What is Hunter Biden Doing?

I have a question for Hunter Biden.

What the fuck are you doing?

I’ve been watching his media tour, and some of it I actually like.

After years of having every humiliating detail about his addiction and his relationships blasted across the internet, I understand why the guy wants to speak for himself.

I get it.

I really do.

And he’s doing it, for the most part, in perfectly acceptable venues. He’s gone on Gavin Newsom’s podcast, and launched a Substack, “Where’s Hunter?” He’s been talking about recovery, his father’s presidency, his pardon, his money problems, and many more details it’s worth sharing with the public

But he’s also sitting down with Tucker Carlson. And on July 24, Hunter Biden spent nearly two hours in a studio dressed up as a seedy motel room, across the table from the youtuber Andrew Callaghan and Nick Fuentes.

That’s where you lose me.

I understand the argument Hunter seems to be making.

America really is divided, and everybody lives in an information bubble. Maybe if we sat across from each other we’d find the other side isn’t as bad as we imagined. Sure, that makes sense.

But Nick Fuentes is not the guy you use to demonstrate that.

We’re not talking about a Republican congressman who disagrees with Democrats about taxes or whatever.

No, this guy has praised Hitler, denied the Holocaust, and talked openly about turning America into an authoritarian Christian theocracy. He’s not even hiding this shit: he’s proud of his racism and antisemitism.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the interview happened because Fuentes reached out — looking, in THR’s words, to do an interview “that would shift perceptions about his brand.”

This was obviously what Fuentes was up to. And Hunter Biden has now found polishing this asshole’s public image. Did he know, or was he too foolish to realize? I don’t know what’s worse.

To be fair, Hunter and Fuentes fought over race, Israel, antisemitism, cancel culture, and Trump. At one point it reportedly got heated enough that Callaghan had to step in before it turned physical. And when Fuentes described Jewish people with dehumanizing slurs, Hunter told him he didn’t know anybody who could take him seriously after that.

Good. But none of that undoes the damage, because the damage was done the moment they sat down across from one another in front of the cameras.

Fuentes wasn’t really there to win an argument against Hunter. He didn’t need to: all he really needed was a photo-op of them side-by-side.

Think about the asymmetry here. Hunter Biden is the son of a Democratic president, one of the most recognizable political names in America. Whatever you think of him, he’s been at the center of American political life. But Nick Fuentes has spent years trying to climb out of the political sewer into the mainstream.

When Hunter sits across from him, jokes with him, argues with him, and finds occasional common ground with him (which they did, both criticizing Trump) Fuentes gets the one thing he cannot manufacture for himself: normalcy.

He gets to look like one more controversial commentator on the American spectrum.

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That’s exactly what Tucker Carlson attempted to do with Fuentes last fall. When he had the guy on his podcast, they had a friendly conversation about how “organized Jewry” was the main obstacle to holding the country together.

It nearly tore the right in half: Ben Shapiro called Carlson “the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America,” and Mitch McConnell publicly slapped the Heritage Foundation for defending him. Once Heritage’s president dismissed the critics as a “venomous coalition,” at least five members of Heritage’s own antisemitism task force resigned in protest.

Conservatives, in other words, have fought furiously over whether Nick Fuentes belongs anywhere near mainstream discourse. But now the son of the Democratic president has showed up to finish the job for Fuentes’s allies.

You may think you’re confronting these people, but they’re laundering themselves through you.

There’s a second thing that bothers me. If the goal is actually understanding the other side, there are millions of other Americans to talk to.

Talk to a Trump voter who lost his job at a factory, or an evangelical pastor, or a Republican veteran. Talk to somebody who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Donald Trump in 2024, or a young man who fell down the far-right rabbit hole on the internet, and ask him why.

But that’s never who gets booked. That’s a tendency in media: extremists like Fuentes get all the attention, regardless of how unrepresentative they are of America writ large. Everyone wants to hear from the most outrageous people there are, and the seventy million normal people who disagree with you just get written out of the story.

Look. I fuckin’ get it. Most people know me because of the worst day of my life — a life that has been reduced, over and over, to a single day when everyone watched me, in vivid detail, clinging to life in a sea of rioters who wanted me dead.

People still assume I was Capitol Police. I’ve tried to correct the record a thousand times, but it never sticks: I actually spent almost twenty years as a deputized plainclothes narcotics officer.

Still, to most pundits and producers, I’m just the January 6th guy, paraded out whenever the anniversary rolls around. It’s a twisted groundhog day where I get to relive my PTSD for the fifth time.

Then there are the death threats against me and my family, the trolling, the conspiracy theories. All I ever wanted was to be a cop, a dad, a friend, and otherwise a blissfully anonymous nobody.

Hunter Biden watched his life story be twisted into political entertainment. It makes sense that he sympathizes with people society has declared irredeemable. That’s human, and I get it.

But addiction is something that happens to a person, and white supremacy is something a person believes. And you can’t help somebody recover from vile political extremism by treating their beliefs as one more interesting political perspective.

I want Hunter Biden to succeed. He rebuilt his whole life, and talks openly about things most people would spend forever running from. There’s probably something real he can contribute.

But he’s gotta know when he’s the one being used.

Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes know exactly what Hunter Biden is worth. A photo with him is valuable, and a friendly exchange is worth more. But a two-hour conversation that ends in we’re-all-Americans-here is priceless.

I’m all for talking to people you disagree with. I do it constantly, and this country needs more of it.

So Hunter: if you’re reading this, name a time and a place and I’ll sit down with you myself. I’ll say my piece and you can say yours.

But you can’t heal a fractured country by giving every idea an equal seat.

Hunter says he’s finally speaking on his own terms. Good. But he’d better figure out whose terms everyone else in that room is playing by, or he’s going to get fucking played.