(Republished from Carter Moon’s Substack)

Depending on how your particular algorithm is oriented, you either spent this week constantly bombarded with clips from Hunter Biden’s almost three-hour interview with YouTube reporter Andrew Callaghan, or you have no idea what I’m talking about. The interview currently has 2.9 million views on YouTube as I’m writing this, but I wouldn’t hold it against you if it completely passed you by. How your algorithm serves you Hunter Biden related content is wildly different based on your preferences; there’s a good chance if you’re reading this that you rarely think about the guy, but if you’re someone who follows Fox or the New York Post, you most likely saw stories about him almost every single day for four years. He exists as a perfect avatar for our fractured and deranged media environment: Either you believe he is the embodiment of everything evil about the depraved political elite, or you see him as a sad, marginal figure in our political culture. The interview is, in my opinion, one of the best documents of how warped our moment is and an incredible act of empathy depicting a man who is a lightning rod of controversy.

Before I go any further, I should acknowledge that Andrew Callaghan was accused of sexual misconduct and assault by multiple women in 2023. He did make an apology that seemingly recognized his harmful patterns of behavior and he took a pause from creating videos to go to a mental health treatment center and evaluate what he did. I’ve mostly stopped watching his stuff, and I would encourage anyone reading this not to buy his videos or support his Patreon. That being said, I think this interview is an incredibly rare insight into the unfiltered thoughts of someone with a close proximity to power, and I’m going to demonstrate why that’s really valuable as a cultural artifact. The interview feels like it has the potential to be this generation’s Frost/Nixon.

There’s an interesting through-line from the recent Epstein controversy to Hunter Biden. Both are figures that right-wing media has relentlessly latched on to convince their audiences that Democratic elites are criminal perverts with no morals. Their actual respective crimes and transgressions are completely divorced from the fantasy world of reactionary propaganda surrounding them. Unlike Epstein, Hunter’s crimes primarily center around a crippling crack addiction and paying escorts, things that are illegal but nothing close to what Epstein did. Yet if you were to stand outside a Trump rally and talk to a dozen people, there’s a good chance someone would mention both names in the same breath. As the Channel 5 interview explores, any story of Hunter’s legal troubles was covered by the right-wing press with accompanying pictures of Hunter naked and at the worst point in his addiction, even if the legal troubles were for something mundane like unpaid taxes. Hunter discusses how for a monthslong period he was mentioned on Fox News every single day. The modern fascist propaganda machine is so effective in part because they are incredibly adept at telling a consistent narrative, no matter how little basis it has in reality. What’s really bizarre is that even if you believe the worst things the Right accuses Hunter of, that he used his father’s political connections to secure lucrative deals in Ukraine, there’s no way that Trump’s own children don’t engage in activities that are brazenly more corrupt by orders of magnitude- Don Jr. opened a private members club selling access to his dad for $500k- but the Right doesn’t care.

One of the best aspects of the interview is how candid Hunter is about his addictions to alcohol and crack. I am a firm believer that everyone needs to listen to actual addicts tell their stories in their own words and Hunter is a gifted storyteller. He is very honest that losing his mother and sister in a car accident was traumatic for him, as was his brother’s death from cancer, but he takes equal responsibility for his actions during his addiction. He talks about how common addiction is; he points out the absurdity of congressional Republicans dragging him in for questioning about his addictions when he knows they are also in recovery themselves. He tells a harrowing story of almost overdosing in a motel hot tub, and a stranger sitting with him until he regained consciousness even though they certainly could have been arrested if he had died. He shares about meeting his wife and their supercharged relationship that lead him to recovery. There’s a really remarkable section where he’s very clear-eyed that his dad’s support for the 1991 Clinton crime bill directly contributed to the mass incarceration crisis we live in, and that he personally pushed his dad to commute the federal sentences of drug users.

