Yes. It is the same thumbnail.
Look, we all look extremely good in that picture. David looks distinguished, Hunter looks like a man who has made peace with a few things, and I look like someone who was told there would be tequila. Why mess with perfection.
Here is why I am sending you another Hunter Biden email anyway.
When he sat down with David Shuster and me, we got to a subject most interviewers steer around, and most guests are grateful to have steered around. It was pointed out to him—directly, on camera—that some of the rhetoric circulating right now edges up against an old antisemitic trope about Jews and money.
He did not deflect. He said it has been a problem for him. He said he gets accused of giving safe harbor to antisemitism by one crowd and called “the son of the genocide Joe” by another, and that there is no winning that.
And then he did something I have watched exactly no one else do on a political show this year. He gave a history lesson.
His argument, and I am not going to flatten it, is that the persecution of Jewish people across twenty-five centuries has one root cause, and it is not faith and it is not money and it is not success. It is that they are, in his telling, the only people in history who refused to assimilate to Pharaoh. Who stood against empire—against Pharaoh, against Caesar, against the Third Reich—and were hated for it.
Then he turned the same blade the other direction. The Jewish people, he said, have also had their Solomons. Their Herods. Their Jezebels and their Ahabs. Leaders who washed the streets in the blood of their own, and who were resisted by people who understood that refusing to bow to Pharaoh also means refusing to become him.
“Where is our Micah today?” he asked. “Where is our Jeremiah to stand up to Solomon and say: you are him.”
He was clear about the distinction he was drawing. He believes Bibi Netanyahu is evil incarnate. He also believes that saying so is a categorically different act from talking about the Jewish people, and he thinks a lot of people have stopped being able to tell those two things apart.
And then—this is the part that got me—he was gentler than I have been.
On Thursday, on Tequila Talk, I said flatly that I believe Abdul El-Sayed is an antisemite. I stand by it. Hunter’s read is different. He hopes it is immaturity rather than conviction, and he thinks El-Sayed is open to a real conversation about how this lands on people it lands on. I am not sure he is right. I am sure the disagreement is worth your five minutes, and I am not going to pretend our guests agree with me when they do not.
That is the show. Somebody says something I did not expect, on camera, without a publicist in the room rewriting it afterward.
Now here is the ask, and I am going to be direct because the clock is actually running out.
We got Hunter Biden because there is nobody above us to say no. No network standards desk, no corporate parent, no advertiser who would rather we booked somebody safer. Just subscribers. You are the entire reason that interview happened, and you are the reason the next one will.
Our Democracy 101 back-to-school sale ends at midnight on Monday, August 31. Forty percent off your first year: $36 instead of $60. Three dollars a month. After Monday the price goes back up and stays there.
The clip above is free. The full hour with Hunter—his father’s actual prognosis, the addiction and the grief, Don Jr., Jake Tapper, and what he thinks of Kamala Harris—is for paid subscribers, and it is right here:
Three dollars a month and you get all of it, plus the archive and four live shows a week, through November and whatever November turns out to be.
Come watch the whole thing. And seriously, look at that thumbnail. We earned it.
—Cliff
PS: And if you’re already a subscriber—thank you!—you can gift a year of Blue Amp Media to someone you love who needs to hear the straight talk we offer 365 days a year.
