The most sober a crack addict ever sounds is when he’s talking about the science of, well, crack. Amid three hours of screaming about George Clooney, the illegal immigrants responsible for cleaning his post-bender hotel rooms, the “f***ing dictator thug” Donald Trump, and his father’s entire campaign staff, Hunter Biden only finally found peace when he initiated an extended chemistry lesson on the differences between crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

“The only difference between crack cocaine and cocaine is sodium bicarbonate and water and heat, literally,” the former first son said during a freewheeling podcast interview with YouTube host Andrew Callaghan. “People think of crack being dirty — it’s the exact opposite. When you make crack, what you’re doing is you’re burning off all the impurities so that it combines with the sodium bicarbonate, which makes it smokable, that’s all.”

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Biden, whose storied career of marathon drug and alcohol abuse began with a 1988 drug possession charge when he was still a teenager, is indeed in his element waxing poetic on the beauty of getting blitzed. Alas, he seethes and rages about everything else, especially as it pertains to his father’s aborted failure of a presidential reelection bid.

Clooney, who waited until after Joe Biden infamously imploded during his 2024 debate against Trump to admit what everyone saw onstage, is “not a f***ing actor,” according to the younger Biden, but a “brand.” According to Hunter Biden, “James Carville hasn’t won a race in 40 f***ing years,” and David Axelrod and the Pod Save America bros are grifters “who have been dining out on the relationship with [Barack Obama], making millions.”

It’s not that this analysis is wrong, but rather that it’s dead right, if only because if there’s anyone on the planet who understands mediocre “white millionaires” who have spent their entire lives riding the coattails of another politician’s success, it’s Hunter Biden.

Despite the ravages of addiction evident on his once-handsome face, from the blur of an iPhone, Biden looks like his father and sounds like him, too, both in the tenor of his voice and what he’s actually saying. Acting as a cipher for the whole Biden patriarchy, he is telling us that, in the world according to his family, the Bidens are never at fault, never have agency, and are constantly the victims of nefarious actors. He blames Joe Biden’s debate night debacle on an ominous “they” who allegedly gave the then-president too much Ambien to perform. The collapse of the world order under his father could be blamed on Mossad, which Hunter baselessly claimed knew about the impending Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and allowed it to go ahead. Republicans are now to blame for deporting the illegal immigrants whom Hunter Biden graciously says are responsible for the “food on your f***ing table” and washing your dishes.

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For nearly a year now, Democrats have been wandering through the wilderness in pursuit of an escape from the dark shadow of Biden’s failed presidency. Keen to ignore the concrete ideological causes of inflationary fiscal policy and a foreign policy that opened the southern border and destabilized the world, Democrats have begun to delude themselves into believing their problem is one of branding, not principles. With “brat summer” dead and gone, some left-wing strategists have leaned into “dark woke,” urging politicos to grow out grizzly beards and drop more f-bombs.

Hunter Biden’s media tour, laden with profanity and rage and utterly devoid of self-reflection, is a good test case of how well this strategy to avoid dealing with the substance of the party’s problems will actually work. By any indication, it simply won’t, at least not for anyone without the name Biden.