Right-wing media looks to have made a profound miscalculation. They put Hunter Biden through an unrelenting public pressure cooker, convinced that by turning a private citizen’s darkest personal rock bottom into a daily political circus, they could break both the man and his family. Now, seven years into his sobriety, Biden has picked up a podcast mic and won’t stop talking. The man whom the right spent years trying to destroy is now walking into rooms they open up for him — and setting them on fire from the inside.

For the better part of the past decade, conservative media made a concerted effort to turn Biden into the ultimate avatar of political corruption: the degenerate failson as a symbol of Democratic rot. During his father Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, the right devoted extensive attention to Hunter’s overseas business dealings, particularly his role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and allegations stemming from a laptop Hunter owned that surfaced in GOP hands shortly before the election. The laptop story became a defining example of modern media dynamics after the major social media companies temporarily limited distribution of an October 2020 New York Post article that included information taken from the laptop, a decision that conservatives still cite as evidence of a massive, multi-institution coverup. Republican lawmakers spent endless congressional hours investigating his digital footprint, but were ultimately unable to establish that the elder Biden had engaged in a criminal bribery scheme tied to his son’s business activities. 

The meandering story is what makes the current public rehabilitation of Hunter Biden one of the stranger spectacles in American politics. Right-wing media turned him into a household name to hurt his father, and now that notoriety is precisely what gives him leverage. 

Having emerged from severe addiction, public humiliation and federal prosecution, Biden is now truth-telling about his past and single-handedly roasting the right wing’s bad-faith outrage ecosystem on its own home turf. This year alone Biden has sat for hours-long interviews with independent outlets that cater to the very audience the GOP spent a decade cultivating against his family. He talked to Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5, whose YouTube following runs past three million and skews toward people who trust almost nothing coming out of U.S. institutions. He talked to Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who spent years amplifying allegations against him. Ryan then hooked him up with MAGA podcaster Candace Owens, who once called him a degenerate who belonged in prison. 

Biden’s media strategy is dangerous and fascinating. He has described his media blitz as partly about addiction recovery and partly about strategy. Independent podcasts and YouTube channels have replaced the legacy media gatekeepers that used to referee these fights, and Biden figured out faster than most Democratic operatives that the audience he needed to reach was sitting in exactly the media ecosystem built to hate him. “No one gives a shit with what anybody says on CNN,” he told one interviewer, arguing that years of investigations and public scrutiny had lowered expectations to the point where audiences were surprised simply to hear him speak coherently at length. His approach appears designed to replace years of secondhand portrayals with direct exposure. 

Biden’s rapid growth on X further underscores this tactical evolution. Joining Elon Musk’s platform just days before his interview with Owens dropped, Biden began tweeting with relentless energy, sometimes authoring over 100 posts a day. Commentators quickly dubbed him a “MAGA whisperer” as he systematically dismantled right-wing talking points and exposed media figures he accused of building careers off bad-faith attacks. When CNN anchor Jake Tapper published a scathing review of Jill Biden’s memoir — which defended the former president’s fitness for office — Hunter immediately went on the offensive, blasting Tapper and corporate media for what he viewed as complicity in weaponizing personal family dynamics for television ratings.

Biden’s new approach mixes vulnerability with nuclear-grade anger. Instead of avoiding controversy, he frequently addresses it head on. On a Barstool Sports podcast this week, he joked about signing a laptop and openly discussed his struggles with crack cocaine addiction. For a movement that has invested years in hyping “Hunter’s laptop” as a civilization-ending scandal, seeing the man himself turn it into a potential merchandising opportunity should be humiliating.

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On that same Barstool appearance, he delivered an expletive-filled rant about Donald Trump’s entire family: “F**k him. F**k his sons. F**k his daughter. I mean it, all of them, the whole family, down to the grandchildren. I hope for the rest of time that I am on this earth, that their names live in ignominy.” Biden backed that rage up with a substantive critique, pointing out that the Trump sons received $3.2 billion in Defense Department contracts in just 18 months and that son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite holding no government position, is reportedly receiving more than $110 million from the Saudis, tied to nuclear enrichment authorization and billions in investment funds. 

