkle Creed is an effort to distance religious observance from conscience by inserting syncretistic elements that somehow transfer divine authority to same-sex conduct. I don't think this will work any better than efforts, for instance with COVID lockdown restrictions, to abolish religion entirely. It isn't, strictly speaking, "heretical", especially because the most visible Protestant denominations won't impose formal discipline over its use. But it's here and it's queer. We should at least recognize it for what it is.

The Bidens, The Ivies, And The Chosen

This piece at the Washington Free Beacon outlines Joe's and Hunter's efforts to get Hunter's underperforming daughter Maisy (shown with Joe in the photo above) into the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania:

Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, show how Joe and Hunter Biden worked behind the scenes to get a subpar family member into one of the most selective schools in the country.

"I applied early decision to Penn today!!" Maisy Biden texted Hunter Biden on October 31.

Just two days later, Maisy asked her father for an update on her application. In the coming months, Hunter and Joe Biden would mount a full-court press on university administrators to get Maisy's application over the finish line. The Bidens took their case directly to the top: University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann.

On December 13, 2018, the elder Biden texted Hunter that he was "going to try to see [University of Pennsylvania] Pres GUTMANN tomorrow." Two days later, Joe Biden told Hunter Biden that he "had a great talk with Guttman [sic]."

It's worth noting that in 2018, Joe was out of office, while in October of that year, as Maisy sent her application to Penn, Hunter, well into his four-year crack-and-hooker binge, was in the middle of the gun-in-the-dumpster incident with Hallie in Wilmington. By December, Joe and Hunter were working hard with President Gutmann, and Hunter had an inspiration:

Hunter also suggested that Maisy could see her chances improve if she expressed interest in playing lacrosse at Penn. Although it's unclear whether the lacrosse tip was from Joe Biden's conversations with the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Hunter was peeved that the counsel came so late.

This reflects Jerome Karabel's insight into the position of recruited athletes in Ivy admissions in The Chosen, as well as his remarks about them in the Slate piece I linked yesterday where he noted of Harvard,

Even more striking is the extraordinary preference granted to recruited athletes; 79.5 percent of such applicants with a mediocre academic rating of 4 (on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 highest) were admitted, compared to an admissions rate for non-athletes with the same academic rating of less than 1 in 6,000.

It looks as though Penn has a similar policy. The 2019 Varsity Blues scandal suggests that getting an applicant designated a recruited athlete, even if the applicant doesn't even play the sport, is a common admissions dodge:

Thirty-three parents of college applicants were accused of paying more than $25 million between 2011 and 2018 to William Rick Singer, organizer of the scheme[.]

. . . Singer primarily used two fraudulent techniques to help clients' children gain admission to elite universities: cheating on college entrance exams and fabrication of elite sports credentials.

. . . Singer also bribed college athletics staff and coaches. At certain colleges, these personnel can submit a certain number of sports recruit names to the admissions office, which then views those applications more favorably.

. . . In one of the most notable cases, actress Lori Loughlin, famous for her role on the American sitcom Full House and the drama When Calls the Heart, and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli of Mossimo fashion, allegedly paid $500,000 in bribes to arrange to have their two daughters accepted into USC as members of the rowing team, although neither girl had participated in the sport.

As I've noted here before, the problem with the Varsity Blues scandal was not that applicants could use their putative status as "recruited athletes" to bypass the admission process, but it was simply that bribes were paid to the wrong people to accomplish this. It was perfectly legal for Joe Biden to twist President Gutmann's arm to do precisely what Lori Laughlin did -- the only difference was that Joe didn't bribe anyone to do it.

Joe was present at Maisy's graduation from Penn just this past May. I noted yesterday that it will be far more problematic to eliminate this type of privilege in elite-school admissions for the wealthy and powerful than it was to eliminate affirmative action.

As Long As We're On Legacies

There's been a lot of commentary on yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and the University of North Carolina cases. Just last Tuesday, I posted on the question of legacies, admissions policies that privilege offspring of alumni, in the makeup of Ivy League student bodies and their consequent impact on the US upper class. This is something of a mirror-image view of the affirmative action problem the court addressed, and it was discussed to some extent in the reporting. According to the New York Post,

At Harvard, applicants are initially scrutinized by a “first reader,” who gives the prospective student a numerical score in six categories: academic, extracurricular, athletic, school support, personal, and “overall”, taking race into account for the final number.