In many ways Hunter’s wider political analysis is shockingly clear-eyed. He spends a solid ten minutes explaining the details of Leonard Peltier’s case, who he also pushed to have released. He goes on a remarkable tangent about how the current fascist turn America is experiencing is more akin to the destruction of Reconstruction after the Civil War than it is to Nazi Germany, which is spot-on. He uses his personal experiences with the Right to articulate a broader perspective of how their fascist propaganda machine churns. He sharply criticizes many elements in the modern Democratic party that are infuriatingly inept at meeting the moment.

All in all, it’s the best version of a “Joe Rogan of the Left” experience I’ve seen; the interview is sprawling and feels uncensored and unedited and there’s no sheen of carefully crafted messaging that comes across as inauthentic. People think Rogan’s appeal is purely his hyper-masculine affect, but it’s really that the format of his show allows his audience to feel that they’re getting the raw, authentic version of a person in an interview. It’s why it was so damning that Kamala Harris seemingly couldn’t handle going on his show if her team couldn’t edit the interview after the fact. Hunter does show that a person can unapologetically advocate for the things the Right hates and be listened to and taken seriously, so long as they can come across as genuine and not restrained by special interests.

There’s tons of stuff in the interview that is deeply frustrating. Hunter insists that he had very little influence over Biden’s administration, but later continuously uses the term “we” to refer to his father’s accomplishments. He is rabidly defensive of his father’s legacy, which is to be expected, but he also acts as though his dad was a saint doing everything in his power to protect the people of Gaza and restrain Netenyahu, and that’s not true. His framing of his dad’s ouster from the Democratic nomination is similarly hagiographic, as though his father were a martyr unfairly forced out by feckless elites like George Clooney and Nancy Pelosi. (There’s a very telling moment where he mentions in passing that Clooney was furious with Biden for not getting more aid into Gaza, but Hunter conveniently handwaves that away.) Similarly, there’s a bizarre disconnect where he insists that his father was still fit enough to run for a second term in June of last year while also talking about his father’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Meaning, in fact, that it was a bad idea for him to insist on seeking a second term when he most likely won’t live to the end of this year, our collective intuition that he wasn’t fit to run was in fact correct!

There’s a surreal element to the whole interview; Hunter’s entire affect is eerily similar to Joe’s, so there becomes this uncanny sense that you’re watching the younger version of Joe Biden defend his legacy through his son. Given how unwell Joe Biden is at this point, it honestly is very clarifying to get this perspective. In many ways, the most infuriating parts of the interview are still good to hear, because they are a snapshot of our maddening political moment. Through Hunter, you do get an insight into just how white-hot Joe Biden’s ego is, how deeply he believed that he alone was uniquely suited to meet the moment, despite any evidence to the contrary. Yes, the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act were impressive accomplishments, but we still ultimately saw even more people die of COVID during Biden’s term than Trump’s and we made little progress towards actually hitting net-zero emissions for the country. Hunter touts his dad’s ability to pass bipartisan legislation, but when the opposite party is openly fascist and had just tried to stage an insurrection to keep Biden out of power, maybe that’s not an aisle he should’ve reached across so often without prosecuting Trump and his cronies for treason and permanently removing them from power. On top of that, if Hunter really believes that his dad was fully mentally cognizant for the last year of his presidency, then he fully holds responsibility for the genocide in Gaza. It’s all infuriating because, well, our present political moment is infuriating.

But I don’t mean to rag on the guy too hard, it is almost impossible not to like him if you watch the full interview. Even his defensiveness of his dad is so clearly rooted in a fierce love for the man; it’s hard not to empathize with that to a certain point. And as of right now, Hunter doesn’t have to answer for the same sins as his father; he didn’t personally protect Netanyahu at the UN or sign off on illegal arms shipments to Israel. I’m a deep believer in listening closely to people, in letting them share their honest perspective even if you sharply disagree with them. I spend hours every week listening to podcasts that cover conservatives; even though I believe some of the people I listen to are fascists who deserve a premature end, I also know I’m never going to overcome them if I don’t deeply understand them. And this interview gives a ton of insights into how the American fascist movement operates.

But you should watch it for yourself! Perhaps the best thing the interview accomplishes is being an effective way for you, the audience member, to make up your own mind.