Commentator
Hunter Biden, Ukraine's Counter-Offensive, Chinese Spying, Swedish Fascism
LAPTOP FROM HELL - AND H.B.’S TROUBLED SOUL
The big media story at the moment is New York Magazine’s tackling of the Hunter Biden laptop saga.
A few points to make here.
- First, this is a story. For the legacy media to have ignored it in the way that they have is a complete abrogation of journalistic integrity. And New York Magazine, which has been terrific recently (Nicholson Baker’s lab leak story, Elizabeth Drew’s ‘canceled at 17’ story), has carved out a niche space for itself in the sort of heterodox political center - or, to put it a different way, is actually, you know, doing journalism, striking out at different stories even if they’re unpalatable to liberal sensibilities. It’s a bit unclear to me how this perspective became such a rarity within media. When I was starting in media (this is in the 2000s), the reigning ethos was to be a sort of equal-opportunity terrorist to anybody with any power or, really, any public profile. Journalists - even if their personal sensibilities happened to be on the left - had a professional pride about going after anybody, and the general belief was that Democratic scalps were fair game just as much as the other side. It would be interesting to do a bit more media forensics to try to work out how this ethos got sidelined, how the legacy media came to see itself as playing, at core, a partisan role. My guess is that it has a great deal to do with the Republican capture of the presidency in the ’80s, that newsrooms had drifted to the left during that period and found themselves fuming at the near-existential threat of Reagan and, once Democrats retook power, viewed their primary duty as being to liberal amelioration rather than to professional disinterest. The ‘mainstream media’ really did sit on incendiary and accurate stories about Bill Clinton - as Jeffrey Toobin astutely reminds us in A Vast Conspiracy. Critical coverage of the Obama administration was completely lacking - which included an unwillingness to challenge Obama on drone strikes, dirty wars, the continuation of black site detention programs, the continuation of tough deportation programs - and, with Biden, it’s just a joke. The president’s son is caught, literally, with his pants down; there is ample evidence to indicate that Biden himself is profiting from influence-peddling schemes; and not only does the mainstream media decline to run the story (it’s passed off as ‘Russian disinformation’) but anybody who does repost it on Twitter gets their accounts frozen. The question for the legacy media is whether they want to be journalists or not. For a long time they’ve chosen not to - for the actually understandable, higher-order argument that the Republican Party poses such an existential threat to democracy that political considerations outweigh journalistic ones - but the result is that the legacy media has utterly lost its credibility with a broad public and it falls to a relative outlier like New York Magazine to do the work of actual reporting.
- Second, even as I’m praising New York Magazine, there’s an odd feeling that they’re dancing around what they’re actually looking at. I don’t feel I understand the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop more than I did before reading the piece. New York Magazine keeps hinting that the content is very revealing for how these sorts of international, influence-driven payouts actually work but without digging into the payouts themselves. It’s a rare story in which Steve Bannon comes across as the voice of reason. His line “this is the heart of the elite capture through money-laundering and influence-peddling operations” may actually be on target, but New York pulls the curtain down over that aspect of the laptop’s contents. The overriding point of their reporting is that the laptop (really, hard drive) is a ‘compromised crime scene’. “The forensic quality of the thing is garbage,” said a cryptography expert who examined the laptop’s contents for The Washington Post. And New York Magazine gives credence to the claim - contradicting the bulk of their own reporting - that the whole thing is a Roger Stone operation. “Roger Stone looks to be in the middle of it and it’s Roger Stone,” said an unnamed source not citing any evidence. And, as far as the story reaching the mainstream, that seems likely to be its concluding point. The line is that the contents of the material can neither be proven nor disproven - parts of the drive have been corroborated but it has been so heavily tampered with by right-wing actors that the key bits of evidence involving Joe Biden’s knowledge of payouts are left in a state of indeterminacy.
