Hunter Biden’s business activities are a powder trail, yet most American media are unwilling to strike a match. Perhaps it might shed an unflattering light on their partisan efforts to suppress the story before the 2020 elections. Perhaps an unexpected detonation might damage a Democratic president who is floundering in the polls. Perhaps it would help former President Donald Trump, who threatens to run in 2024, or the Republicans, who promise to step up their inquiries if they recover Congress in the November midterm elections.
Hunter Biden is untouchable. Where once Dr. Faustus, busy with his pipes and decoctions in his home lab, cut a deal with Mephistopheles, Hunter, the Faust of Generation X, has done one better. He may have mortgaged his soul, but he enjoys near-unique privileges where it really matters, down here on the ground. This crackhead and whoremonger amassed millions as an influence-peddler. Hunter peddled as hard as he partied, and he peddled to pro-Putin oligarchs in Ukraine and party-adjacent squidillionaires in China. He was under the influence of a shopping list of illegal substances and a raging sex addiction, too, but his connection to his father was strong enough for his clients to believe that when they put Hunter on the board and the payroll, they were buying access and influence to Joe Biden.
If you believe we’ll ever get the facts on what Hunter was really up to and whether the then-vice president knew what was happening, I have a wet market in Wuhan to sell you. Meanwhile, we have a work of fiction, a movie called My Son Hunter, predicated on the material on Hunter’s notorious laptop. When the New York Post ran excerpts from this material three weeks before the 2020 elections, it was dismissed by most of the media and a rogue’s gallery of retired generals and security officials as “Russian disinformation.” The same outlets now admit that it seems to be genuine, so the “Russian disinformation” was in fact American disinformation. We are building back better.
My Son Hunter takes liberties with the truth, too. It is politics as entertainment, which is a refreshing reversal of the usual Hollywood diet, entertainment as politics. Released on Sept. 7, My Son Hunter won’t screen in movie theaters, and I don’t imagine it’ll appear on Netflix, either. The first production from Breitbart, it will stream only from Breitbart’s website. Its Irish-born producers, Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, have previously made documentaries that, they claim, correct misinformed public opinion on fracking (FrackNation), mining (Mine Your Own Business), and Al Gore (Not Evil Just Wrong). They raised their budget, a relatively small $2.5 million, by crowdsourcing, including, they claim, from dissident and anonymous conservatives in Hollywood.
“Politics is downstream from culture,” went Andrew Breitbart’s famously Gramscian observation. My Son Hunter is the latest in a growing stream of films and documentaries that use the means of Hollywood’s production to send a right-wing message. Dinesh D’Souza pioneered the genre in 2012 when he adapted Michael Moore’s techniques for the polemic 2016: Obama’s America. D’Souza’s documentary was screened in more than 2,000 theaters. It made some $33 million and might be the second-bestselling documentary of all time — a real achievement, given that not all of it might be true. In 2020, Amanda Milius turned Lee Smith’s book on the Russiagate saga, The Plot Against the President, into the top documentary on Amazon. And earlier this year, Daily Wire Studios released its first thriller, Shut In, which is now available to its higher-tier subscribers only.
Like Vincent Gallo, the star of Shut In, the cast members of My Son Hunter have either suffered career death by cancellation or outed themselves as conservatives to much the same effect. The producer, Robert Davi, is a regular on right-wing talk shows and endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020. John James, who plays Joe Biden, is familiar from his ’80s stretch as Jeff Colby in Dynasty and The Colbys. In 2014, James considered running as a Republican in New York’s 21st Congressional District. The race went to Rep. Elise Stefanik, a persistent “MAGA” enthusiast. After displacing Liz Cheney as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, Stefanik now impersonates a serious politician as the third-ranking House Republican. James, meanwhile, gets to impersonate the president, so perhaps it all turned out for the best, for him if not for American democracy.
In 2021, Gina Carano, a mixed martial arts champion turned actress, was fired by Disney from The Mandalorian, a Star Wars spinoff, after sharing an Instagram post that compared the position of American conservatives to that of Jews under the Nazis. Her supporters argued that her co-star Pedro Pascal had got away with comparing the treatment of illegal immigrant children at the southern border to Jews in concentration camps. This culture-war reflex hardly reflects well on her or them. Nor does her performance as Joe Biden’s Secret Service bodyguard in My Son Hunter. Her forays across the fourth wall land as heavily as the recipients of her martial arts routines.
