An actress goes on the casting couch, that is she sleeps for roles. She becomes rich and famous. Other women have more compunctions. They wither on the vine.

The actress has learned a powerful lesson. There is a side door to everything. She has college-bound kids now. She’ll just bribe college admissions officials to get them in. Into Yale, other Ivy Leagues, Stanford, the creme de la creme. What she doesn’t realize or doesn’t care to realize is that every seat her undeserving kids take, another meritorious candidate is denied.

There is a US Senator called Josh Hawley. He is a Republican from the state of Missouri. Hawley wrote a book. One of the premier publishers in the US, Simon and Schuster, picked up his book. The book is something about Big Tech and how evil it is. Republicans are furious that Twitter bounced their godman from its platform. It’s unclear what qualifications Hawley has to write the book, or to even be a writer.

Maybe it’s one of those ghostwritten deals. If you are in the business of publishing, you will note that ghostwriters are everywhere. It’s a lucrative profession. So many senators want their book published. The publishing house doesn’t care about the quality of the book or that someone else other than the purported writer wrote it. The senator has name recognition. The book will sell. That’s all that matters to the publisher.

Ever wonder why despite being a native-English speaking country America produces such few quality writers in English. Senators like Hawley push out quality writers who may not have the platform that they do. So America produces junk in massive quantities.

Came January 6 this year. The US Capitol was attacked by hordes of white supremacists, KKK members, QAnon members, Proud Boys and the rest of them. Their godfather had been thrashed fair and square in the elections and they didn’t like it one bit. Five or six people died in the insurrection. The white boys threatened to kill vaunted members of Congress. These members of Congress were Hawley’s colleagues.

What was Hawley busy doing during the insurrection? He was raising a fist in public in support of the proud boys. Simon and Schuster pulled his book. But another major publisher, Regnery, snapped him up. Regnery says that it is against cancel culture, so that’s why it is publishing the book. It feels that anybody should be allowed to say anything. For four long years, the godfather was spewing hate on Twitter. It was only when Twitter could not spew his hate any further that it blocked him. Otherwise it benefitted from his hate traffic all these years. Facebook too.

White supremacy is a rotten ideology. Joe Biden campaigned against white supremacy and won the election. What are the two things one notices about Biden? One, that his life has been consumed with tragedy. And second, it’s that stutter. As someone who has his own disabilities, you can’t help but relate to that stutter, and how a man with such an impediment since childhood overcame it to win the most powerful office in the world, even to get to where he has had to think about his stutter every second of every day.

That’s what makes Biden so endearing. That’s why you wish he completes his first term in rude health, and the second one as well. Time alone will tell. But let it be known. People voted for Joe. For Joe alone. For Joe alone has the stutter. They didn’t vote for Jill or Hunter or Kamala or anyone else. All of them are baggage that Joe has carried with him to the White House.

People were so fed up with the godfather that they forgave the perceived transgressions of Joe’s son, Hunter. Hunter has a drug addiction that he is battling, as his father confessed so directly on the campaign train. No matter, many people have addictions, many for no fault of their own. Hunter could be one of them. While Joe was vice president, Hunter got a board seat at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, which paid him in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s unclear what Hunter’s qualifications were to sit on the board of an energy company.The general feeling was that Hunter would keep a very low profile during Biden’s presidency.

But that is not proving to be the case. Suddenly Hunter has discovered the artsy-fartsy within himself. His art will go on display at a prestigious New York gallery this year. Simon and Schuster (them again) are publishing his book, which can only be described as Hunter’s musings. Now all of us will get to benefit from Hunter’s pearls of wisdom.US press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about Hunter’s dealings with a Chinese company. She responded that he was a private citizen and that the question was best posed directly to him. Is Hunter a private citizen? As the president’s son, which he has become for no reason other than the grace of God, Hunter finds himself at the apex of Washingtonian glitterati.

There is no elite like the Washington elite. They truly believe that they rule the world. And Hunter rules them now.So his paintings sell now. His books do too. In about two weeks into the Biden presidency, he has become a Renaissance man. And you, the writer? You have been dredging it out for 11 long years, trying to build your platform. Is it a million people now? Half a million? Two million? It’s hard to say. The Internet is fickle with numbers. But your platform is never large enough for the Simon and Schusters and the Regnerys of the world.You, the writer, you are not a notorious fist-pumping senator supporting an assault on your own office, against your own colleagues.

Now you, the senator, want to become president in 2024. Make sure to highlight your white power salute. And you, the writer, you are not the drug-addled son of a president. For he is not a private citizen when art galleries and publishers rush to his door. He is only a private citizen when he has shady deals to conceal.

The writer is an expert on energy and contributes regularly to publications in India and overseas.