“Why were you and your business partner installed as directors on a major Ukrainian energy company while your father was the point man on Ukraine for the Obama White House?” was just one of many questions that did not appear in Candace Owens’s heavily-trailed “exclusive” interview with Hunter Biden.

A conversation aired last night in which the pair sat down for two hours, covering a range of topics. Despite Biden’s recounting of his own past indiscretions and Owens’ incisive questioning, the interview was more of an example of the state of online political discourse. Ostracised figures on both the Left and the Right are seeking solace in each other’s media clout to maintain an audience, despite neither having anything meaningful to say.

The content of the show itself was fairly mundane. Biden was fluent in therapy-speak and recounted how many times he had attempted suicide. He gushed about how — given his six years of sobriety — every day was now a blessing. He explained how you make crack from regular cocaine. He talked of the dark times and the toll it had taken; he had been on the cover of the New York Post more times in a single year than anyone else in history.

Owens, on the other hand, has “been on a journey” in the past two years. Fired from the Daily Wire, she has since charted a hugely successful path to the bottom of the Right-wing ecosystem. She has so far run 45 episodes of her podcast about the Charlie Kirk assassination — she doesn’t believe the lone-shooter theory, instead suggesting Israeli intelligence involvement. She is locked in a slander lawsuit with the French President, having announced to her six million YouTube subscribers that his wife is a man.

In recent months, she has called Hunter Biden himself a paedophile, and accused him of introducing his niece to crack — for which she now apologised. The duo quickly wrote it off. All’s fair in love and online media.

Instead of the pair slugging out an ideological debate, what we got was the curious horseshoe effect now gripping the Right: finding common cause with fellow pariahs on the Left. There is now an urge in the conspiracist’s mind to turn over every premise and inspect it for evidence of falsity. Could Hunter actually not be the agent of his own misfortune? Could a playboy princeling who peddled influence actually be the victim here?

Some of this is already visible in the increasingly off-reservation work of Tucker Carlson, who suffered his own defenestration from Fox News. Carlson has developed a touching belief that “America First” influencer Nick Fuentes is the victim of a plot to suppress his ideas, rather than of the perfectly normal hatred of his ideas among the Right. He, too, has become increasingly convinced that Israel is behind all the world’s evil.

Hunter had clearly read the brief: in exchange for social rehabilitation, he gestures vaguely at powerful forces. “You know who benefits?” he said of the Iran war: “People who are making trades of billions of dollars on market manipulation.” He evinced the way in which the Epstein files have become a catchall smear in US public life: “You wanna figure out why they don’t wanna release all the Epstein files? All you gotta do is look at Trump on his inauguration stage and look behind him…” “It is good versus evil,” he said by way of final salutation. “They have torn the mask off of this.” In 2026, hopelessly addicted to paradox, the extremely online Left and the extremely online Right are finding common cause in the simple act of gesturing to things and saying: “See?”

The Gaza war has reshaped politics at the fringes, and it is doing something similar to the mainstream. But yoking it all together is Epstein, a half-conspiracy proved half-right. A universal solvent, encompassing money men, pederasty, influence-peddling and a protagonist of Semitic heritage.

Owens and Biden can come together because post-Epstein there is now sufficient space in the ecosystem for them to do so. Once the tribes were clear: woke vs MAGA. Now, the fraying of both constituencies has bled out the emotional energy that once seemed so addictive, and allowed space for something else to appear. Politics has always been sport, but just as InfoWars shut down this month, a whole new generation of WWE-tier infotainment is coming into being.

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Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes

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