Hunter Biden Claps Back — and Hits the Right Targets

The former president's son called out the Democratic Party’s obsession with donor-class validation — the folks who confuse Vanity Fair clout with voter outreach.

So, Wednesday morning when I woke up, my Bluesky feed was flooded with alerts telling me I had to check out this Hunter Biden interview. Then I checked my inbox and saw that a few of my students — bless their persistent hearts — had messaged me the same thing.

Now normally, when I get messages like this, I don’t think much of them. I love my Lincoln Square readers, I love my students, and I love engaging with people who pay attention to politics. But sometimes the stuff that gets them excited doesn’t move me the same way it moves them. Not enough to write about it, anyway.

But this time? The alerts wouldn’t stop. So I finally gave in, and watched the portions of the interview that were not behind a paywall.

And all I can say is: wow.

Hunter Biden didn’t just sit down with Andrew Callaghan for a Channel 5 podcast interview. He gave a political exorcism. He called out Democratic elites, media gatekeepers, and long-retired strategists still coasting off their one hit from decades ago. George Clooney. Jake Tapper. David Axelrod. James Carville. The Pod Save America crew. He went down the list like he had been keeping receipts in a folder labeled, “Break Glass When the Party Starts Acting Stupid.”

And the wild part? He wasn’t wrong. He said what a lot of people are only just starting to say out loud now — but I’ve been writing about this on Substack for the last three months, and on Medium for the past year before that. This entire article, like much of my work, is rooted in the same themes: the performative incompetence of Democratic elites, the media’s complicity, and the political illiteracy eating away at the electorate. Hunter may have brought the fire, but I’ve been stacking the kindling for over a year.

Now, I’m not campaigning for Hunter Biden to run for anything. I want that man to focus on his sobriety, his family, and his peace. But when he’s right, he’s right. And this wasn’t a meltdown — it was a broadcasted group chat.

And right on cue, Fox News ran with it. Their favorite post-interview trick: Question his sobriety. It was predictable. They acted like the only way someone could call out elite nonsense with this much accuracy was if they were high. And honestly? If Hunter was on something, the Democratic Party might want to ask for a hit, because the clarity he brought to the conversation has been sorely missing.

Let’s go down the list.

George Clooney. I don’t need to invoke Batman to say this plainly: The man has been politically out of his depth for a while. His instincts are rooted in Hollywood optics and donor-class sensibilities. This is classic argumentum ad verecundiam — the idea that because someone is respected in one field (acting), we should accept their judgment in another (governance). Hunter gave him the kind of dismissal you usually save for a telemarketer calling during dinner — and it stuck, because the Hollywood halo only works when you’re not trying to override actual voters.

And here’s the kicker — a few weeks before that Clooney-Julia Roberts fundraiser for Biden, I got something in my inbox from the California Democrats promoting the event. I actually talked to my wife about going. We gave it some serious consideration. But I wasn’t feeling great at the time, so we ultimately passed. And thank God. Because if I had shelled out $2,000 to go to that dinner and then read Clooney’s New York Times op-ed throwing Biden under the bus not long after, I would’ve felt like I paid to see Beyoncé and she sent a body double with a sore throat and a Bluetooth speaker.

How do you host a high-dollar event to raise support for a sitting president — asking people to dig deep into their pockets — and then publicly undermine the guy you were raising money for? I’m not saying I believe in conspiracy theories, but I don’t think Danny Ocean acted alone. One of those powerful California Democrats — not naming names (cough, Pelosi) — probably nudged him. And they probably asked Julia Roberts to write an op-ed too, but she was like, “Yeah, no. I did Erin Brockovich, not Democratic clean-up duty. I’ll let Clooney be your sacrificial lamb on his own.”

Jake Tapper. I could write a dissertation on this man’s ability to sound smug while saying absolutely nothing. Tapper is the personification of “both sides” theater — the kind of anchor who thinks saying “Trump and Biden both face criticism” is the height of nuance. Watching Hunter roast him was like watching someone finally close a pop-up ad that had been stuck on the screen for eight years. It was cathartic.

