Hunter Biden is sof launching a new version of his story. It’s clever because as Biden casts himself persuasively as a gritty antihero, copping to various mistakes, he’s also whitewashing his family’s real corruption — and his interlocutors seem to be falling for it.

Now sober, Hunter is charming and charismatic. His life story is extremely compelling. Despite being in his mid-Fifties, he’s also crushing the social media game. “I know this may sound petty, but I can’t stand it when people put [sic] photoshop a meth pipe in my mouth,” he posted on X this week, trolling one of his own trolls. “A crack pipe doesn’t have that little bowl at the end. This is why we can’t trust AI. Please make the appropriate edit. Thank you for your attention to this matter.” Anti-Trump accounts are eating it up, reposting Hunter’s work with captions like, “Hunter Biden is absolutely massacring MAGA right now.”

Biden is also updating his father’s lapsed Scranton-style populism with posts like this one: “WTF timeline are we on. Someone called me the MAGA whisperer, and I’ll gladly take the title. Left, right, D or R, we all want the same things. We’re being divided on purpose by the Epstein Elite Oligarch class because as long as we’re at each other’s throats, they get fat and rich off of our misery.”

Railing against the “Epstein class” is a key element of Biden’s current media tour. Having sat for long-form interviews with Andrew Callaghan, Soft White Underbelly, Shawn Ryan, and Candace Owens, Biden is opening up about the darkest moments of his life — from the car crash that killed his mother (and nearly him), to his crack addiction. It’s truly an amazing story, and I’ve personally listened to every single one of those conversations with ease because his candour leads to some interesting places.

The problem is that Hunter’s willingness to riff on crack pipes and embrace self-deprecating humour lends credibility to his version of the Biden family business. Time and again, Biden is making two revisionist assertions: first, that his family was never really part of the “Epstein class”, and second, that his laptop was just a spectacle about his personal life that proved nothing else about influence peddling.

It’s true that Joe Biden was never among Congress’s wealthiest members. What’s also true, though, is that his family — including his siblings and Hunter, as journalist Ben Schreckinger documented at book length — were trading access behind the scenes, to everyone’s benefit. Ultimately, the president himself became enmeshed. The Bidens were never billionaires, but they were hardly middle class and were extremely well connected.

The Biden family operation actually involved much of what Jeffrey Epstein is now implicated in: making money by operating a shadow foreign policy. And contrary to Hunter’s contentions, we know much more about this because of what was revealed on his laptop hard drive.

You don’t need to look far beyond the crack pipe pictures and self-made pornography on Hunter’s laptop to see communications that reveal clear evidence the younger Biden was operating as an unregistered agent of foreign principals. This is typical “Epstein class” behaviour, for what it’s worth. While prosecutors decided it would be too difficult to make the FARA case in court, the evidence of unethical behaviour abounds.

It’s funny to see this revisionist history on a split screen with Jill Biden’s media tour for her new memoir. Jill is making an old school pitch for her revisionist history that everything was fine in the White House, and her family is a beacon of morality. Hunter’s pitch, on the other hand, is perfect for new media: candid, self-deprecating, populist. Unfortunately, this is making it much easier for him to whitewash the truth.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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