A Pardon as War Politics by Other Means

Evaporated corpses in Gaza; Congress confirms COVID conspiracy; U.S.-Canada union in the offing?

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The Big Story

To the shock of nobody who had ever paid attention to the self-serving nature of the man’s career, President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter for his many crimes—discovered and hidden—over the last 10 years. Many people expressed a certain shock and dismay about the act—presumably timed as an early Christmas present from a dad who is past caring what people think of him and family—because Biden had so firmly and repeatedly insisted that he would never consider pardoning his own son. But he was obviously never going to let Hunter go to prison. Family over country is the Biden way.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said yesterday that Hunter Biden’s prosecution had been a case of “war politics,” which confused the reporters, but shouldn’t have. Did she mean that Hunter had been pursued by a vindictive prosecution on a selective basis? they asked. But the prosecution was organized by his father’s own Department of Justice! they replied. How could President Biden legitimately claim that his son had been the victim of unjust prosecution when he set his own dogs after Hunter?

But “war politics” has a double meaning. It indicates the brutal, bare-knuckle, and savage nature of politics, and also the deceptive, sneaky, and double-dealing nature of war. Of course Hunter Biden faced selective prosecution. He was intentionally dangled before the public to counter credible accusations that the Biden White House had weaponized the Department of Justice by organizing four state and federal prosecutions against Donald Trump in order to neutralize him politically and actually imprison him. You may recall how the administration and the media had congratulated themselves when Hunter was indicted. From The New York Times in the distant past of June 2024:

For nearly four years, Republicans have delved into the darkest corners of Hunter Biden’s life, seeking to tie his troubles to his father, President Biden. But as the younger Biden stands trial in Delaware on gun charges, the case’s glaring political contradictions have rendered the G.O.P. largely mute, from former President Donald J. Trump on down.

It stands to reason: The baseless claim that the Biden Justice Department is running a political persecution of Mr. Trump is somewhat undermined by the department’s prosecution of the president’s son.

The point of the Hunter Biden prosecution, as the Times tacitly acknowledges, was always to give the Biden campaign cover for its criminal inquisition against Trump and his allies. In that sense—in the moral world of a wronged child—the pardon is just. If his father hadn’t been running for president in 2020, then Hunter’s errant laptop would have remained at most a footnote, if it had been noticed at all, and his and the Biden family’s many crimes would have remained hidden from view. The DOJ would certainly not have pursued Hunter for his gun charges, and his unpaid back taxes would have been dealt with quietly by lawyers and large checks. It’s only because Joe Biden was running for president that Hunter was forced to take a fall.

That dynamic replicates the one Hunter complained about so often in his emails, as the family’s bagman and tool, forced to travel the world selling the “brand,” as he put it. As he complained to the House Oversight Committee in his February 2024 deposition:

You understand my relationship with my family. When my dad was 29 years old, he woke up one day, went to work, and got a phone call and lost his wife and his daughter. And, in that same accident, he also lost almost my brother and myself. And then, when I was 46 years old, my 47-year-old brother died … And in our family, when you have a call from—I call him or he calls me or I call one of my—his grandkids or one of my children, you always pick up the phone. It's something that we always do. … If my dad calls me and I'm in the middle of something, I either get up from the table or I answer the phone at the table if it's with people that I have a long-term relationship with.

Hunter Biden’s whole life was built around ensuring that his father, stepmother, aunt, and uncles, and the extended family profited from Joe Biden’s exalted position in the U.S. government, with genuine personal tragedy used to cover scams in unassailable robes of pity. After years of travel to the seediest parts of the world to forge sleazy business dealings with oligarchs and strongmen, being asked to stand trial for the sake of the “brand” was unusual but not extraordinarily so. War politics is just war and politics by other means.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Labor unions should be for working people, argues Jake Altman—and not for privileged grad students pushing their progressive pet causes

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The Rest

→It must not be easy to be a statistician for the Gaza Ministry of Health. From one side, eager Hamasniks from the West constantly accuse you of understating the “true” death toll from the war with Israel, while on the other side you have to deal with the fact that there aren’t enough corpses to satisfy claims of genocide. In order to solve this dilemma, Al Jazeera “journalist” Hossam Shabat, whom Israel credibly accuses of being a member of Hamas, reports that the IDF uses sophisticated new weaponry which causes the human body to disappear. “After speaking with first responders and doctors in northern Gaza,” Shabbat posted on X on Nov. 30, “many are reporting that Israeli forces are using new weapons that cause bodies to evaporate on the scene. They describe it as something they have never seen before.” Now, Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, director general of the Gaza Ministry of Health, has repeated the story of this magic munition, which should enable his ministry to report as many civilian deaths as anti-Zionist sign painters could dream up. One hundred thousand? Why not one hundred million? As long as the bodies have been evaporated, there’s literally no limit to the death toll.

