Joe Biden
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW,
Washington, DC 20500, USA
Dear President Biden,
I saw reports that you are planning to pardon not only criminals like your scumbag son, but also people who haven’t committed any crimes and are under no suspicion and haven’t done anything wrong.
That is a brilliant idea! I hate Franz Kafka and have always wanted to write an anti-Kafka novel. You just gave me the plot: A spotlessly innocent, law-abiding protagonist wakes up one morning and discovers that the President of the United States just issued him a blanket pardon covering all crimes he may have committed, may be currently committing, or may commit in the future. The protagonist grows paranoid, wondering why he has been singled out for such anti-persecution. He makes inquiries at various government bureaucracies, desperately trying to find out why the President thinks he needs a pardon. But naturally, he comes up empty. He is being gratuitously anti-persecuted!
Such gratuitous anti-persecution takes a toll on his mental health. He keeps thinking the President must know something he doesn’t. Did he accidentally commit a crime, perhaps even a terrible one, and somehow forget about it? Could he have sleepwalked, or fallen into a fugue state, and robbed a bank, murdered a sweet little old lady, or (God forbid) torn the tag off a mattress?
Or could it be that the White House has developed pre-crime technology as envisaged in Minority Report? “Does Biden know that I will, in the future, for reasons I can’t even imagine, become a criminal? Is there anything I could do now to make sure that doesn’t happen? Or is it inevitable? Might there be different quantum timelines, most of which include me becoming a criminal, but a few of which don’t? How can I enter a non-criminal timeline and make sure I stay there? Or should I just gracefully accept the pardon, and the possibility that I might someday need to use it?” The protagonist worries himself sick, falls asleep, wakes up, and discovers that he has been transformed into a gigantic insect bearing a certain resemblance to Hunter Biden.
So please, Hairsniffer Joe—pardon me, I mean, Mr. President, sir—it occurs to me that, like the protagonist in that anti-Kafka story, not to mention certain cronies of yours, my spotless innocence should offer no barrier to my receiving a presidential pardon. Though I am a paradigmatic law-abiding citizen to the Nth degree, powerful forces have demonstrated their willingness to try to shut me up using immoral and possibly illegal means. I have been targeted by Fox News, debanked by Stripe, deplatformed by Patreon and YouTube, and recklessly libeled by the AP and the Atlantic Council, viciously attacked by the President of France, and slandered for years and finally cancelled by Wikipedia, for starters.
So there is a chance, hopefully a negligible one, that nefarious actors might one day try to frame me for a crime I did not commit. If I were the proud possessor of a presidential pardon in perpetuity, they almost certainly wouldn’t bother. So of all the spotlessly innocent people on Earth, I am one of the very few who might conceivably benefit from a blanket pardon.
Thank you for your indulgence, and I look forward to receiving that pardon from you at the earliest possible opportunity.
Sincerely
Dr. Kevin Barrett