Hunter Biden has sat down for an interview with Candace Owens; it hasn’t aired yet, but select clips are available on social media. So while it’s not yet possible to get a feel for the overall tone of the conversation, we can nevertheless conclude that there is at least some warmth between the two. For instance, Biden can be seen praising Owens for asking supposedly tough questions about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. She has stated plainly that she does not believe the official story, and has suggested that Kirk’s wife, Erika Kirk, his organization, Turning Point USA, or even the state of Israel could be somehow involved.

There is no evidence whatsoever for any of these claims. On the contrary, the alleged killer’s motive and opportunity are overwhelmingly clear, and he also confessed.

Biden apparently disagrees.

“I listen to you and I go ‘right on,'” says Biden during the interview, specifically referencing Owens’ desperate mission to connect the Israeli government to Kirk’s assassination.

By all accounts, Biden is no longer smoking crack, so one might wonder why he would agree to sit down with Owens and also validate her unhinged conspiracies. The answer, however, becomes obvious in this clip: He is still trying to salvage his dad’s reputation and also attack the people who forced him off the ticket in 2024.

“The D.C. elite of the left, they crushed my dad because he was never part of that club, he was never part of the Epstein class,” says Biden.

This Thursday. Hunter Biden and me. @candaceoshow pic.twitter.com/iNISQNoIGA

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) May 18, 2026

This is complete nonsense, of course. Joe Biden was not “crushed” by the leaders of his political party because they were in cahoots with the financier and convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. Powerful elites did not turn on Biden because he was threatening to expose their complicity in sex trafficking. Biden was forced out of the campaign because his advanced age and infirmity had rendered him patently unfit to serve another term. Despite the best efforts of his inner circle to conceal this reality from the public, it nevertheless became obvious to everyone after the disastrous June 2024 debate.

Hunter Biden wants to rewrite history, however. He wants to pretend that a nonexistence group of people, “the Epstein class,” had something to do with his dad’s ignominious exit. And so he’s found someone who is well known for seizing upon claims that are manifestly not true and peddling them to a large and unfortunately gullible audience.

Thus the malleability of the grifter. Owens is, of course, a long-time critic of Hunter Biden and has no love for his father, either. But at present, she has other priorities. So it makes perfect sense that she would be willing to absorb Hunter Biden’s conspiracy theories about the Democratic elites betraying his father, in service of her overall agenda of spreading nonsense.

Owens could always surprise me and ask Hunter Biden to defend his absurd claims. I wouldn’t count on it.

This Week on Free Media

I am joined by Amber Duke to discuss alleged assassin Luigi Mangione’s fangirls and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s contempt for President Ronald Reagan.

Worth Watching

I am not sure I’m going to be able to finish the final season of The Boys. It’s really, really bad. Three episodes in, I am enjoying having Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) back, and that’s about it. The showrunners have made the obnoxious decision to transform Homelander into a full-on, completely unsubtle parody of Trump, and it’s really grating. This has somehow rendered him much less terrifying. Also, the main characters still being alive is no longer plausible whatsoever. They’ve had far too many encounters with the bad guys in which no one important gets lasered to death.

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Who should be exempt? Why does Jeff Bezos think teachers in Queens making $75,000 a year shouldn’t be expected to pay taxes?

“I think what’s going on is that it’s kind of a tale of two economies,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box yesterday. OK, uncontroversial. “You have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you also have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling—struggling to pay rent, groceries.”

“A nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year pays 12—more than $12,000 a year in taxes,” continued Bezos—the veracity of which is debatable. “Does that really make sense? So, people talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes?”

“Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?” he continued. “That’s $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything. And so—and by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3 percent of the taxes. It’s only 3 percent. We can find 3 percent. So we don’t have—it’s a small amount of money for the government.…We don’t have a revenue problem in this country. We already have the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all the tax revenue. The bottom half pay only 3 percent. We have already, and I think it should be zero. I don’t think it should be 3 percent.…We actually have a spending problem and that’s a skills issue.”

I mean, some parts of this are true: The federal government does have a massive spending issue. But parts of it are very muddled: Per Tax Policy Center estimates, the bottom 40 percent of households already don’t pay any federal individual income tax. We’re already basically there, at the place Jeff Bezos aspires to be! And it’s not great—either for those households, seemingly, which still (reasonably!) complain of high housing and healthcare and education and childcare costs, or for the federal government being able to balance the budget. (But also, the “nurse in Queens making $75,000” is an imagined person. Average salaries for New York City area registered nurses run about $96,000.)