→New York state Sen. Liz Krueger, representing the old Silk Stocking district of Manhattan, raised eyebrows recently when she suggested that four American states—New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont—secede from the Union and join Canada as its 11th province. Krueger came up with this plan—which would nearly double the Canadian population—as a radical means of leaving Trump’s America. “Instead of us all trying to illegally cross the border at night without them noticing,” Krueger explained, “they should instead agree to let us be the southeast province, a new province of Canada.” The senator admitted that she hadn’t consulted the leaders of any other state, much less her fellow New Yorkers, about the scheme; nor has she considered the insurrectionist implications of secession, given American history and its last experiment with national divorce.

But now, it emerges, President-elect Donald Trump has broached the same topic, but from the other direction. At a Mar-a-Lago dinner with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian leader implored Trump not to impose a 25% tariff against our northern neighbor, saying it would “kill” the Canadian economy. “So your country can’t survive unless it’s ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion?” asked Trump, referring to Canada’s trade surplus. Perhaps, he quipped, the Great White North would be better off surrendering its national sovereignty by becoming one or two new states in the American union.

→South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, facing low approval ratings from the population and parliamentary opposition even from his own party, declared martial law late Tuesday night Seoul time, claiming that the country was threatened by communist forces. The opposition party, which controls the legislature, has impeached members of Yoon’s government, and impeded his agenda. Yoon sent the military to block access to the parliament, but lawmakers gained entrance and voted unanimously to end martial law, two hours after it was announced. Yoon appears to be attempting a self-coup, but as of this writing it appears that the military is not obeying his orders, and is submitting to legislative efforts to restore democratic order.

→The House subcommittee on the COVID-19 pandemic released its “After Action Review” this week, exactly five years after the first confirmed case of the infection. Among its findings, the committee reports that “the possibility that COVID-19 emerged because of a laboratory or research related accident is not a conspiracy theory,” and that “the Chinese government, agencies within the U.S. government, and some members of the international scientific community sought to cover-up facts concerning the origins of the pandemic.” The authors of the report further found that rampant fraud attended the pandemic response, and that “pandemic-era school closures will have enduring impact on generations of America’s children and these closures were enabled by groups meant to serve those children.” Essentially, assertions that would get you kicked off social media and derided as a crank, a racist, or a fool four years ago are now confirmed to be true.

→A staffer for New York City Mayor Eric Adams was caught on video near Gracie Mansion tearing down posters of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, ripping them up, and throwing them in the trash. When Nallah Sutherland, a special event coordinator for the Mayor’s Office of Special Projects and Community Events, was confronted about her vandalism, she slapped the person filming her. Alerted to her actions, the mayor’s office initially gave Sutherland an official reprimand, and required her to undergo training in “cultural sensitivity.” Anger about this light punishment has led to her unpaid suspension from her job. One might hope that someone in a community-facing role working for the mayor would have the good sense not to express her radical sentiments so publicly, but when intersectional politics have infected the deep structure of municipal government it’s no surprise that even public relations functionaries are soldiers in the anti-Zionist cause.

→Tablet magazine, of which The Scroll is a proud subsidiary, is conducting it’s annual fundraising drive this month. If you’ve been reading along with us over the past year, you’ll know that plenty of Americans are getting tax deductions to support antisemitism, jihadist and Marxist terror, destructive racialism, gender insanity, anti-democratic lawfare, and general Obama faction psychopathy. We figured we’d offer you the chance to get a tax deduction for supporting our efforts to expose all of the above.

You can donate at this link: https://secure.qgiv.com/for/tabletdonate

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TODAY IN TABLET:

In Love We Disappear, by David Yaffe

Leonard Koan, boudoir poet

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Labor Unions vs. Working People

Unions shouldn’t be for left-wing grad students who want to inflict their niche identity politics on people who have bigger things to worry about, like paying rent and supporting their families

by Jake Altman

After the disastrous 2016 presidential campaign, which saw Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign nearly derailed by identity politics fanatics, before being finished off by Hillary Clinton’s globalist post-liberalism, I participated in a call with a prominent union leader and a senior official of the Working Families Party, to discuss bringing the Working Families Party to Michigan. I raised the issue of a county, Monroe, that has one of the highest rates of union membership in the country. This union stronghold, which went for Obama twice, has been solidly Republican since President Trump’s first victory. Trump carried Monroe by 22 percentage points in 2016. In 2024, the margin was 27 points.

