Why did we deserve Hunter's 'laptop' but not the Trump hacks?
MAGA has benefited from the few restraints in our system, which Trump lackeys like Musk have done their worst to destroy
It’s been almost three weeks since the Trump campaign confirmed reports that it had been hacked.
The intelligence community has swiftly identified Iran as behind the attack that led to the intrusion, which the Trump campaign claims only accessed “publicly available” data. Yet nothing from the hack appears to have been posted online, as the newspapers that were sent the data have refrained from publication. Nothing.
No stolen documents, no emails, or no dick pics. Not even a risotto recipe.
We could roil about how the media went wild over Wikileaks’ publication of emails from the DNC and John Podesta’s hacked Gmail account.
Or we could scream about how the press has continually ripped stories from Hunter Biden’s “laptop” without ever asking why we deserved unfettered access to the private data of Joe Biden’s shady kid and not the same access to the devices of the incomprehensibly shady Jared Kushner or Donald Trump Jr.?
The overly ripe irony of this moment is too sour even to attempt to swallow.
Trump is benefiting from precisely the sort of restraint he’s spent his life trying to destroy, the kind of restraint that asks decent people to step back and say, “What now, again?” We haven’t seen any of the Trump hacks because of a safeguard that came about explicitly to protect candidates from the sort of foreign influence hacks and leaks that Trump has solicited and weaponized since 2016.
In a free bonus episode of Ball of Thread, Marcy explains that publications have adhered to guidelines issued by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center in March 2020 in response to the Trump hacks in the decision not to publish.
We all know what sort of hell would be raised through all the dimmest corners of the MAGAverse if this sort of restraint were shown with known hacked data from Kamala Harris or any Democrat. Republicans like Jim Jordan, Matt Taibbi, and Elon Musk would be bleating a familiar chorus: “Cen-sor-ship!”
We know this because that’s what they’ve been labeling any attempt to contain foreign influence operations. They’ve raged against any collaboration between public and private institutions, suggesting that coordination is an epic scandal so massive that it required Musk to blow $40 billion to buy Twitter and then hack and leak the company’s employees.
These ironies have benefited Trump so far. However, Marcy notes that weakening the systems designed to protect America inevitably can endanger any American, even—or, perhaps, especially—Donald Trump.
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