The supporting cast members have yet to trouble the academy’s voters. The recent performances of Kelly Lynn Reiter, who plays the procurer Lorenzo, include horror franchises such as Amityville Uprising and Clown Motel 2. Tyrone, Hunter’s bodyguard and fixer, is played by Franklin Ayodele, a Nigerian-born ex-soccer player making his movie debut. Hunter’s foil, a 25-year-old prostitute named Grace Anderson, is played by Emma Gojkovic, who most recently appeared in With the Badger on Trial, an adaptation of a surreal short story by the Bosnian Serb writer and nationalist politician Petar Kocic (1877-1916), in which a farmer in Habsburg-ruled Bosnia sues a badger for damaging his crops.
Gojkovic does her best with a limited role, but the star of the show is Laurence Fox as the dear Hunter. Fox is the nephew of Edward Fox (The Day of the Jackal) and the son of James Fox (Performance). He threw over a steady career as a TV detective for free speech activism and a freelance political career that included setting up his own party and running in the 2021 London mayoral race. You could say he has the ideal background for a political film about a sex maniac who goes into the family business. His Hunter is a self-pitying stick insect, a manipulator flipping from little-boy-lost to sadist with the effortlessness of a man with no conscience.
“Hunter is a fascinating figure,” Fox told me on the phone from London. “He’s a political figure, which is interesting to me. He’s a very protected figure and a man who seems obsessed with constantly filming himself. And his family is fascinating. Obviously, I have this political freedom, and I just thought, ‘This is a story that no one else would dare put on.’ So, the rebellious part of me goes, ‘That’s the part I’ve got to make.’”
Hunter Biden’s story is absurd and obscene, and it is also unfinished. Meanwhile, the arc of the cinematic universe bends toward tidy conclusions. My Son Hunter is really two films, each absurd and obscene in its own way. The first half is a ludicrous, snappy, and damning reconstruction of the material on Hunter’s laptop, delivered in the ironic and pacey mood of Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Vice. The second is a labored, Hallmark Channel fantasy of redemption in the style of directors who adopt a pseudonym in order to pay the rent.
In the first half, Hunter’s depravities are soundtracked by dope beats or a sinister circus polka in the key of Larry David because Hunter cannot curb his enthusiasm for sex, drugs, and foreign cash. In the second half, Grace is so appalled by Hunter’s confessions that she reconciles with her father and, we infer, gets out of the game. The piano balladry is so schmaltzy it’s a wonder the pianist’s fingers didn’t slide off the keys.
The characterization falls apart, too. In Grace’s first attempt to tell the media about Hunter, she contacts a Washington Post reporter who, being a reporter in the year 2019, wears a fedora inside the house and bashes away at an old metal typewriter. He and Grace meet on a park bench, a location so hackneyed that we might wonder if municipal authorities install these benches specifically for secret assignations between hacks and their sources. This feeble handling obscures the message that our hack is supposed to deliver. America, he explains, is under Trump, the “fascist dictator,” so he won’t look into a story that will harm Joe Biden’s run for the White House.
Most journalists really did talk about Trump like that in 2020. They really did do their best to help Biden win the White House, and they will do their best to make sure that the Democrats win again in 2022 and 2024. American media say they talk truth to power, but these days, they talk half-truths on behalf of power. The movie business was never obliged to tell the truth, only to entertain, but Hollywood now leans a long way leftward.
“This film would have been a [Hollywood studio] film back in the day,” Fox said. “You would have thought this is the film that someone would want to make and that the studios would have got massively behind it. But it just goes to show” that the media and Hollywood are “mouthpieces of the Democratic Party and, more widely across the West, the woke movement.” There is no Oliver Stone to make another JFK, flaws and all.
The Right’s new-media industries have developed in reaction to the Left’s near-monopolies in legacy media and social media. The Right’s responses often mirror its enemy’s demonizing tendencies: On Trump’s Truth Social, you can lie and incite even more freely than you can on Twitter. “I think the producers wanted to make a slightly different film compared to what their artists wanted to do,” Fox reflected. “You know, I just want to make films that are good. The producers wanted to slam Biden and Clinton — that was their motivation.”