But Biden is also reaching out beyond the right-wing media ecosystem. He has appeared on NPR’s “Newsmakers,” podcasts hosted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Don Lemon, and the “I’ve Had It” podcast with hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan. Yet his aggressive, unapologetic posture does not spare Democrats. He has openly torched party leaders who pressured his father to abandon his 2024 reelection bid following the president’s disastrous debate performance, specifically calling out Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a “piece of s**t” for his role in pushing his father aside. “I’m not running for anything, so I can say whatever the f**k I want,” Hunter Biden declared, giving voice to millions of frustrated progressives who are sick and tired of watching Democratic leaders play by polite, outdated rules while right-wing extremists burn down democratic norms. 

It makes you wonder: Had the party embraced Biden’s willingness to fight back early on, perhaps they could have deployed one of the most effective anti-MAGA communicators in the country to stop Trump’s return.

To be certain, Biden’s media strategy has generated intense criticism, especially his decision to sit down with the extreme, far-right activist Nick Fuentes. The interview, filmed in a Philadelphia studio dressed up to resemble a seedy motel in a wink at the laptop scandal, quickly became a viral sensation, generating millions of views. During the interview, which reportedly nearly escalated into a physical confrontation, the two found common ground, trading skepticism about American support for Israel, with Fuentes framing his objections as political rather than religious, a distinction that will comfort no one who has watched what he actually says about Jews. When discussing their public reputations, Biden joked, “I’m a crackhead,” to which Fuentes replied, “I’m a racist,” prompting Biden to shoot back, “Mine is true!”

Biden defended the pairing on social media in terms that sound almost reasonable — until you remember who he is talking about. He argued that people who profit from keeping Americans separated have built a business model on it, and that he would sit down with anyone who sees Trump as an enemy, regardless of what else they believe. He was explicit that Fuentes’ views on race and women are indefensible, and that what Fuentes has said about the Holocaust and Nazism cannot be defended. But he argued that one issue — stopping Trump — mattered more than any daylight between him and a man who leads an online movement built substantially on racial grievance. 

This is a coherent argument. It is also the argument every troll counts on succeeding, because it leads and allows audiences to conclude that platforming extremist speech and views like Fuentes’ is a savvy tactical maneuver rather than what it actually is: a laundering operation. In this particular wash cycle, Fuentes needed laundering a great deal more than Biden needed an outlet. 

The instinct to give Fuentes and people like him a bigger microphone under the banner of anti-Trump unity deserves more skepticism. There is no common ground with someone whose political project is ethno-nationalist authoritarianism, and treating a two-hour conversation as evidence that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” echoes the bad faith politics that lets extremists claim they were misunderstood or “just joking” the whole time. It’s just whitewashing bigotry for clicks. 

But Hunter Biden’s choice to sit with Fuentes exposes something crucial about our current media environment. At a moment when fascism is organizing through podcasts and X feeds, he has stumbled into a role Democrats should have desperately filled: that of a loud, media-savvy fighter who doesn’t care about decorum. By owning his flaws and speaking directly to the public, Biden has stripped the right-wing outrage machine of its primary power source.

The post Right-wing media can’t quit Hunter Biden appeared first on Salon.com.

The Vibe Shifts Again

After the 2024 election, there was quite a bit of focus on the increasingly right-wing ecosystem of podcasts, streaming video and social media clips in which a vast number of Americans were stewing. But a fascinating New York Times analysis published this morning finds that world fraying, with right-wing influencers feuding with one another and audiences declining from early 2025 through today.

The article highlights the role that unpopular issues for Trump — the Iran war, the continually increasing cost of living — have played in making the whole thing less fun. Though the Times article does not go here, it strikes me too that Israel and Gaza have also confused this world, with various reactionary celebrities sorting themselves among those who are more antisemitic and those who are more Islamophobic and critiquing one another accordingly.