- Third, as far as red meat goes, the story leads only so far. New York Magazine manages to disprove many of the more exotic rumors stemming from the laptop (above all, the widely-disseminated belief that the hard drive contained child pornography) and what’s left is Hunter Biden as a lost soul and Joe Biden hovering over a few of the payments Hunter received. As corruption goes, it’s of course nowhere near Trump trying to hold Ukraine’s foreign aid hostage in exchange for political pay dirt - and, likely, nowhere near the financial escapades of Trump’s own circle with many of the same actors. New York Magazine may be doing the Democrats a favor by pushing a story like this close enough to the Democratic mainstream that it tarnishes Biden and helps to convince him not to run again - clearing the way for a more viable candidate. But the whole thing does leave a distinct impression. Hunter’s complaint from a 2018 voice memo - uncorroborated evidence, like so much else on the laptop - that “Beau didn’t take on these fucking responsibilities, he didn’t do any of this shit” does have a ring of truth to it, that Hunter felt himself to be the family’s “cash cow,” as the New York Post columnist Miranda Devine put it, while his father and brother were able to keep their hands clean.
- Fourth, speaking personally, I don’t care very much about anything that’s on the laptop. It’s all about par for the course for what I’d expect from Joe Biden as a career politician with a reputation for wheeling-and-dealing - some shady deals, some grease, some dysfunctional family relationships. As a Democratic voter, this story doesn’t come close to convincing me to change my vote or anything like that - it’s pretty much what I signed up for when I voted for Biden and for ‘politics as usual.’ What I find fascinating - looking at this from a detached, sort of aesthetic, place - is the way that Hunter Biden encapsulates so much of what contemporary America is while Joe Biden is almost impossible to connect to. The drug addiction, the Ashley Madison account, the turbulent relationships, the hunt for the ‘big breaks’ in his finances, the despairing voice memos, the endless emo selfies, the ketamine treatments (which really baffled New York Magazine), the whole career trajectory of the non-practicing lawyer who ends up making very interesting, unsettling art - all of it vastly more relatable than ‘Amtrak Joe’ or that misty-eyed look that the ‘Big Guy’ gets when he’s trying to relate to the average American. What’s most ironic about the Hunter Biden saga is that it may have come close to costing Trump the election. He clearly got obsessed with Hunter Biden - his kind of guy, with a sleaze he could relate to - and thought he could crucify Joe Biden with it. And Joe’s response in the debate - “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem. He’s overtaken it, he’s fixed it, he’s worked on it, and I’m proud of him” - was, really, the one memorable moment from him throughout the entire campaign and may have gone a long way towards framing the winning narrative, that Trump was a monster who would stop at nothing and that Biden, even with mind slipping, was a decent guy with a good heart. In terms of the sort of metaphorical dimension of politics - the way that people understand their eras through their rulers - there really is no other story about the Biden presidency other than Hunter. The overall sense of the presidency is of The Cid - the old warrior propped up by his technocratic advisors - but the Hunter story speaks to something. Broken America, in the grip of its addictions and its demons, maybe hopelessly corrupt, but getting by the best it can.
UKRAINE’S COUNTER-OFFENSIVE
The big story in the world is of course Ukraine’s counter-offensive and Russia’s rapid response, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of more troops and planning the annexation of occupied territories. As for as I can tell - this is from riffling through a wide variety of articles - everything is as it seems to be. The Ukrainians really did plan a major offensive towards Kherson. The Russians reacted by moving troops to the region and largely held the line there but opened up holes in the line around Kharkiv and the success of the offensive surprised everybody, the Ukrainians included.
The takeaway here - as it has been since the beginning of the war - is the complete ineptitude of the Russian military - “terrible leadership and very low morale,” as the Council for Foreign Relations’ Max Boot puts it. The copious use of irregular forces and the recruitment of prisoners - as reported on, for instance, by the Institute for the Study of War - can’t help matters.
Ukrainian soldiers interviewed seem amused more than anything else at the fighting prowess of their adversaries. “They ran away very fast,” said soldiers interviewed in the RFE/RL. And that sort of bewilderment is shared by the Russian rank-and-file. The Guardian writes of two Russian border guards in Belgorod asking each other “How the fuck did this happen?”