But the final decision doesn't really reflect all those criteria:

During a final winnowing process, four factors are considered: “legacy status, recruited athlete status, financial aid eligibility, and race,” with the last factor being “‘a determinative tip for'” a significant percentage ‘of all admitted African American and Hispanic applicants,'” according to the court.

So of the four final criteria, legacy status and recruited athlete status make up two of the four, or half. As I pointed out on Tuesday, recruited athlete status privileges prep school applicants, since athletes are recruited for sports like lacrosse, rugby, golf, and rowing that often aren't available in public school athletic programs. (By the same token, the Ivies don't award athletic scholarships, so that top athletes in public-school sports like football and basketball will go to non-Ivy schools that will give them athletic scholarships and make them desirable to pro teams as a matter of course.) Although the court focused on the presence of race as a final determining factor in admission, legacy status, plus the upper-class bias in athletic recruitment, were mentioned only in passing.

In other words, per the decision, elite universities focus wrongly on race as an admissions criterion, but so far, it's still OK for the schools to privilege applicants with certified class identifiers, such as coming from a family of Ivy alumni or attending a prep school where they develop athletic prowess in upper-class sports.

Tuesday I cited Jerome Karabel's The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. As I noted then, Karabel covered the exclusionary policies in Ivy admissions in great detail, and he's heavily influenced my own view, except that his argument is that the Ivies are entitled to do this, and if they now choose to weight race as a major criterion, so much the better. Karabel commented on the case at Slate last November:

[T]he plaintiffs called for the total elimination of race-sensitive admissions. Their argument in these cases was not the traditional one that affirmative action discriminates against whites, but rather that it discriminates against Asians. One central argument that came up again and again in oral arguments is that just as Harvard imposed quotas in the 1920 to limit the number of academically talented Jewish students, it is now imposing quotas to limit the number of academically talented Asian American students.

. . . The claim that Harvard has imposed a secret “quota,” though, is at the center of the SFFA’s portrayal of Asian Americans as the “New Jews.” But the claim of a quota is not supported by the facts; the proportion of Asian American freshman at Harvard has risen gradually from 3.6 percent in 1976 to 10.8 percent in 1985, to 17.9 percent in 2010, to 27.8 percent in 2022. The contrast with Jewish quotas could not be more stark; at Harvard, Jewish enrollment, which had surpassed one-quarter of the freshman class in 1925, quickly plummeted to 15 percent with the imposition of the quota[.]

Nevertheless, after hundreds of words, Karabel finally acknowledges the real problem:

It has long been known, for example, that Harvard gives preference to the children of alumni (known as “legacies”); what was not known, however, was that they are admitted at a rate of 33 percent, compared to 5 percent for non-legacy applicants, and still comprise 14–15 percent of the freshman class. Even more striking is the extraordinary preference granted to recruited athletes; 79.5 percent of such applicants with a mediocre academic rating of 4 (on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 highest) were admitted, compared to an admissions rate for non-athletes with the same academic rating of less than 1 in 6,000.

In other words, the problem isn't so much that Harvard isn't currently discriminating against Asians quite as much as it used to discriminate against Jews, the problem is that there are basically two privileged groups, the upper class and certain designated racial minorities, that between them make up a significant proportion of admitted applicants. The rest, which we might call "walk ons" that are unable to claim either privilege, are squeezed between the privileged groups.

As a practical matter, the court in its Harvard and UNC decision has taken away the current justification for one of the two privileged groups, the members of designated privileged races. Certainly self-described spokespeople for the privileged racial groups are complaining, and they're likely to continue to press the Ivies and others to maintain or increase their numbers. But if the ivies do that, how can they now satisfy the Asians and other walk-ons who are demanding consideration? (It's worth pointing out, by the way, that "Asians" are a catchall term for people of Indian, Vietnamese, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and a wide range of other heritage.)

Well, for one thing, there are the legacies. Karabel himself says,

[S]ome of the admissions practices of Harvard and similar institutions, including the preference given to the children of donors—witness the case of Jared Kushner—need to change. Some of these changes, such as the abolition of legacy preferences and the reduction of the remarkable weight given to recruited athletes, would almost certainly redound to the benefit of Asian Americans.

A question I still have is how the legacy preference arose in the first place. This isn't much discussed. My reading over several decades suggests this was part of a more or less tacit deal the Ivies made with wealthy alumni donors beginning in the 1930s as applications to elite schools increased, and the schools felt a need to restrict admissions to students who could perform the work best -- but to satisfy the alumni, they quietly agreed to reserve a significant number of slots for their own offspring irrespective of their competitive standing.