---

---

David Axelrod and James Carville. two guys still dining out on meals they barely helped cook. I’ll give them a reluctant nod. They each contributed something useful once, long ago. But let’s stop pretending they’re irreplaceable political wizards. Barack Obama would’ve still steamrolled his way to the White House in 2008 if he’d picked a C-list strategist with a decent haircut and a working printer. And Bill Clinton? He could’ve won in ’92 with a campaign manager pulled straight out of a Waffle House night shift. Axelrod and Carville didn’t build the rocket — they just happened to be on the launch pad when it took off. Yet somehow, they’re still floating around like they invented orbit.

The Pod Save America crew. I’ll be a little generous: They’re not bad guys. But let’s not pretend they’re champions of the working class either. They’re multimillionaires. If they were ever broke, they’re so many years removed from it, their poverty stories are basically campfire legends now. And the longer someone has money, the easier it is to forget what not having money feels like. This goes for the Pod Save bros, Clooney, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and anyone else rich enough to treat politics like an Instagram caption.

I met Jon Favreau once very briefly. No, not the Swingers guy. The other Jon Favreau — the speechwriter turned podcaster turned Democratic oracle. I met him back when John Kerry was running for president. I was a young Democrat in training, and he was the same age as me, already being hyped as the future of the party. Nice guy. Polished. But now? He and his crew feel like they’ve gone from challenging the machine to selling limited-edition merch from inside it.

But here’s the real story: what Hunter exposed.

He called out the Democratic Party’s obsession with donor-class validation. The folks who confuse Vanity Fair clout with voter outreach. The people who would rather get a thumbs-up from Clooney than listen to a Black working-class mom juggling teaching Sunday school, acting as a caregiver for her parents and sick husband, while dealing with Medicaid threats. The same people who think checking in with MSNBC counts as coalition building.

And it’s not just the donors. A lot of elected Democrats know the rules of campaigns. They know the rules of power. They know how panic spreads, and how it’s exploited. These aren’t amateurs. They knew exactly what they were doing when they let Trump and the Republican Party redefine what strength and masculinity mean in politics. And here’s the rule: Any time you let your enemy set the terms of the fight — and you go along with it — you’ve already lost. That’s not just true in theory. That’s argumentum ad populum in action: the belief that if something feels strong or “alpha,” it must be right — even when it’s dragging us off a cliff.

This moment isn’t about Hunter Biden’s personal drama. It’s about power — who has it, how it’s used, and why so many of the wrong people keep finding their way to the front of the line.

But let me take it a step further. The problem isn’t just the elite. It’s also the voters who keep opting out of their own future. I’m not talking about MAGA voters. Those fools were lost a long time ago. I’m talking about the people who thought voting for Jill Stein was some kind of moral statement. The ones who treated Cornell West like he was running a book club instead of a spoiler campaign. People who stay home to “teach the Democrats a lesson,” then act shocked when democracy takes the hit.

And every four years, Jill Stein’s witch hazel energy floats back into the picture like a haunted Groupon. She raises some money, eats up headlines, disappears after the election, and somehow still gets invited back like nothing happened. If that’s your idea of resistance, I’ve got a used fax machine to sell you from Ralph Nader’s attic.

I teach political science. Whether I’m at Cal State Fullerton or one of the community colleges I serve, I meet students who want fairy tales. They want The West Wing. They want idealism without process. But when I tell them that change is usually slow, incremental, and deeply frustrating, some get mad. Because real politics? It’s not emotionally satisfying. It’s compromise. It’s paperwork. It’s three steps forward, two and a half steps sideways.

And if you don’t understand the rules, you keep losing the game. We have first-past-the-post voting in this country. That means the person with the most votes wins —even if it’s only a third of the vote. That system naturally squeezes out third parties. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s Duverger’s Law — a principle in political science that explains why our elections end up binary. The math rewards consolidation. It punishes fragmentation.