On the call, I argued that our focus should be running conservative social democrats in Monroe. There are many working-class voters in the area, which also has strong ties to the Catholic Church. The Working Families Party, I argued, could and should facilitate such an option. The official seemed baffled by my suggestion. “What would that even look like,” they scoffed.

From the standpoint of traditional working-class politics and political organizing, as practiced in America for the past 150 years or so, my suggestion was an obvious one. Win the votes of working people by focusing on bread-and-butter economics and candidates who can relate to their constituents’ own heartfelt and entirely reasonable attachments to family, faith, and American traditions. No dice.

The refusal to grapple with on-the-ground realities and acknowledge limits as well as new possibilities has long been characteristic of the political myopia of the far left, which is why working-class voters—including those who religiously vote for Democrats—have long preferred the political mainstream. Since Nov. 5, a growing consensus has emerged about the need to extirpate the far left from Democratic circles. The question becomes how do labor moderates return our movement to reality when a significant proportion of its members and staff, drawn from the hothouses of factional politics, nurtured on out-of-touch campuses where the far left can impose its own orthodoxies from the top down, continue to march us toward their imaginary utopias, and over the cliff.

This disjuncture between workers, the Democratic Party, and the party’s left flank has been growing ever wider since 2008, which is why—after eight years of Obama’s version of Ivy League campus liberalism—Sen. Sanders’ insurgent run nearly toppled Hillary Clinton. If Donald Trump was the insurgent candidate who won the 2016 election, in part by reflecting working-class concerns over jobs and immigration, Bernie Sanders could have equally been that candidate—and won nearly the same share of Democratic primary votes as Trump won Republican votes. Sanders’ failure and Trump’s success marked a significant transfer of working-class voters from the Democratic to the Republican Party—a pattern that held true again in 2024.

Biden’s administration proved to be a partial interlude for the failing relationship between the Democratic Party and labor, at least on core union issues. President Biden delivered for sections of organized labor and yet a disjuncture continues, fueled by the prioritization of party management above a recognition of reality and the party’s capture by academics and their culture at the expense of American workers’ priorities. Today, Biden’s connection to older Democratic Party traditions—an iteration of the party that fostered and included many people who benefited from broad social mobility and diverse paths to power—is very much at odds with the party’s academic tilt. The values of the majority who want to be rooted in family, community, and the familiar are at odds with a more secular, global elite who see transgression of older societal values and the imposition of new, inflexible norms of behavior as essential ingredients of their project. They claim to be prophets of progress. The election results say different. In reality, they are the beleaguered priests of a new and faltering religion.

Union leadership has been caught in the middle of this disconnect, with its ears plugged and eyes safely closed. For not only do Democrats, and their analogs in the labor movement, need to be concerned about unease with their corporate wing, they must contend with far-left ideologues who vacillate between pissing on the tent from the inside or pissing on it from the outside, depending on their mood and the issue, while indulging in the cosplay of being “working class” and “revolutionaries.” Meanwhile, their purity tests smack of the worst forms of Protestantism. Think the hysteria of Salem or the millenarianism of the Münster rebellion. It hides the material struggle between an elite dependent on academic credentials and those they wish to shut out of power.

As more and more higher education locals form, and as white collar “knowledge workers” increasingly supplant the traditional industrial worker cores of unions like the UAW, this conflict between town and gown has become ingrained in the labor movement—alienating workers from their ostensible leadership. People understand when their leaders, in culture or in politics, construct a world that they neither recognize nor relate to. Afraid to stand up to the purveyors of campus identity politics, the establishment in labor and the party may prefer to pretend that the culture clash does not exist. Rank-and-file union members know better.

Labor must deal directly with the far-left activist class inside its house either by continuing to accommodate them, a grave mistake, or purging them, an unlikely outcome. Maintaining the pretense that there is no conflict will be difficult and further alienate the very people labor needs to maintain a broad appeal. Pursuing the aims and interests of identity-politics bureaucracy is not an effective substitute for meaningful action on questions of worker pay, leave, job training, and medical and pension benefits.

As a union representative, I frequently advised faculty members and medical practitioners who found themselves caught in the DEI bureaucracy. Their crimes? Using colloquialisms or speaking too openly about their personal thoughts on a vaguely political matter. Everyone knew how absurd these cases were—including, I suspect, the staff who investigated them—nevertheless they had to jump through the hoops. The stress and fear generated by such events was all too real for those involved. I often heard, the person who reported me “wants me fired.” Often, it was true.

