As a human type Hunter Biden is familiar enough. Like George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, he is a wayward member of a political dynasty with a strange knack for slaloming his way out of trouble. Before the internet it was much easier for such figures to go about their business. It is hard to see how the goings-on at Chappaquiddick could be covered up now, in the age of X and camera phones. It was Hunter’s misfortune to be born too late.
Dynasties are self-interested and adopt ideas based on the needs of the moment. The Habsburgs placed themselves at the head of the Counter-Reformation, and the Bushes, who were once liberal Republicans of the Nelson Rockefeller mold, later became the spokesmen of the evangelical revival. Hunter Biden is now going along in a similar vein. As a guest on The Candace Owens Show, he brought out the old theory – now doing the rounds again – that all men would be brothers if not for the CIA. According to Biden, the 2016 book The Devil’s Chessboard, which is about the global intrigues of one of the agency’s old directors Allen Dulles, shows that “it’s not about Democrats and Republicans” and that “it’s not about left and right.” Americans are only so divided because they are being manipulated by the intelligence agencies and by the “Epstein class” – the same people who forced his father from office.
This was shrewd of him, because the conditions are ripe for just such an appeal. Most Americans now have an occulted view of the world which holds that almost everything can be explained by plots and hidden channels of influence – often of a supernatural character. The plotters, it is always implied, have no discernible motives beyond the accumulation of power for its own sake. It is no surprise then that this type of thinking finds its common symbols in Jeffrey Epstein – a man of no particular worldview – and the slain JFK, a “sleeping-king” figure held to have been above right and left. Without the CIA and the FBI, we are told, Americans of all races and all classes would live in harmony. We regularly hear that the New Left of the 1960s was invented by the intelligence services to turn people against each other; “m00t’s” (the founder of the forum 4chan) contact with Epstein, revealed in the latest file dump, is meant to prove the same of the nationalist right.
These ideas are now commonplace. The “podcast bros” Joe Rogan and Theo Von all think in these terms, as do the floating voters they represent. So does the left: ostensible socialists like Hasan Piker and June Sternbach now speak flatly of “demonic” influence and “ontological evil.”
Hunter’s host Candace Owens has been plowing this particular furrow for some time now. She reassures Biden that she isn’t going to ask him to say anything bad about his father because that would be demonic. Owens used to be a moderate conservative influencer attached to the Daily Wire, but would later break with them over foreign policy. She has, in turn, broken with MAGA after suggesting that Erika Kirk may have had a dark hand in her husband Charlie’s death. To Candace, America is governed less by woke institutions than a series of misdirections, “gaslighting,” “humiliation rituals,” “psyops” to distract the people. The only way out is to give up on politics entirely.
What replaces it? A sort of showy quietism. Epstein and his demon friends will reign no matter what, and anyone who proposes to change anything about society is probably in on the plot. Much is said of the radicalism of Owens et al but the conclusion always seems to be that one should simply renounce society, touch grass. Owens seconds Biden when he quotes Mother Teresa that “if you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” For people of Piker’s stripe it is much the same: change is not really possible, so all we can do is rededicate ourselves to those around us until the imperial structures are destroyed in some great cataclysm.
Some people have called Owens’s line of thinking Gnosticism – the idea that the material world is irredeemably evil, with the CIA taking the place of the Demiurge. Really it is much simpler. Americans are becoming deeply uncomfortable with the idea of politics and will go to great lengths to avoid it. They do not want to believe that there are any real conflicts in society, and are always looking for ways to wish them away – usually by blaming malevolent third forces. If this fails, there is always the option of the retreat from the world, as the Pilgrims did in coming to America, and as Owens seems to be doing now.
Who will succeed in such a world? Probably people like Hunter Biden. The politicians of the future will be figures of “generational wealth” – another phrase that is doing the rounds – who can speak in this quasi-spiritual language, forever raising new spooks and frights to scare the masses. CRISPR is demonic, phones are demonic, ordinary border control is “ontologically evil.” Trump is currently able to hold this back by force of personality, but once he is gone the storm will break. Even his nominal heir J.D. Vance smirks to reporters about UFOs being devils. American life will coalesce around a new center-ground: the final union of the religious right and therapy-speak.
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