This isn’t about what should be. It’s about what is. If you want to change the system, you have to first understand the system. Voting for someone with no path to victory might make you feel righteous, but it doesn’t shift power — it surrenders it.

I’ve seen smart people get tripped up by this — not bad people, just folks who confuse principled rhetoric with practical power. Killer Mike is a gifted rapper who rhymes about vital issues and speaks from a place of conviction, but he’s not a political scientist. Marc Lamont Hill is a brilliant sociologist with deep insight on race and media, but he’s not a political strategist, either.

For years, Bill O’Reilly propped Hill up as a kind of “liberal counterweight,” but the imbalance was clear: O’Reilly was openly supporting Republican candidates like John McCain, while Hill would say something like “Obama’s better than McCain, but I’m voting for a third-party candidate” as if that was a serious rebuttal. It wasn’t a debate — it was a staged mismatch, and Hill never seemed to realize how much he was being used to give intellectual cover to bad faith narratives.

Even in 2024, his support for Kamala Harris was tepid at best. Despite knowing the stakes of another Trump term, he couldn’t step out of the shadow of his own purity politics. And that’s the trap: If your theory of change can’t survive contact with a committee hearing or a midterm electorate, it’s not a strategy. It’s a TED Talk.

I’m a Democrat. Not because I think the party is perfect. Not because I love every candidate. But because in our system, parties are how you access power. You don’t have to be in love. You just have to be involved. Because when you’re not at the table, you’re not just on the menu — you’re the hunted.

And the hunted don’t get to negotiate. They get gutted. Skinned. Processed. Their rights carved up for polling points and weekend spin. And then — after all that — they get served. Served up on a platter to whoever’s hungry enough to exploit them. That’s what happens when you sit out. You don’t dodge the system by opting out. You just make yourself easier to plate. The only way to stop that is to get in the room, learn how the game works, and start flipping tables before someone sets yours.

And this brings me to Kamala Harris. You know I couldn’t help myself — if you’ve read anything I’ve written in the last six months, you already knew this detour was coming.

I’ve written at length about how she got railroaded — by pundits, by donors, by members of her own party. And it wasn’t just political cowardice — it was misogynoir. That specific intersection of racism and sexism that gets weaponized against Black women in public life. It’s why her confidence was read as arrogance, her caution as incompetence, and her ambition as a threat. The pundits didn’t just second-guess her — they dissected her. The party didn’t just overlook her — they treated her like baggage. The press, the consultants, and yes, even some so-called progressives, used her as the fail-safe excuse for problems they didn’t want to blame on Biden or the system. It was ugly. And it was intentional.

As angry as I get, I’m still in this fight. Because politics doesn’t pause while you catch your breath. The train moves. If you want Kamala — or whoever the nominee is — to represent your progressive values, now is the time to speak. Not four months before midterm elections. If you don’t want people like George Clooney ghostwriting your future, go to a town hall. Learn how policy gets made. Learn how power operates.

And yes — I hold voters accountable. The Democratic Party shouldn’t — and won’t —shame voters. But I have no problem doing it. Honestly, I’ll hand out shame like Costco samples if it means people remember what time it is. Because some folks really sat out or wandered off to third-party fantasy camp, and now Trump is back in power. I’m not saying you need to spiral forever, but you should sit with that. Sit with what you passed up. Sit with what it cost — immigrants, working people, vulnerable communities. Hunter was right to bring that up. If you looked at this moment and still chose to shrug and walk away, then yeah, go ahead and feel that. Not forever — but long enough to remember what happens when you treat politics like Yelp reviews instead of survival.

George Clooney has money. But we have numbers. And numbers, when organized, can’t be ignored.

So yeah — Hunter Biden vented. He lit the match. But what he revealed? That’s the part we can’t ignore.

If you’re tired of the same voices deciding your future, it’s time to stop watching from the bleachers.

Suit up. Step in.

Because silence has never saved anyone.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons.