I’ve got one question for Hunter Biden, and I mean it without a drop of sarcasm: what the hell are you doing?
I’ve been watching his media tour, and honestly, a lot of it I liked. After years of being narrated by everyone but himself — his addiction, his relationships, his finances, the laptop, the photos, every humiliating frame of his worst years plastered across the internet — of course the guy finally wants to grab the mic. Of course he wants to say: you’ve all spent a decade telling the country who I am; now I’ll tell you myself. I’d want the same thing.
And he’s committed to it. Per the Wall Street Journal, he’s sat with everyone from Gavin Newsom to Benny Blanco. He’s got a Substack north of 65,000 subscribers. He’s talking about recovery, his father’s presidency, the pardon, the money, the family, the people he thinks treated all of them like garbage.
But he’s also sat down with Tucker Carlson. With Candace Owens. And then, somehow, Hunter Biden ended up in a motel room across from Nick Fuentes.
That’s where he lost me.
I understand the argument, or at least the version of it Hunter seems to be making. The country’s split into sealed-off bubbles. Nobody listens to anybody they disagree with. Maybe if we actually faced each other and talked, we’d find the person across the table isn’t the monster we pictured. That’s a genuinely good instinct. I believe in it. I do it constantly.
Nick Fuentes is not the guy you use to prove the point.
We’re not talking about a Republican congressman who wants lower taxes. Not a conservative voter in Ohio. Not even some die-hard MAGA guy who’s convinced the 2020 election was stolen. We’re talking about Nick Fuentes — a man who has praised Hitler, denied the Holocaust, pushed racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, showed up at Charlottesville, and talked openly about turning America into an authoritarian Christian state.
And that’s not just me disliking his politics. Last year dozens of U.S. senators put forward a resolution that named Fuentes outright as a white supremacist leader and Holocaust denier and laid out years of his own words. He isn’t hiding any of it. So what, exactly, do we learn by treating him like he’s just the far end of a normal political spectrum?
Sit with the math for a second.
Hunter Biden is the son of a former Democratic president — one of the most recognizable political names in the country. Love him or hate him, he walks into any room carrying the weight of someone who’s lived at the dead center of American public life.
Nick Fuentes has spent years trying to crawl out of the fringe and into the mainstream.
So when Hunter sits across from him — jokes with him, spars with him, hunts for common ground with him, treats him as one more voice in the great American conversation — Fuentes collects something he could never buy: normalcy. He gets to look like just another spicy political commentator instead of what he is.
And this isn’t hypothetical. Tucker Carlson already ran this play. When Tucker interviewed Fuentes, the blowback didn’t come only from the left — plenty of conservatives, including Republican senators and right-leaning writers, tore into him, and it kicked off a real fight on the right about whether a Holocaust denier belongs anywhere near mainstream conservatism. Now here comes Hunter Biden — the son of the president those two spent years savaging — helping finish the makeover. You may think you’re confronting these people. They think they’re laundering themselves through you.
If the actual goal is understanding the other side, Hunter has tens of millions of people he could call.
Talk to the Trump voter who watched his plant close. Talk to a conservative cop. Talk to an evangelical pastor, a Republican vet, somebody who pulled the lever for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024. Talk to a young guy who got swallowed by the MAGA corner of the internet and ask him how it happened. Hell, talk to an elected Republican who actually has to stand behind these policies. Those conversations might teach us something real.
But Fuentes, Carlson, Owens? There’s this rot in the media where extremism becomes interesting precisely because it’s extreme, so the most outrageous person keeps getting the invitation while the 70 million ordinary people who simply disagree with you never get asked a single question.
The Journal quotes people close to Hunter describing him as liberated. The family’s out of the White House. The old constraints are gone. He spent years watching strangers autopsy the darkest stretch of his life, and now he’s doing it “on my terms, not yours.”
I feel that one in my bones.
Most people know me from the worst day of my life. A life that, ever since, keeps getting flattened into a single afternoon — the one where the whole world watched me, in vivid detail, clawing to stay alive, powerless and alone in a crowd of rioters who wanted me dead.
People still assume that because I was at the Capitol on January 6th I was Capitol Police. No matter how many times I say it, most of them never register that I spent nearly two decades as a deputized plainclothes narcotics officer — undercover work, major cases, helping federal agencies go after some of the biggest drug-trafficking operations in modern American history. To most pundits and most of the political establishment I’m still just “the January 6th guy,” wheeled out whenever a January 6th story comes up, like some sick Groundhog Day where I get to relive the worst trauma of my life for the millionth time. You would not believe how hard it is to get anyone to see you as more than a single-issue trauma victim.
And because what happened to me became a political football, I’ve eaten countless death threats aimed at me and my family, gotten trolled by the right on a loop, been accused of every conspiratorial thing you can imagine — when all I ever wanted was to keep being a cop, a dad, a friend, and otherwise a blissfully anonymous nobody.
So yeah. When Hunter Biden talks about being reduced to a caricature of his worst moment, I don’t just nod along politely. I get it.
He’s an addict in recovery. He’s talked openly about smoking crack in motel rooms, torching relationships, nearly ending himself — and then watching the whole ordeal repackaged as political entertainment. So maybe when he looks at people the public has branded irredeemable, some reflex in him thinks: I know what it’s like to be written off.
That’s human. It might even be decent. But there is a canyon between addiction and ideology. Addiction is something that happens to a person. White supremacy is something a person chooses to believe. You don’t help somebody recover from Holocaust denial by treating it like one more colorful point of view.
And to be clear — I want Hunter to succeed. Genuinely. He survived the thing that kills most people. He’s rebuilt real pieces of his life. He’s willing to say out loud what most of us would spend our lives burying. There may be something valuable he can bring to this country’s conversation.
But if you’re going to build your second act on radical honesty and talking to people no one else will, you’d better learn to spot when you’re the one being used. Because Carlson and Fuentes know precisely what Hunter Biden is worth to them. A photo is valuable. A friendly exchange is valuable. A two-hour hang where everybody laughs and argues and lands on “we’re all just Americans trying to understand each other” is priceless — because the next time somebody says Fuentes sits outside the bounds of decent politics, he points to the former Democratic president’s son beside him and says: apparently not.
I’m all for talking to people you disagree with. We need more of it, not less. So if you’re watching this — reach out to my team, name a time and place, and I’ll sit down with you myself. I’ll say my piece, you say yours. I mean it.
But this particular strategy — cozying up to the far right in the name of dialogue — is dangerous. Disagreement and extremism are not the same animal. You don’t heal a fractured country by pretending every idea has earned an equal seat at the table. And you sure as hell don’t beat extremists by helping them scrub the very history that made them extremists.
Hunter says he’s finally speaking on his own terms. Good. But you’d better figure out whose terms everyone else in that room is playing by — or you’re going to get played, and the whole country eats the cost.
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