Tucker Carlson began his top-rated Fox News program with a startling and disturbing comparison of the treatment of Joe Biden's family with the way that children of dictators are treated in places like Iraq under Saddam.  (Hasty transcription by me.)

You know you're living in a non-democracy when it's dangerous to displease the ne'er do well children of the supreme leader. If you were, for example, at a red light in pre-invasion Baghdad, and Uday Hussein came screaming up behind you in his Lamborghini, you got the hell out of the way and you did not complain about it, because Uday's dad ran the place and you did not want to make him mad. You might end up like the members of his personal soccer team who dared to miss penalty kicks.

That's what third world countries are like. All citizens are not equal in countries like that. Power derives from proximity to power. That means the second most powerful people in a country like that are the children of the leader. And very often, they don't have jobs and are addicted to something. That's the way it works in places like that.

And for a long time, that sort of system seemed very foreign to most Americans. They were used to living in a democracy. They could barely even imagine it.

But then, during the last presidential campaign, Joe Biden's daughter abandoned her diaries, in a house she was staying at in Florida, after she got out of rehab. And in that diary, Ashley Biden recounted how her father had taken showers with her when she was young, and she attributed her later sexual compulsions to that experience with her father. So by any standard, that seemed like clear evidence of abuse. And yet so far as we know, no law enforcement agency ever asked Joe Biden about it.

Instead, once he became president, Joe Biden's FBI raided the home of journalist James O'Keefe and seized the evidence. Ashley Biden's diary was taken by force and has never been seen again.  So the message was unmistakable: when Uday Hussein blows by in his Lamborghini, get out of the way, peasant. Princelings have power, you do not.

By the way, Hunter Biden's whole life has been a monument to that message. Despite a decades-long drug problem and no record of legitimate achievement of any kind, Hunter Biden has managed to accumulate the highest possible academic credentials. Georgetown and Yale Law!

Tucker went on to discuss Hunter Biden's laptop, abandoned at John Paul Mac Isaac's repair shop in Delaware, and Hunter's lawyers' yesterday demanding that both the federal government and the state government of Delaware prosecute him for "crimes" that were unspecified but, as Beria told Stalin, can always be dredged up.  Given that his toady Merrick Garland runs the DoJ and that Delaware's A.G. Kathy Jennings is an enthusiastic Biden-supporter for decades and formerly worked for Beau Biden (Tucker's treatment of her is compelling), these requests have a lot of force in a system where proximity to the leader equals real power.

Watch the whole thing.  It may very well change the way you think about our current political reality.  

Photo credit: YouTube screen grab.