The week presented two very divergent reactions on the Russian side. There was the instinct towards ‘plausible deniability,’ which had been such a central tenet of Putin’s way of waging war over the past decade - an impulse to pretend that Russian soldiers had never been in Ukraine in the first place. The reports of Russian soldiers just leaving their tanks and weapons in Ukraine and driving back across the border seem well-verified and speak to an urge to just melt away from the whole misguided war.
But, of course, that’s not possible. Reports on executions and torture chambers in Izium have corroborating evidence behind them as well. Luke Harding of The Guardian interviews Ukrainian civilians who had ‘crocodile clips’ tied to their fingers and hooked to electric currents. The Kyiv Independent has a heartbreaking story of the Russians firing artillery shells into a schoolhouse in Verbivka as their ‘farewell’ to the town they occupied.
And that turns out to be the legacy of Putin’s invasion - cowardice in the field of battle, brutality to civilians. There’s really no other way to think about it. And the end of the week made it clear that Putin has chosen to double down on this path - no melting away and, really, no more plausible deniability. Mobilization, annexation. His regime fully committed to endless war in Ukraine.
The reporter gaggle has moved to the Belgorod region of Southern Russia where residents are getting distinctly nervous. “We are on the border, they are shooting us. So we need an army and protection. Who will wake up the president?” writes one resident. The smart discussion becomes about whether the Ukrainians push into Russian territory and, if so, to what extent - with the assumption being that that’s unlikely to happen, that the difficult next round of fighting occurs in Donbas and maybe, eventually, Crimea. “I don’t think the Ukrainians want to expand the war,” says Boot about the possibility of attacks on Russian territory, for instance in the Belgorod region. “I don’t think we should be too, too nervous.”
The other smart discussion is about who gets credit for the counter-offensive. As Boot says, “After a big breakthrough like this there’s a little beating of the breasts at the Pentagon,” but, actually, the U.S. military establishment has been more circumspect than they were, for instance, early in the war with their admission that they had provided critical intelligence for individualized attacks on Russian battlefield generals. A New York Times story on the offensive, relying heavily on Pentagon sources, is a model of humility and discretion, giving essentially all credit to the Ukrainians and in particular to Zelensky. “The Ukrainian generals and American officials believed that the large-scale attack [devised by Zelensky] would incur immense casualties and fail to quickly retake large amounts of territory,” The New York Times reports, but it turned out, at least in this telling, that Zelensky was a more astute war commander than anybody else and the Russian line was softer than even American intelligence anticipated. These sorts of reports are always hard to credit - it’s very unclear exactly what the level of U.S. involvement is in battlefield intelligence - but no reason, so far, to dispute the overriding narrative, that Zelensky has been a uniquely gifted strategist, the Ukrainians disciplined and effective with the forces at their disposal, and the Russian military almost ludicrously bad at war.
THE NEW INTELLIGENCE LANDSCAPE
There’s a set of rolling stories about intelligence-gathering - the point being that Chinese espionage has become turbo-charged and is basically a mass-gathering of data of all possible sorts from Western countries while a U.S. effort to establish troll farms on the Russian and Chinese model has been dropped.
This op-ed by Nigel Inkster, former director of operations and intelligence for the British SIS, is part of a series of warnings by top intelligence brass in the U.K. and U.S. claiming that China’s espionage threat is ‘immense,’ that, as Christopher Wray, the FBI chief, put it, “The scale of China’s efforts is breathtaking.”
The claim coming from the intelligence community is that the various world powers think about intelligence in very different terms, that U.S. intelligence tends to be highly targeted, that Russian intelligence tends to more brutal and sweeping, and that Chinese intelligence basically amounts to hoovering up every possible bit of data from a rival. “China can best be described as an intelligence state,” writes Inkster. “The party views the business of acquiring and protecting secrets as an all-of-nation undertaking.” What that translates to is a variety of activities that Westerners would tend not to associate with spying - that have nothing to do with state secrets or military infiltration - but connect to influence. The most public instance of this is the MI5 alert posted on Christine Lee earlier this year about ‘political interference activities.’ The activities amounted to little more than befriending an MP, meeting the Prime Minister and donating to Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians - but all of that was pretty clearly part of the United Front Work Department, which is an external-facing entity of the Chinese Communist Party. All of the activities were fairly transparent - which was part of what made everything so perplexing; it was about connections for their own sake without an ask let alone hard espionage attached to them. And that was just the most high profile case. The British/American spies have been warning about harvesting business data, harvesting genetically modified corn seeds, about scams on dating apps.