Fox, however, was more interested in Hunter’s character than scoring political points: “Your job is not to take a view on your character. You just play the character. Hunter is someone who wants to be in places that his father was, but he’s far more impulsive and a rogue, the black sheep of the family. And he just loves his dad and wants to crush your dad. I just played him as a human being. But if you listen to his book, it’s incredibly compelling. He’s just such a good liar. I find myself really falling for it. I have to slap myself around, remind myself that this guy has played a part in basically bringing down America.”
James plays Joe Biden for laughs just as the real Joe Biden does, and he sniffs Carano’s hair, too. This is one of many online in-jokes in My Son Hunter, all of them tedious, but the film also asks us to look behind the mask and find the criminal mastermind, leading what the MAGA internet calls the “Biden crime family.” This is hard to believe. The president is clearly not even the master of his own mouth, and it doesn’t take a mafia don to accumulate the wads of moolah that he and his family have accrued through his long and no doubt entirely selfless decades in public office. All it takes is to stick out your hand like an old-time ward heeler. Biden has a small-time mentality, and this is part of his appeal. If he is a crook, he’s more Donnie Brasco than Don Corleone.
It taxes credulity to think that Joe Biden consciously sold out the United States to China. But it’s entirely plausible that Hunter didn’t care, so long as he got his money. And it’s not impossible to imagine that Joe was so used to his family members trafficking in influence that he didn’t see the problems in Hunter’s reckless ventures into Ukraine, Russia, and China, just as he never had a problem with his brother Jim’s leveraging of the fraternal connection in a series of failed businesses. A February 2020
report
from ProPublica described a “well-synchronized tango that the Biden brothers have danced for well over half a century.” Joe the politician cultivated “an expansive network of well-heeled Democratic donors,” and Jim the “entrepreneur” helped raise money for Joe’s campaigns and “cultivated the same network to help finance his own business deals.” One hand washes the other, and the dirt never quite sticks.
There is a difference between winking at crime and looking the other way. The FBI winked at Whitey Bulger when it let him carry on killing, so long as he remained an informant. Whitey’s brother William, the upright public servant, merely looked the other way. Eventually, he disgraced himself by refusing to cooperate with the FBI’s inquiries into Whitey’s activities, stonewalling a grand jury, and taking the Fifth before a congressional committee. But William was only forced out of public life after Whitey lost his protected status as an informer. Hunter Biden is still protected, at least until after the midterm elections. This in itself is a scandal in plain sight. The party that talks of equity is insulting the fundamental principle of equality before the law. This could not happen without the active assistance of almost all of America’s major media outlets, which have suppressed and lied about Hunter Biden and his laptop, and the federal agencies that are supposed to enforce the law.
My Son Hunter is a missed opportunity of a film, but then, so is the whole Hunter Biden story. Did Joe wink at Hunter’s excesses and enable them, or did he merely look the other way and keep a sensible distance? If the Republicans deploy the apparatus of congressional inquiries, we might get a partial answer to that question, but it might not be sufficient to resolve the second question in their favor: Will it matter? A lot has happened since the 2020 elections. The voters are more concerned with inflation and a faltering economy than the war in Ukraine, let alone Hunter Biden’s prior dealings in that faraway country of which we know little or the increasingly deranged attempt to vindicate Trump’s incitement of the Jan. 6 riot.
The truth, or something approaching it, is dripping out, but the story is falling off the front pages. Like this film, the hunt for Hunter has deteriorated into that political Hunting of the Snark, the partisan gotcha. This kind of investigation, whether cinematic or congressional — and the two are increasingly hard to tell apart — always delivers less than the marquee promises, star names or not.
“I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas dealings,” Joe Biden said on the campaign trail in Iowa in 2019. Hunter, who has yet to be charged with any crimes, claims to be misunderstood. Joe will claim to be misunderstood, too. An aging father does his best for his wayward son as the neighborhood falls apart, but he gets victimized by a mob of “semi-fascist” MAGA media loonies who believe he’s on the take. It sounds like a pitch for a movie. It will be screened as the news.
Dominic Green, a Washington Examiner magazine contributor, is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Find him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.
