Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Hunter Biden nudes, explained

A years-long fixation reached its predictable apotheosis on Wednesday when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) used her allotted time during a hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to publicly display some hardcore nudes of Hunter Biden.

“Before we begin, I would like to let the committee and everyone watching at home know that parental discretion is advised,” Greene said. She then proceeded to whip out a series of X-rated posters.

I would like to describe the content of these photos but I would also like to not be fired, so I’ll refer you to the New York Post’s retelling. The images included “a (mercifully) censored picture of a woman caressing the first son’s, well, first son.” Hats off, guys, truly.

What was the point of these photos? According to Greene, they were necessary supporting evidence in an alleged tax fraud coverup. (Last month Biden reached a tentative agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes.) But people who are allegedly guilty of tax fraud can be just as guilty when they are wearing pants. Did the American public really need to see this?

Advertisement

Ever since 2019, when a computer repair guy in Delaware came into possession of a busted laptop allegedly belonging to the president’s son — a busted laptop containing a lot of naked selfies and homemade porn — the answer to that question in conservative circles had become a resounding yes. Show the citizenry the phallus of a middle-aged attorney-slash-cocaine addict, preferably from many angles! Leave no butt cheek behind!

“This is actually the evidence that I believe the American people deserve to see,” Greene explained to a Newsmax host the evening after her stunt.

Tucker Carlson mined similar territory on his prime time show in 2021, showing viewers what appeared to be an image of Hunter Biden being straddled by two women (“There is a dog there with him, as well,” Carlson’s guest remarked, in case casual viewers had missed the white poodle minding its own business in the corner of the frame).

Advertisement

Sean Hannity had gone there, too: “Hunter Biden’s latest video: Nude water slide riding,” he tweeted last fall. The video link wasn’t working when I clicked on it earlier this week, but I found a number of still images online that fit the description. I fail to see their political relevance, though they make a compelling case for why one should always wear clothes when skidding down any kind of slide.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee earlier this year held a hearing investigating why Twitter had muffled New York Post reporting on the laptop, and whether the site had allowed the Biden campaign to inappropriately censor content Twitter related to the president’s son. A Twitter employee repeatedly explained that the content was not removed because Twitter was in cahoots with the Bidens, the content was removed because it was a bunch of naked pictures of Hunter Biden, posted without his consent, which violated Twitter’s terms of service.

What’s going on here? The most serious accusations against Hunter Biden revolve around the idea that he used his positions with foreign companies to sell access to his politician father (no evidence has yet been produced that the elder Biden was influenced by his son’s role with these companies). What does Hunter’s hunter have to do with the integrity of his father’s administration?

Advertisement

The goal appears to be shaming him in general and, by extension, the entire Biden family.

There is, after all, something oddly clarifying about a picture of a 50-ish man strolling around in unflattering lighting wearing sunglasses, a hot pink scarf, a jock strap and nothing else. Images like this present, in a single frame, a compelling narrative of debauchery and dirt. A narrative that no amount of depositions, leaked emails or lengthy confessional memoirs could begin to approach. Naked Hunter Biden is a joke, a degenerate, a walking embodiment of squick. He is lecherous and louche, sloppy and sleazy. God, Hunter, put on some shorts.

But there’s also this.

In the course of reporting this column I came upon a website — linked to by a Fox News article — that purports to be a photo dump of nearly every picture salvaged from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Almost 10,000 images in total, presented as endless pages of clickable thumbnails.

Advertisement

There are a lot of naked pictures. There are a lot of pictures that make Hunter Biden look exactly as high, inebriated, irresponsible and all around disastrous as he has described himself to be for a period of time in the late 2010s.

But there are also pictures of his kids’ sporting events. Birthday parties. Family trips to the beach. Assuming these photos are all real, there are excruciating pictures of Hunter’s brother, Beau, in his hospital bed, timestamped just weeks before he died in 2015. By all accounts, the death unraveled the family. It brought Hunter to his lowest places of lonely motels and decaying teeth, to benders where he has said he’d go days subsisting on nothing but crack and vodka.

These images tell a different kind of story. One in which the degenerate man keeps trying to claw his way out of the hell he’s made for himself, one in which he keeps being sucked back in. He’s a proud dad, he’s a struggling son, he’s a wasted addict. In many selfies he is fully clothed when he stares down the camera, the expression on his face belonging to a man who appears haunted and emptied by what he has become.

These were the ones that felt like the biggest intrusion of privacy. These weren’t the types of Hunter Biden images that end up on a poster board in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional clown show. But in those images, he has never looked more naked.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLmqssSsq7KklWR%2FcX6SaGdwZ2JmfK6t0aOmq6GVYsGixcuoqWafopqyr7GMoaynrJWneqO1w56lZqGdlrSmv44%3D