Even now, limiting the numbers of these slots would cause alumni dissent far greater than the abortive alumni trustee movement of the early 2000s. I may discuss this further.

Where's Melissa?

People have been commenting on the photos of Hunter boarding Marine One on the way to Camp David with his dad or at the state dinner with Prime Minister Moti, which are taken as a tacit signal that Hunter has been fully rehabilitated following his guilty pleas to various misdemeanors and settlemenmt of his child support case with Lunden Roberts. The question I have, though, is if this is meant to show that things are back to normal with the First Crackhead, where are the First Crackhead's wife and three-year-old son? They were notably absent from the past week's events, as far as I can tell.

The most recent sighting I've beem able to find is in the UK Daily Mail from May 11, where they were in LA together:

The president's son had his little boy in his arms and his wife Melissa Cohen trailing close behind as he left the children's playground and got into a black Suburban under the supervision of security personnel.

But every indication has been that Hunter's been in Washington and not LA, possibly living in the White House, during the past several weeks as he's dealt with his tax case in Delaware, and reports have also indicated that Kevin Morris flew him back and forth to Arkansas from Washington to deal with the child support case in his corporate jet. Are Hunter and Melissa basically living separate lives?

This brings me to the question of Hunter's current lifestyle. Under the plea deal,

the president’s son would plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay income taxes, and the government would recommend a sentence of probation. He also would be permitted to enter a pretrial diversion program for a serious gun charge, which would be dismissed if he successfully completes the program.

As far as I can tell, pretrial diversion programs, especially if they involve drug offenses (Hunter's violation was lying on a gun form that he wasn't addicted to a drug) require drug testing, although under federal rules, each US Attorney develops policies for his district. By his own admission, Hunter is an addict, and under normal circumstances, he should be subject to drug testing as part of his diversion program. This almost certainly will be waived as yet another feature of his deal.

Indeed, if Hunter is still using drugs, this would be a problem for LA child protection authorities if Hunter were in the household and using drugs.

But this raises the question of Hunter's past performance when he's been close to Joe. The most recent pair of text mssage revelations involve two instances while he was in Delaware in the summer of 2017. On July 30, he sent sent a WhatsApp message demanding payment from a Chinese businessman while he was "sitting with his father". On August 3, he asked a second Chinese associate, Gongwen “Kevin” Dong, for $10 million in another WhatsApp text, noting the Biden family is best at “doing exactly what the chairman wants.”

While the Biden defense so far against these imputations, insofar as there is one, claims that Hunter might not have been literally sitting in the same room with Joe, and indeed Joe was unaware of what Hunter was doing in his name, this raises at best another question: Hunter's four-year crack-and-hooker binge, which began with his brother beau's death in May 2015, was well under way by the summer of 2017. Whatever the specifics of Hunter's claim literally to be sitting with Joe, photographic evidence places him at the Biden family compound in Delaware at the time these messages were sent.

Among other things, this raises for me the question of how Hunter was getting drugs into the Biden compound during these and other periods, and how he was satisfying his extreme sexual needs while in the family residences. In part, he was continuing his affairs with Hallie and her sister, but these were by no means exclusive, and his affair with Lunden Roberts, a Washington, DC stripper, appears to have begun during late 2017 as well.

It's hard to avoid thinking Joe was at least aware of these issues while he and Hunter were working closely on their business deals and also, at least in part, living in close proximity. But now we have a situation with Hunter rehabilitated, at least in Joe's mind, apparently now often in the White House, and closeted with Joe at Camp David as well -- with Melissa nowhwere to be seen. What, if anything, has changed between the summer of 2017 and the new, rehabilitated, presumably clean, presumably sober, presumably chaste family-man Hunter of 2023? And where's Melissa if things are so great?

I can't help but think there's always beeN a strange pattern of codependency between Joe and Hunter, revealed in periodic messages that show up on the laptop where Joe pleads, "I love you. I need you". The question is how long this can be covered up. Hunter is an addict. His relationship with his father seems to have this factor baked in, and I see no reason for Hunter to change a thing, at least as long as Joe can keep covering for him.

The Poll On Post-COVID Church Attendance

There's been a small stir this week over a new Gallup poll that says church attendance in the United States is lower than it was before the COVID lockdowns. On one hand, this shouldn't be a surprise, as stories have already covered this without the need for Gallup to ask about it again. A Pew Research poll just this past March reported:

There are some indications that in-person engagement in religious services has declined slightly since 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak. The share of all U.S. adults who say they typically attend religious services at least once a month is down modestly but measurably (by 3 percentage points, from 33% to 30%) over that span, and one-in-five Americans say they now attend in person less often than they did before the pandemic.

