“We’re from the same place… I went to school with your high-school girlfriend,” Tucker Carlson reminds Hunter Biden at the beginning of their interview.
Much like Donald Trump, Hunter and Tucker style themselves as establishment insiders gone rogue. Hunter wrote Carlson’s son a letter of recommendation that was later found on the infamous laptop, Tucker recalls. “You and I both know the Epstein class very well,” says Hunter, ruefully adding that he was afforded “incredible privileges” because of his father.
At one point Tucker motions to a picture on the wall of his great-grandfather with Teddy Roosevelt. Their chat, released on YouTube yesterday, comes across as a sort of family affair.
If such an encounter had taken place five years ago we might have expected a clash for the ages. Today, however, the world is very different and the Hunter-Tucker chat therefore mostly consists of a search for common ground. Both men agree that social media is harming the body politic. “We are being fed the equivalent of a suicide pact,” says Hunter of these websites, which as a recovering addict he compares to “a pocketful of heroin.”
Both men also agree that the salient fact of American society is that an “Epstein class” owns nearly everything. Both dislike Donald Trump greatly. Both quite like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Both appear to believe that the answer to America’s problems does not lie in any political cause, but in private morality. Not for the first time Biden quotes Mother Theresa: “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.”
Inevitably, the talk dwells on Hunter’s laptop. Biden says that the released data exonerated him and his father of any wrongdoing. Tucker claims it was an open secret that Israeli intelligence was putting it about that nude pictures of minors had been discovered on the hard drive.
But, bygones be bygones, and now Hunter and Tucker both think the Iran war has given Americans an “opening” to think about what Biden calls “the way forward.”
Would this new center ground really represent something new? The theory that divisions in society are mostly caused by social media; the need to control social media; the personal mendacity of Donald Trump; and the idea that one should be content with one’s own life rather than trying to change the world. The new politics could end up looking a lot like the old.
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