Tl:Dr (what, it would kill you?)

With the change in the House I have a feeling we're going to be hearing a lot about Hunter Biden's Laptop in the coming months, so I broke it down for you https://t.co/bSEZK7LADW

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) January 10, 2023

Ms. Rangappa refers to this as a three-part formula used by psychologists studying conspiracy theories:

What is the evidence for your claim? 

What is the source of evidence for this claim?  

What is the reasoning that links your evidence back to the claim?

Which is a bit of an appeal to authority, frankly; because these are the basic analytical questions I learned in law school. Useful not just for examining conspiracy theories, but for evaluating any claim. I use them in academic research, or any time there is a claim requiring substantiation. So these are fundamental questions, applicable to a wide range of fields. Ms. Rangappa applies them well here. If you want the details, she has them. If you want the short version, read on.

To me, the crux of the biscuit is the validity of this hard drive. In brief, a legally blind man received (he says; my legal training and simple logic say “assume nothing.”) three laptops from a man identifying himself as Hunter Biden. This does raise the question:

how a blind computer repairman in Delaware and the president’s personal lawyer just happened to come into possession of the entire contents of a hard drive belonging to the troubled son of the president’s political opponent.

How indeed? That’s actually a very critical question, because the whole matter comes back to the legitimacy of the source.

There are two scandals here. One is the contents of the laptop; the other is the Twitter files. That’s the Hunter Biden part of the conspiracy: that the FBI coerced Twitter into stifling this story. The evidence for this is selected email messages and even more selective interpretations. Interpretations are not facts, but facts do not speak for themselves. Which is why conspiracy theories run on assertions, not on facts. But without facts, interpretations are groundless.

I discard the Twitter Files out of hand. They barely merit the attention Rangappa gives them. But the files are part of Scandal 2, as she calls it. Scandal 1 was supposed to be the laptop but that never caught on.

Zooming back, the best way to understand the Hunter Biden Laptop saga is this: Scandal 2 is essentially a temper tantrum over the fact that the attempt to create a narrative around Scandal 1 didn’t work out as planned.

Framing is definition: the frame contains the picture. Outside the frame is just wall. The picture is the point; the frame its definition. Scandal 1 was framed as a scandal, complete with emails as damning as those presented in the Twitter files. But the provenance of those emails is dubious (details in the article), and nobody’s really buying the underlying narrative (laptops left in a repair shop? Seriously?), so the second scandal is meant to sell the first.

It’s all pointless bullshit, in other words. The only point is to throw shit around. But you knew that, didn’t you?