The crank and the crackhead

Imagine, if you will, that the last five years never happened. That instead of the twisted, malignant podcast-influencer ecosystem we live in, we all still had trustworthy newscasters. Imagine that a bright, young African American woman rose to prominence simply by giving sharp and interesting takes. Imagine, too, that the political climate were like it was, say, in the 1990s – just Democrats and Republicans arguing over taxes vs spending. That the 2020 presidential race was between two humdrum candidates with nice, boring families, and did not involve a media and intelligence community cover-up to protect one of the candidates and his wayward, crack-addled son. And that the candidate who won the election did not, then, use his administration to hound his former opponent through the courts, while also demonising half of the country that supported him.

In that alternate universe, the interview that Candace Owens just did with Hunter Biden would have been quite fascinating – moving, even. But we do not live in that world. Somebody needs to tell Ms Owens that her attempt to refashion herself as the new Oprah Winfrey ain’t gonna fly.

The interview, released this week on Owens’s YouTube channel, is a jaw-dropping display of utterly shameless revisionism, bald-faced whitewashing and craven myth-making by two deeply disreputable people. It is extremely unpleasant to watch – primarily because they are both unnervingly good at creating an entirely false reality in which they recast themselves as heroes and saints who just want to see justice and fairness in the world. And they love God so much, gosh darn it!

I watched all 109 minutes of this interview, and now I think I have a peptic ulcer and a touch of PTSD.

It opens with a truly hair-raising statement by Owens, who recently went from being merely a batshit crazy conspiracy peddler (the first lady of France has a penis) to a vile tormentor of the widow of her supposed best friend, the assassinated right-wing media figure, Charlie Kirk.

Owens says to Hunter, right up front, that she’s not going to ask him to criticise his dad. As that, apparently, would be ‘demonic’. Oh really, Candace?

The usual version of Candace, where she sits in front of a microphone, mesmerising her audience with cruel pseudo-narratives, her malevolent gaze directed to the camera, is nowhere to be seen in this interview. Instead, she shape-shifts into a mature, compassionate mum. The kind of person who is gracious enough to be able to apologise for calling Hunter a crackhead, back when they were mere squabbling political adversaries instead of the enlightened, philosophical beings they are today.

Owens gives Hunter free rein to rewrite the Biden family’s history, and he does it well. To hear him tell it, he is the beloved son of an ‘aw, shucks’ dad, ol’ Delaware Joe.

‘The DC elite of the left, they crushed my dad’, Hunter tells Owens.

‘He was never part of that club. He was never part of the Epstein class… My dad never bought a stock or a bond because he made a commitment in 1972, when he was 30 years old, after Watergate… My dad was the poorest person to ever enter the presidency.’

What a pure and loving soul, this Biden fellow sounds like! Almost makes you wonder: how did a man who basically fell off a turnip truck make it all the way to the White House? I’m sure it was because he was brilliant and kind and worked real hard.

Hunter is also at pains to tell us that it’s not just his father who is basically a living saint. But also he, Hunter Biden – one of the most infamous nepo-babies ever to exist, crackhead extraordinaire and connoisseur of, uh, ladies of the night – is actually very smart and has a great curriculum vitae.

He muses about ‘this misperception of me’. But there’s more to his story than just being a drug fiend, he insists. He went to Yale Law School, he reminds us. He served in the Clinton administration. He taught at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. He was chairman of the board of the World Food Program USA – ‘the largest humanitarian organisation in the world’. He served on 16 boards, ‘before I ever joined the board of Burisma or anything’, referring to the Ukrainian energy company at the centre of the infamous laptop scandal.

Wow, Hunter. I had assumed that you were given all these credentials from deeply entrenched, powerful elite institutions because your father was the ultimate DC swamp creature. But now that you’re telling me this, I stand corrected.

And he is just so humble. ‘I was a degenerate crack addict’, he says, as if we didn’t know this already. As if we haven’t all seen the photographs.

He shares his wisdom with us, too. ‘If you want to change the world, go home and love your family’, he says, actually quoting the actual Mother Teresa.

Hunter is keen to remind us how much he has been through. ‘My entire digital footprint was stolen from me’, he says of the laptop scandal that exposed his sordid behaviour. Poor baby. But he is now grateful for all the bad press, he says, because it has given him the opportunity to ‘own it all’. ‘I no longer have any fear’, he says. ‘I have a community of people out there that I want to be of service to.’ That’s nice. I’m happy for you, Hunty.

Candace does her own whitewashing, depicting herself as a humble servant of the truth who just wishes we could go back to a more innocent time. ‘Back when I was left-leaning, in college, my best friend was a Republican conservative’, she says. ‘It wasn’t so at each other’s throats and hating each other and wanting to destroy one another, and, you know, you could kind of see that good and the bad.’

This is a gargantuan level of chutzpah – a Yiddish word, which I’m sure Ms Owens will appreciate – coming from a woman who has made it her life’s mission to destroy a totally innocent woman whose husband was murdered in front of the entire world. I have never seen anything more vile than what Candace Owens has been doing to Erika Kirk recently. And I’ve been on Reddit.

These two miscreants are in agreement that the Biden family’s financial scandals amounted to nothing more than how much money chumps paid for Hunter’s paintings. ‘I wish I could go back to the days where I thought, like, Hunter Biden’s art was the most corrupt deal that was done in politics’, Owens says.

No, honey. You do not get to rewrite history. The ‘art’ was not the concern. It was the corruption and the censorship that sprang up to cover it up. And that’s not even getting into his deeply unpleasant dealings with women – for example, the affair with his dead brother’s widow (during which he got her hooked on crack), the inordinately high number of hooker sex photos on his laptop, and the Tennessee stripper whom he impregnated and abandoned.

But, then again, as Hunter tells Candace: ‘It’s about figuring out how to love yourself.’

This interview is deeply disturbing because it shows how easily sociopaths can slide into ‘normal’ mode. Though Candace does let the mask slip somewhat when she goes on a tangent, in which she fantasises about murdering an imaginary intruder, because according to her, there are people out there who want to kill her for her ‘criticism’ of Israel. ‘I will shoot you, and I will kill you, and I will happily go to prison before you have one opportunity to even make me think about whether you’re going to hurt my kids’, she says to the imaginary Zionist. ‘I will smile in my mug shot.’

There’s the Candace I know! If there was any justice in the world, these two creeps would never be heard from again.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.