The sense is of being in a completely different landscape for what constitutes intelligence and to a certain extent what constitutes warfare. The Chinese activities are in the cultural domain and often seem innocuous if not silly. But they are meant maliciously and a degree of paranoia, which unfortunately tends to turn into a self-perpetuating loop, is at the same time justified. And the Western intelligence agencies seem at pains even to articulate what exactly the line is between normal international trade and something that shifts into the domain of security. “Obviously, much influencing activity is wholly legitimate. Where we come in is unearthing, and seeking to neutralize, what we call ‘interference activity,’” said MI5 Director General Ken McCallum.
And, meanwhile, Western intelligence appears to be struggling to keep pace. The U.S./U.K. spy chiefs have said there’s basically nothing that anybody can do about Chinese efforts except for people to be on guard in their private lives. And American attempts to fight fire with fire - to create troll farms and circulate anti-Russian tweets particularly in Central Asia - have been ineffectual, according to this Washington Post piece. It’s of course hard to know how much to believe any of that - to say something is not working is a normal cover in intelligence world for something that’s working perfectly well - but if we take this on face value it means that the United States is trying to keep pace with Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns and finding that it’s harder than it looks, or else that the U.S. intelligence apparatus is built with a different approach in mind.
The philosophical way to think about all of this is that we’re now in the multi-polar world and in a reprise of Cold War politics - and this is what it looks like. Statecraft isn’t just professionals in government buildings. It’s complicated and it runs all the way through populations, and various states employ asymmetric means to get advantages over one another. It’s been a kind of luxury to be in a world that’s not that - and now China is ascendent and belligerent and these kinds of peculiar cultural wars, like Chinese spying in civilian life, are what we have to look forward to for the foreseeable future.
SWEDEN’S FASCIST TURN
And another unpleasant fact about the world we’re in - major European countries becoming Fascist. The electrical triumph of the Sweden Democrats, the far-right party, hasn’t quite shaken the ground in America - I missed it on the first pass of my weekly news scouring and might not have heard about it if I hadn’t run into a disconsolate Swede at the drinks’ table at a party. The expected victory of Georgia Meloni and the Brothers of Italy party in Italian elections later this month is likely, though, to really send shock-ripples.
The Sweden Democrats, over the last 15 years or so, have worked assiduously to soften their image, making themselves less of a neo-Nazi or White Supremacist party - although as virtually all commentators have pointed out, the neo-Nazi connections, not to mention, you know, first-wave Nazi connections, are deep in the party’s DNA - and more of a nativist, anti-immigrant party. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy have done less of that softening. She descries Soros and the “project of ethnic replacement of Europe’s citizens desired by the great capitals and international speculators.” At first blush, her politics seems more the say-offensive-things brand of Fascism than the invade Ethiopia sort of Fascism, but even so….
Still, the triumph of the Sweden Democrats is not to be underestimated in the unfolding saga of Europe’s turn from the liberal EU project to the hard-right. From an American perspective, there really is something shattering about the election result. Sweden, in my lifetime, has always been the model of what a modern nation-state should be. Bernie Sanders’ campaign, for instance, sort of boiled down to mimicking the social achievements of Scandinavia - “I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people” is one of many quotes of his on this topic. All of which leaves an odd taste when 20% of Sweden votes for the hard-right and a plurality of Swedes seem committed to more or less abandoning the great inclusive European project.
