"Hunter is... a domestic offender of a more mundane stripe, his misdeeds largely outside the reach of the law, involving serious harm..."

"... not to the American taxpayer but to the family that is, per the Biden fantasy, the beginning, the middle, and the end. Of all the anecdotes in these four memoirs, the one that I think about the most is from 'If We Break.' It is the spring of 2002, and Buhle, then the mother of a baby, a toddler, and an eight-year-old, is enjoying a rare night out with a friend in New York City, a two-hour train trip from her home in Wilmington. Her friend urges her to stay overnight; Buhle calls Hunter, who says it’s fine. But then she asks him to take Naomi, their oldest child, to Sunday school the next morning. 'No,' Buhle recalls him saying. 'I’m not going to do that, Kathleen.' So Buhle boards a train home in the middle of the night, arriving at 5 a.m. to the sight of Hunter and a group of friends smoking and drinking in front of the family’s fireplace. The kids, it seems, are at their grandparents’ house.... What explains... this ostentatious defiance of basic responsibility, this refusal to be fully part of the family you’ve created? Can this mind-set be blamed on addiction? Trauma? The learned helplessness of men in heterosexual partnerships? The ego-warping effects of a famous last name? Are dirtbags born or made? And what, in the end, is a father good for?"

Writes Jessica Winter, in "Hunter Biden and the Things Left Unsaid/The President’s son is a ubiquitous topic of conversation. But, in four Biden-family memoirs, silence is the undercurrent that tugs at a voluble, demonstrative clan" (The New Yorker).

Buhle = Kathleen Buhle, Hunter's first wife, author of the memoir "If We Break."

"[S]ilence is the undercurrent that tugs at a voluble, demonstrative clan" — what a phrase! "Voluable" means talking incessantly. Picture, if you can, blabbermouths dragged down by an undertow consisting of silence.

There's a word for the fear of silence: sedatephobia.