Hunter Biden, Candace Owens and the power of “the Epstein class”

In her new interview with Hunter Biden, the right-wing influencer Candace Owens explains the revelation that made her want to sit down with former president Joe Biden’s disgraced son. “I just didn’t even consider: He’s a crackhead,” she recounted. “That’s actually a very relatable thing.”

In reality, Owens spent years calling Biden a crackhead on her popular podcast. But more recently, she’s apparently taken to describing him as her dream guest. After the pair were connected by podcaster Shawn Ryan, Biden sat down for a two-hour interview at Owens’ Nashville home studio in what is one of the year’s most surprising pairings. 

“The truth of the matter is I was a crackhead,” Biden admitted. He later explained how to make crack from cocaine. 

Owens was transfixed. “I am most interested in the addiction story,” she replied. 

That is how we arrived at the surreal sight of Hunter Biden — a longtime fixation of right-wing media — warmly embracing one of the most influential promoters of antisemitism as “the most effective communicator behind a microphone.”

The interview quickly racked up over 1.1 million views in less than 24 hours and was accompanied by a flood of YouTube comments praising Owens for humanizing addiction and bringing hope to a polarized nation.

The thing is: The interview, a bizarre attempt at mutual rehabilitation, is a compelling listen, I am sorry to say. Biden discussed addiction, suicide attempts and public humiliation with a bluntness that occasionally bordered on genuinely moving. Owens, to her credit, did not interrupt him with gotcha questions or cheap shots.

The gleeful cruelty with which the right-wing media machine has mocked people who suffer from addiction while ignoring their own complicity in the stigma is shameful. When Owens apologized to Biden for years of mockery — telling him she felt “sh*tty” about reducing him to a caricature at his lowest moments — the exchange carried real human weight. 

But a warranted apology from Candace Owens does not redeem her. In any case, that is not actually what the interview was about.

The Owens-Biden collaboration is about the emergence of a new cross-partisan media ecosystem built around conspiracy, alienation and mutual distrust of institutions — a kind of anti-establishment influencer class that transcends traditional ideological boundaries while feeding audiences increasingly addicted to paranoia. Call it the “Epstein Class,” to borrow Biden’s preferred phrase, though not in the way he intends.

During the interview, Biden claimed that “the D.C. elite of the left” destroyed his father because the elder Biden “was never part of that club, he was never part of the Epstein class.”

His use of that phrase attempts to transform the former president — a man who spent half a century at the center of Democratic power — into an outsider victimized by shadowy elites. It is conspiratorial thinking repackaged as populist truth-telling. 

Joe Biden was not forced aside because he threatened elite power structures. He was pushed out of the presidential race because millions of voters watched in shock and horror as he struggled publicly on a debate stage. No secret cabal was required. Yet Owens eagerly indulged his son’s tale because this kind of thinking is now the primary currency of outrage media.

In today’s attention economy, ideological consistency matters far less than maintaining relevance — which increasingly belongs to an odd coalition of disgraced celebrities and conspiratorial influencers who realize that institutional trust has collapsed so thoroughly that almost any alliance can be repackaged as authenticity.

As Salon’s Andi Zeisler masterfully outlined, conspiratorial thinking “flourishes in times of political and social upheaval, and it tends to resonate within minoritized groups ‘who are systematically kept from participating fully in society’”:

The conspiratorial thinking of the Epstein Class was a privileged twist on the latter — a result not of being marginalized but of fear that they might be: Donald Trump was not notably interested in conspiracy theories until he began feeling personally attacked by Barack Obama’s presidency; Trump began seeding racist citizenship theories not because he was materially disempowered, but because he recognized that Obama’s success and likeability far outpaced his own. 

Likewise, Epstein saw #MeToo as a problem to be neutralized because the success of any social movement in which women were treated as reliable narrators of their own exploitation would impede his own racket.”

For Hunter Biden, invoking the specter of an “Epstein class” is a carbon copy of this strategy. It is a privileged defense mechanism designed to obscure personal and political failure by inventing a shadowy, omnipotent enemy. He chose to feed the beast of right-wing paranoia, validating a nonexistent “Epstein class” conspiracy to explain away a perfectly transparent political exit.

Owens, for her part, has spent years building an audience through increasingly unhinged provocations. She has promoted conspiracies about global elites and amplified antisemitic tropes so aggressively that the Daily Wire — the outlet that made her a star — eventually severed ties with her. Her recent fixation on linking the Israeli government to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, with whom she once worked at Turning Point USA, has only grown her audience.

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Still, Owens is currently drowning in an ocean of severe legal and professional crises. She is facing a landmark, multi-million-dollar defamation lawsuit in a Delaware court filed by French President Emmanuel Macron and First Lady Brigitte Macron following an absurd, eight-part podcast series where Owens dug into fringe web theories to claim the French first lady was born male. She is also facing additional legal pressure from Kirk’s former head of security after suggesting he was involved in Kirk’s assassination. Owens has separately accused Kirk’s widow, Erika, along with Turning Point USA, of using artificial intelligence to forge Kirk’s dying wishes. 

Seen in this light, Owens’ sudden display of journalistic empathy toward Biden is a calculation. What we are watching with her is someone collecting new credibility with each provocative and unlikely alliance while the actual content of her work continues largely unexamined by the outlets that cover her rise. It mimics the strange, unearned respect that some liberals have recently extended to figures like former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene whenever they break rank with the dominant MAGA orthodoxy. Owens understands that deep political polarization can be easily blurred and manipulated if you wrap yourself in the cloak of the independent truth-teller who is simply “asking questions” that the establishment wants to suppress.

By comforting Biden and validating his anger toward the Democratic establishment, Owens is attempting to position herself as an objective, courageous renegade who transcends partisan boundaries. Her guest, leaning entirely into the flattery, eagerly fed into her wild theories about Kirk’s death: “The level of disloyalty, or fear—I don’t know what it is . . . and the criticism of you for asking the questions for someone who is like a brother to you? It’s like, ‘what the eff are you talking about?’ I listen to you and I go, ‘right on!’”

This is the toxic truth about much of popular alternative media. It is an echo chamber where ostracized figures from across the political spectrum form marriages of pure convenience, trading currency and validating each other’s victimhood to keep their audiences hooked.