The truth of it is that we probably need a broad tax base given how large of a welfare and entitlements state we currently have. We need taxes to fund the things we’ve decided to do together. I’m OK with scrapping an awful lot of that, and actually doing very little together. But in the absence of making those vast structural changes, it really rubs me the wrong way that Bezos is advocating for a further narrowing of the tax base, acting like households like mine—two income; both white collar—must bankroll nurses and teachers in Queens (both examples he cites in the interview) making $75,000 a year. These would hardly be poverty wages; but also, they’re not even accurate descriptors of what nurses and teachers in New York tend to get paid these days. (And for teachers, this salary is in addition to their pensions, mind you, because, as I’ve reported before, blue-state teachers don’t have it so bad. Tattoo that on my chest and tell it to Elizabeth Warren!)

Elsewhere, Bezos talks more sense:

“These people [Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.)] sometimes say that, that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. That’s not true.…If people want me to pay more billions then let’s have that debate. But don’t pretend you know that this, that that’s going to solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you. You can’t connect those two things, not logically. You know, there, there are more examples. Why is rent expensive? Why is rent so expensive? I recently saw somebody blamed it on Airbnb. Okay, Airbnb is not the cause of expensive rent. It’s already been outlawed in New York City. And rents are still very high. So we know Airbnb isn’t causing high rents. What’s really causing high rent is government intervention. We subsidize demand with things like tax policy, which is fine, but at the same time, we constrain supply. We constrain supply with things like zoning and permitting. Why does it take so long to get something permitted to build? If you want rents to come down, Econ 101—Really simple. You can’t subsidize demand and constrain supply. If you do, prices are going to skyrocket. But this is not anybody’s fault other than government policy. And this is fixable. Again, this is a skills issue.”

And, when asked about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ (D–N.Y.) recent rant—that there’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned; that you can break rules and abuse labor laws, but you can’t earn billions of dollars—Bezos responded:

“Let’s say you start a burger joint. And you have ten employees and you make a little bit of money.…And so then you open a second outlet. And now you’re making a little bit more money and you have 20 employees and you open a third outlet. By the time you’ve opened 1,000 outlets, you are a billionaire. And by the way, this is a real life story. It happens all the time. It’s In-N-Out burger. It’s, you know, Raising Cane’s Chicken. At what point did that money all of a sudden become unethical or it didn’t? There was one outlet, and then there were two, and then there were three. What you’re doing, the way, the way you make $1 billion or $100 million or $10 million or anything, is you create a service that people love. And if millions of people choose your service, you’re going to end up with $1 billion.”

Given how Bezos accurately diagnoses our political problems throughout much of the interview, it’s rather disturbing how he doesn’t seem to understand a) what the current tax base looks like, and how progressive or regressive federal taxation is; and b) that we probably need a broad tax base and that further splitting into payers and nonpayers might have unintended consequences (like those who pay no taxes voting as if it’s all monopoly money).

Scenes from New York: The only mergers and acquisitions I care about: “The Neue Galerie and its collections will come under the Met’s administrative umbrella; Mr. Lauder and his daughter Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer will donate a further 13 paintings as well as money to cover costs associated with the merger and support an endowment that will fully fund operations and programming. The name will change to The Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie, but it will be referred to as The Met Neue Galerie,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “The Met has deep holdings of work by Paul Klee and Schiele in addition to creations of the Wiener Werkstätte, a sort of early Bauhaus, only in Vienna, where a community of artists designed and made utilitarian objects. And it has a fine Beckmann painting. But its representations of other artists of these schools are spotty at best. So this alliance is transformational.” The Met (as well as our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!) kept me sane when my second-born was in the hospital on the Upper East Side; what a delight that the collection will grow!

QUICK HITS

• “To reveal how Iran has been consolidating control over this strategic chokepoint in recent weeks, Reuters interviewed 20 people with knowledge of the evolving mechanism, including Asian and European shipping sources and Iranian and Iraqi officials, reviewed Iranian documents related to the vetting process, and analysed movements of ships. Taken together, they offer rare insight into how the Iranian scheme functions, with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps playing a central role.” Link here.
• “Hooters Says Bring the Kids,” courtesy of The New York Times.
• Insane:

Within one 24 hour period, Trump:

– got out of a $100 million IRS fine
– secured "immunity" from all future tax investigations for his family and friends
– created a $1.8 billion slush fund for lawbreaking supporters
– was reported for likely insider trading worth nearly $1… pic.twitter.com/8UYkuiAB5p

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) May 20, 2026

• This is patently false. The poor are not “being forced to rely on” services like DoorDash. Eating rice and beans and lentils and chicken breast and apples and dollar burritos and Folgers you brew at home—eating simply, and buying in bulk, and stretching food far by cooking at home—is not oppression. It’s how most of our families ate, pretty much always, up until recently; it’s how many of us were raised. And now, there’s more knowledge-dissemination (check out FrugalityTok!) than ever before. (Others of us, in far less dire circumstances, have the ability to save time by getting groceries delivered, to then use that time for the higher-ROI activity of cooking at home. There are a lot of different options available to us all now, and truly none of them involve being forced to spend $40 a meal.)