The Gallup results aren't much different, so I'm not sure why anyone bothered. Per the first link,

In the Gallup survey, 31 percent of respondents said they have attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days.

In Gallup polls conducted from 2020 to the most recent poll — gathered May 1-24, 2023 — an average of 30 percent of respondents said they attended services in the past week.

This data represents a modest decline of an average of 4 points since the four years before the pandemic, when an average of 34 percent of respondents said they attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days.

Neither poll strikes me as meaningful. I could run a survey that asks people if they've flossed their teeth in the past week, and some would probably say they had just to look good to the pollster -- and by the same token, some might say they've been to church when they hadn't for the same reason -- except that these days, there's a growing number of people who'll say they didn't go to church when they did, because they're more and more suspicious of the hidden state devices the pollster potentially represents.

So The Hill, reporting on the Gallup results, quotes Gallup:

“It is not clear if the pandemic is the cause of the reduced attendance or if the decline is a continuation of trends that were already in motion. However, the temporary closure of churches and ongoing COVID-19 avoidance activities did get many Americans out of the habit of attending religious services weekly,” the Gallup survey found.

I had a gut feeling from the start of the lockdowns that they were aimed in considerable part at shutting down churches, or maybe more accurately, putting a coup de grace to something that creeping secularism had already set in a terminal decline. Discussions of the lockdowns' impact certainly include the parishes that were forced to shut down permanently when they lost the revenue from in-person offerings at services.

And it's worth pointing out that the Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trusts, the philanthropic arm of the Pew family, who made their money from Sun Oil and who, like other uber-wealthy families, are preoccupied mainly with playing life's video game with an invincibility cheat code. In this, they shape the views of legacy media and prosper the operations of state security. On the whole, they would prefer that religious observance fade from the scene, and it's mildly encouraging that their research into the result of the state's effort to stamp it out once and for all was equivocal at best.

One big defect in the polls' methodology is the imprecision of their premise. They're trying to measure "religious observance" or "church attendance" while asking respondents to self-report on whether they've done something good or bad, and this is under conditions where at least some respondents will have come to be reluctant to tell a perceived proxy for state security that they've in fact been to church.

And the polls leave out important context. The lawsuits against California and New York lockdowns that were brought by Catholics, ultra-orthodox Jews, and Pentecostals in 2020 were the first major blows to the COVID lockdown regime. In other words, religious institutions, especially of the more observant type, fought back, and they fought back successfully.

In addition, the post-COVID emergence of the anti-trans movement is based almost entirely on natural law, which is to say natural religion. Insofar as professional athletes have refused to wear Pride totems or endorse Pride nights, for instance, they cite religious belief, and as a practical matter, that's their only option, since the only alternative is simply to say they're transphobes.

This in fact has caused pro-trans bodies like the Human Rights Campaign, which understands "human rights" to include the right of a male to use female rest facilities, officially to declare

a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States for the first time in its more than 40-year history, following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.

The "anti-LGBTQ+" measures the HRC lists include transgender sports bans (21 states); gender-affirming care bans (20 states) restricing bodily mutilations on minors; and bathroom bans (9 states) prohibiting males from entering female rest facilities in schools and sometimes general public spaces. If anything, that the HRC should acknowledge that this is a setback for its agenda suggests that there's a resurgence in a certain type of religious belief, because the philosophical underpinning of this resistance can only be based on the historical undestanding of natural relgion and natural law.

There's a general understanding that people responding to polls are inclined to tell pollsters what they think they want to hear, and this must certainly apply to a pollster who asks people if they've been to church lately. Given the increasing distrust among the general population for the anti-religious bias in institutions like the FBI, the public health establishment, and polls themselves, it seems as though they should be factoring in an increasing willingness in the public to conceal church attendance, to decide politely that it's none of their business (which it isn't), which in turn makes polls like Gallup and Pew on this subject less and less meaningful.

At the same time, crises lke the ones we see building on a national and world level are likely to reinforce the instinct to turn to religion in times of trouble. If I were the powers who'd commissioned Gallup and Pew to find out, in effect, how we did in killing religion with the COVID pretext, the answer would be that at best, any progress was imperceptible in the short term, but over the longer term, it will have proven counterproductive.