Hunter’s Racism: Almost as bad as the other side’s hypocrisy

#RacistHunter started trending on Tuesday night. Twitter was set ablaze by texts from Hunter Biden to his lawyer where the president’s son used a racial slur multiple times and told the lawyer (who is white), “I only love you because you’re black.” 

To the left, it’s outrageous that the right cares so much about this one instance of racism while continuing to support racist people and policies. Besides, doesn’t the right constantly deny the existence of racism?

 

 

Hunter Biden’s struggles with addiction and mental health are well known. While his actions are inexcusable, he is not in the administration, so this is really a nonstory.

 

 

It’s clear the right doesn’t really care about Hunter’s racism — they just want to attack the president and his supporters.

 

To the right, the Hunter Biden story proves the left doesn’t really have the moral high ground on racial issues. 

Democrats’ constant pandering to black communities is proof the white left doesn’t truly see them as equals, but political pawns. It’s easy to see this in Joe Biden’s rhetoric:

And the silence by liberal media is deafening. Imagine the media coverage if it were one of Donald Trump’s children! 

Priors and Hypocrisy

No one disagrees about what was said. The conflict here is about what it means in the broader context. This divergence stems from how either side is integrating this information into their already-established views. As we have written before, our prior assumptions and perceptions about political environments and political actors affect how we perceive and interpret future actions within those environments and by those actors. 

The left often thinks the right is actively engaged in racist ideas. And so the outrage over Hunter Biden’s texts is textbook hypocrisy. 

And in the same way, the right often thinks the left makes everything about race and racism — and after the four years of bashing Trump, to ignore Hunter Biden’s texts is to hypocritically ignore the racism under their own roof.

But when we try to understand the other side’s commentary within their own framework, we realize that a mere reaction is not as clearly hypocritical as we might intuitively believe.

We’re all prone to that quick, instinctive thinking which simplifies our opponents to mere hypocrites, rather than understanding them as the messy, complex beings we all are.

 

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