Much of this crew has tried to find an edge by continuing to criticize those with power — which now include many former ideological allies. Alex Jones, somewhat comically, called for Trump to be impeached over Iran this week. Tucker Carlson has been similarly critical of the war as he makes dark insinuations about Israel’s control of the U.S. government. Nick Fuentes has become deeply critical of Trump. And Candace Owens, famously, has spun up new narratives about how Charlie Kirk’s killing was an inside job orchestrated by Israel or fellow right-wing activists.

Part of what’s been hard for Democrats in recent years is the party is one supportive of institutions and, more broadly, the power of government to be a force for good. This can be a tough sell during a time when institutions racked up a long record of repeated failures and as many Americans see themselves backsliding. It’s a problem politicians from Chuck Schumer to Zohran Mamdani have had to contend with (and have done so with wildly different degrees of success).

But Trump has ironically now put right-wing podcasts in a similar position: Their guy runs the institutions, and he has used them to invade American cities and launch an unpopular and deepening quagmire in Iran. He refused to make public, and then only begrudgingly, sloppily and selectively released, the Epstein files. Podcaster-turned deputy FBI director-turned podcaster Dan Bongino illustrates this trajectory especially comically; he made his career boosting conspiracy theories, entered the government and declared many of his former ideas to be ill-founded; and now is attempting to establish himself, without much success, on the outside again. He “has seen his livestream views shrink by about half from their peak in 2024,” the Times writes.

Blanche Still Stuck

The latest development in the Blanche confirmation saga came midday yesterday, with Trump threatening to pull the nomination until after the midterms, when Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, the two Republicans who want more reassurances from Blanche, will be gone from the Senate, thanks in large part to Trump. “I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office,” he wrote.

• While surely a bummer for Blanche, this whole thing remains more about how the Senate functions under Trump than the future of the DOJ: Blanche can continue to serve as acting attorney general for the duration of Trump’s term.
• True to form, Trump’s attempt to exert leverage over the Senate isn’t all that logical. Whose to say he’ll have the votes for Blanche after the midterms, when the chamber stands at least a chance of falling under Democratic control?
• As David Kurtz has written, Cornyn’s demands are fairly narrow: better defining Trump’s IRS immunity under his settlement agreement, and making sure that the slush fund for his allies is “dead.” The first would still seemingly grant Trump retroactive immunity, and the second would not foreclose other ways of the DOJ paying out Trump’s allies, as it continues to do. Given all this, it is telling Trump does not want to yield and provide Cornyn and Tillis an excuse to vote “yes.”
• For procedural reasons, even if Trump does not pull the nomination, and even if Cornyn is mollified, it now looks unlikely to progress to a full Senate vote before September.

Tabs

• Tina Peters and TPM interview subject Clay Parikh have signed a document calling on the Trump administration to transition the U.S. away from ballot marking machines toward hand-marked paper ballots and for the 2026 midterm elections to not be certified until a full hand count of ballots is completed. The push was first flagged by Media Matters. In an interview about the document noted by Media Matters, Peters also said she urged Trump to fire the heads of the Election Assistance Commission, which he did.
• Emily Moreno filed a new request for a restraining order against former husband Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) yesterday, the Washington Post reports, alleging that Miller physically grabbed one of her attorneys during a hearing Tuesday. Miller faces multiple allegations of abuse and domestic violence. (Miller contends Moreno, who is the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), is lying and is herself dangerous.)

Man of the Hour

Whichever AI enthusiast at the State Department is behind this headline: “US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference”

From the Reuters report:

The state ‌department said it took “full responsibility” ‌for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed ‌the slide deck before the event.

Are We at War?

Still at war.

Correction: This article originally erroneously stated that Tina Peters was advocating to transition away from, not toward increased use of, paper ballots.