Hunter Biden’s Life After Shame

How much grace should we extend to people who screw up—like, really screw up? After many years as an addict and a general failson, Hunter Biden’s history includes felony gun convictions, tax evasion, smoking crack, and smoking Parmesan cheese that he thought was crack. But in the past few weeks, the son of the former president has launched a new career as—a sober counselor? A life coach?Since reviving his dormant X account on May 19, the younger Biden has fully embraced a persona he soft-launched last year, when the Gen Z influencer Andrew Callaghan interviewed him about his past drug addiction. His strategy is not to deny his past transgressions, but to flagellate himself so thoroughly for them that no one else can land a hit. “I was definitely a degenerate crackhead, 100 percent,” the 56-year-old recently told Soft White Underbelly, a YouTube channel that encourages sex workers, homeless people, and drug users to tell their stories in their own words. His addiction had been a form of “suicide,” but he was saved by his current wife, Melissa, who “erased every other phone number from my phone. Literally, if it didn’t have the last name Biden in it, she took it out.” His Substack bio reads, “Artist. Author. Recovery Advocate.”In focusing so hard on his addiction, Biden presumably hopes to connect with others who have had similarly troubled lives. As I wrote when he spoke with Callaghan, “One of the most upvoted comments on the YouTube video is from a poster saying that the interview prompted him to go to rehab.” But on X, he mixes recovery with politics, sometimes within the same post. When someone posted an image of him with a crack pipe in his mouth and called his family a “disgrace,” Biden noted that the critic’s profile picture was of Johnny Cash, who recovered from addiction and “spent the rest of his life singing for prisoners and addicts and the people the country threw away because he knew he was one of them.” Biden concluded solemnly, “You picked his picture