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In addition to basic just-cause protections from workplace politics, unions can be a force to rebalance the economy toward family and community. Soon-to-be Secretary of State Marco Rubio was right to trumpet unions as the solution to a society gone astray. “Today,” Rubio wrote about the effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, “it might be workplace conditions, but tomorrow it might be a requirement that the workers embrace management’s latest ‘woke’ human resources fad.”

Rubio is right on both counts. Unions, though, are only as good as their leadership. Too many union leaders self-select. The left and the far left are overrepresented. Too many elections are uncontested. Too often there is no opposition to hold leadership to account. That must change.

Labor must again become a serious and independent political player in the grim future that looks to be emerging out of the ashes of a failed liberal project. When members and potential members join, participate, and demand democratization in an easy and accessible way, this will happen. There is no nonpolitical excuse to limit the scope of the membership’s control of major, controversial decisions.

Though labor—at least those unions with higher education locals—knows it has a problem with its left flank, they maintain the pretense of a unified movement. That may change. The far left has and will demand “solidarity,” and use the Democrats’ defeat to try to position itself at the center of a “resistance.” A higher profile for the far left would do more damage to both labor and the Democratic Party. The latter will also feel pressure to engage in “resistance” on issues popular only with a segment of its supposed base while boycotting avenues for the improvement of the lives of union members who are looking to feed and care for their families. These union members are not interested in having their livelihoods held hostage in order to promote far-left identitarian crusades.

The forces of moderation must organize—think of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists or broad anti-communist coalitions of the 1940s and 1950s—and quickly. The Teamsters, too, must consider rejoining the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and advancing an agenda that can unite the vast majority of American workers—even and especially if it means alienating the loudest, most privileged voices in the movement, those emanating from often-troubled campuses where trashing the whole of American history as an “imperial project” and promoting pro-Hamas propaganda to demonize the State of Israel are paramount values.

By maintaining the pretense that nothing is wrong inside labor and that the far left poses no threat, the established players in the labor movement have disadvantaged themselves. In September I wrote in my journal, “it isn’t the mistake that alienates people from institutions that are supposed to protect them. It’s the pretense that nothing went wrong.” While this could apply to many issues within the labor movement, I was referring to a particularly troubling refusal to grapple with reality.

In the aftermath of Oct. 7, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) was made aware of serious allegations concerning the undemocratic operations, antisemitism, and more of one of its local unions. Despite the fact that this local union also owed AFT money, AFT failed to investigate the allegations. The hope, presumably, being that the far left would go away, burn itself out, and be replaced by a “normal” administration. I heard this argument directly from two labor staffers. Other insiders who spoke with me were more circumspect when making judgments about the desirability of moving against a far-left leadership that some saw as running their union into the ground. Alternatives were likely weighed at the highest level and, again presumably, it was decided that provocation was too risky. Any national union with significant higher education membership must be wary of the extremist left. Even K-12 locals are susceptible.

The far left is organized through Labor Notes and the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization filled with and now governed by Leninists. They are aggressive and hungry for power. Power means jobs. The forces of moderation are disorganized, siloed, and vulnerable. Outside of key sectors, they seem as exhausted as Biden’s presidency, and they know it. AFT’s Randi Weingarten may have been afraid to act on complaints because AFT could fall to the far left if the left were provoked. Any effort to move against a local under far-left control, so the thinking may go, could trigger a wider revolt. Yet until labor excises its far left, they will continue to serve as a brake on labor’s broader appeal, particularly as the fiction of labor unity becomes difficult to maintain.

A direct conflict with the far left has the benefit of situating mainstream labor leaders in the camp with the majority of American workers and with a majority of their own members. Even in higher education, some extremist locals, while claiming to speak on behalf of the entire working class, are minority unions. As left-led unions continue to partner with more and more extreme groups, including the U.S. Communist Party and affiliates of U.S. Treasury-designated terrorist organizations like Samidoun, the pretense of labor movement unity will come into direct conflict with the possibility of broader union appeal.

Extremists at American universities are free to pursue whatever legal forms of politics they wish, however fantastical, immoral, and destructive. However, their priorities are not ours. Allowing them to continue to pretend that they represent the working class, for fear of splitting the labor movement, is a surefire way to continue to alienate prospective members and condemn ourselves to the political margins, at a time when our people want and deserve results.