On The Sheer Unthinkable Coldness of the Biden Family

Among the squalid dysfunctional pathologies of postmodern life that are still seen as broadly tolerable, perhaps none is more contemptible than the abandonment of one’s child. Bad parenting is not good; divorce is worse; but turning your back on your own children sets you apart form the average loser and elevates you at minimum to the level of lifetime scumbag. Child abandonment is a great clarifier, a moral divider, like a gram stain for a person’s character. Maybe it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to you; maybe that’s because you were never abandoned by your parents.

Hunter Biden has abandoned his own child. The president’s son has not only turned his face away from his daughter but has also successfully petitioned a judge to bar his daughter from using his name. How singularly cold and cruel can you get? It is heartless beyond calculation. At what point does one reach one’s tolerance for cruelty? Can you think of any good reason why a man would want to deny his name to the child he created? Don’t let your partisan instincts confuse you here. You can make a joke—"He’s doing her a favor, the Biden name isn’t worth much, heh heh heh”—but once you’re done laughing you have to really think about this. What will this little girl think when she grows old enough to contemplate her own provenance? How will she order herself in the world, knowing that the man she might have called daddy couldn’t even call her by his own name and literally begged a judge to make it illegal for her to call herself by it? Can you think about what that might do to a young child, and to the adult the child will become?

The Biden family has likewise abandoned this little girl. They refuse to speak of her, she is left out of public family acknowledgements, she does not even get a stocking on the annual Biden family Christmas promenade. The level of familial perfidy on display here is breathtaking, especially for an American political dynasty that has cashed in so lucratively on its own family dynamics. Joe Biden can’t go ninety minutes without mentioning his dead wife or his dead son, but he has a living granddaughter of which he’s never publicly spoken even once.

It is cold, so cold—treating a little girl as if she is a hated little bastard child, an inconvenient intrusion on a president’s decades-long political aspirations. But it goes even beyond that. This is not the 1800s or even the 1960s. Nobody cares if your family has a child born out of wedlock anymore. Honestly nobody cares about it to a fault—we should be more critical about having babies before you get married. It’s not a good thing, for the baby or for anyone. But that’s really only a debate over potential children—it’s a question of a conjectural child, not a born one. Navy Joan is actual. She exists. She is a real little girl with real thoughts and feelings and needs, none of which are apparently being met by her father or her grandfather or any other member of her paternal family. It is as if they quietly despise her. Imagine if you knew someone personally who was behaving this way to his own child. What would you think of that person? Do distance and celebrity really negate the breathtaking scummery of this behavior?

I am not sure how anyone could excuse something so awful, from either father or grandfather. It is a mystery to me. I understand there are justifiable reasons for voting for someone even in spite of such failings. But can we admit that Hunter Biden is actively and willingly and publicly doing something terrible and hateful to a small child? Can we stop pretending that the old man is some warm, genial grandfatherly figure but rather a cruel and nasty ? Let us at least acknowledge the cold, almost unfeeling callousness on display from this family, if for no other sake than for Navy Joan’s.