That’s the general reaction in the commentary on the election. ‘I Don’t Recognize Sweden Anymore’ is the headline of Jim Steinman’s piece in Politico. ‘Sweden Is Becoming Unbearable’ is the headline of Elisabeth Asbrink’s piece for The New York Times. The sense is that the period of Sweden as the model for liberalism - and, more globally, the sense that there is a model for what liberalism can lead to - is over.
The overriding issue is, of course, immigration. In their period of liberal ascendancy the Northern European countries embarked on a really noble, really quixotic policy of opening their doors wide - believing that their system was so effective that it could absorb asylum-seekers and refugees from some of the most war-torn, toughest parts of the world. There’s no criticism of that here - as far as I’m concerned, it was just a very interesting project and stands as sort of the high-water mark of liberalism. But, inevitably, there were consequences - high unemployment rates among the migrants, a rise in crime, and, maybe most significantly, the rise of the far-right. As Jim Steinman, a Swedish journalist and son of an Ethiopian refugee, writes in a startlingly mealy-mouthed essay: “Offering sanctuary to those fleeing war is always the right thing to do, but Sweden’s experiment with multiculturalism seems to have taken a turn for the worse since 2016.”
The sense expressed by the Swedes - and Steinman, for instance, really works hard to pry this out of himself - is that open-door immigration simply hasn’t worked. And that perspective makes things almost too easy for the Sweden Democrats. “This would mean almost zero asylum immigration” is the SD’s program, as articulated by the party leader Jimmie Akesson. And that’s met with a certain relief by Swedes who are ostensibly more moderate on the issue. “Though I may morally disagree with closing our borders to those in need, perhaps it’s the best way to recalibrate - at least temporarily - after decades of failed policies,” writes Steinman - a very mealy-mouthed way of saying that he’s onboard with the SDs.
For those who are knowledgeable about Swedish politics, there’s much blame to go around for the success of the SDs. The Social Democratic Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson tried to tack hard recently to being tough on crime - playing into rhetorical talking points of the far-right without, likely, garnering any votes for herself. The Moderate Party - the more traditional Swedish conservative party - entered into a craven compromise with the SD’s that brings the SDs into a prominent place in the coalition government while making the Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson Prime Minister. And there’s the sense, as there was in 2016 with Trump, that a more concerted campaign of calling out the far-right for what they are might have made the difference - that the habitual politeness of Swedish politicians got the better of them when dealing with extremists. “Simply hoping the nasties would go away has not, in fact, made them go away,” writes The Economist.
But it’s hard to blame non-Fascists too much for the success of Fascists. The reality is that this is just as much a soft spot of the democratic process as it was in the 1920s and ’30s - Fascists tend to have strong rhetorical points, and a well-disciplined, determined Fascistic party, like the Sweden Democrats, can go very far, particularly in a coalition system. And lest there be any mistaking that the Sweden Democrats have morphed to become just a nativist party - not savory but dealing with the genuinely chaotic, hard-to-grapple-with issue of asylum immigration - the party program calls explicitly for eliminating asylum-seeking for those who claim to have been persecuted for being homosexual. And, meanwhile, Meloni calls for opposition to the “L.G.B.T.Q. lobbies.”
It’s the old program coming back - blood-and-soil, homophobia, hatred for ‘cosmopolitanism,’ as embodied in an international finance figure like Soros. And not a whole lot that anybody can do about it - expect to recognize the danger and fight hard for democracy. The feeling I’m having at the moment is just of a cold and lonely world - the advent of A.I. and its challenge to core tenets of human identity; the new Cold War with China; the return of Fascism to Europe. One way to think about it is as the collapse of the post-Cold War Pax Americana. Unfortunately, ‘America’ has come to mean runaway capitalism and demagogic politics. Meloni, for instance, says that she has been inspired by the “phenomenon of Donald Trump.” And it’s not so hard to see the triumph of the SDs in Sweden as part of the ripple-effect from Trump - the end of confidence in the liberal order, the belief that politics is petty, vicious, and zero-sum.
Honestly, I'll be perfectly happy if I never again hear about Hunter Biden as long as I live. He doesn't have any office! Why is this higher than news from Ukraine?
Good