This is bc they do not have the time or capacity to create home cooked meals. It’s an issue countless ppl have tried to raise w leftists but big leftists online continue to shame/abuse poor ppl for being forced to rely on these services for meals, which act as a tax on the poor https://t.co/F3azUiucBJ

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) May 20, 2026

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From Allen v. Noble, decided last week by Judge Latonia Williams (Conn. Super. Ct. New Haven), plaintiff’s factual allegations (for Noble’s side of the story, as to the now-dropped criminal charges against her apparently based on the same incident, see this N.Y. Post op-ed—she denies that she used slurs, and claims that surveillance video footage shows “[n]o confrontation, not even any interaction, with the accuser”):

[P]laintiff alleges the following facts. The plaintiff is an American citizen of African descent, who, during the times alleged in the complaint, was employed as a parking lot attendant for Pro-Park Mobility. The defendant Noble, during the times alleged in the complaint, was the executive director, employee, and agent for service of process of the defendant Buckley Institute. On or about a date prior to July 6, 2023, one or both of the defendants entered into an agreement with the plaintiff’s employer to rent parking spaces for one or more of Buckley Institute’s employees, including Noble, in the parking lot where the plaintiff works as an attendant (parking lot).

The complaint alleges that on or about July 6, 2023, while the plaintiff was at the parking lot, he informed Noble that the lot was full and he could not provide for her parking needs. The complaint alleges that the plaintiff overheard Noble state, “fucking niggers,” and that the plaintiff did not respond to her.

The complaint further alleges that on July 13, 2023, while the plaintiff was on duty within the parking lot, Noble told him she could not find a parking place in the parking lot and the plaintiff said the parking lot was full and could not accommodate her. The complaint alleges that Noble replied: “You’s niggers get jobs and don’t know how to act!,” and that the plaintiff did not respond to her.

The complaint further alleges that on or about July 27, 2023, the plaintiff observed Noble arrive at the parking lot and found that, due to the lot being full, there was no space within the parking lot to park her car. The complaint alleges that at that time, in the presence of, and within the earshot of two individuals and the plaintiff, Noble orally referred to the plaintiff as a “nigger” three times over a parking lot issue.

The complaint states that “[t]he plaintiff, by dint of … Noble’s racially odious, racially demeaning, cruel, abhorrent, and racist epithets towards … [the plaintiff] had the capacity to hold him up to public ridicule, public humiliation, and has caused him great annoyance, embarrassment, shame, degradation, and moreover, he has suffered in his reputation and has lost the good will of many persons with which he otherwise would have enjoyed by dint of … Noble’s heinous and foul misconduct she directed towards him.” …

The court allowed plaintiff’s intentional infliction of emotional distress claim to go forward:

 “In order for the plaintiff to prevail in a case for liability under … [IIED], four elements must be established. It must be shown: (1) that the actor intended to inflict emotional distress or that he knew or should have known that emotional distress was the likely result of his conduct; (2) that the conduct was extreme and outrageous; (3) that the defendant’s conduct was the cause of the plaintiff’s distress; and (4) that the emotional distress sustained by the plaintiff was severe.” “Liability for [IIED] requires conduct that exceeds all bounds usually tolerated by decent society …. Liability has been found only where the conduct has been so outrageous in character, and so extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency, and to be regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community…. Conduct on the part of the defendant that is merely insulting or displays bad manners or results in hurt feelings is insufficient to form the basis for an action based upon [IIED].”

“Whether a defendant’s conduct is sufficient to satisfy the requirement that it be extreme and outrageous is initially a question for the court to determine…. Only where reasonable minds disagree does it become an issue for the jury.” “[I]n assessing a claim for [IIED], the court performs a gatekeeping function. In this capacity, the role of the court is to determine whether the allegations of a complaint… set forth behaviors that a reasonable fact finder could find to be extreme or outrageous. In exercising this responsibility, the court is not fact finding, but rather it is making an assessment whether, as a matter of law, the alleged behavior fits the criteria required to establish a claim premised on [IIED].” …

In general, “courts have been more apt to find sufficient allegations of outrageous conduct when that conduct involves violence, the threat of violence, or racial, ethnic, sexual, or religious slurs…. Lamothe v. Russell (Conn. Super. Ct. 2009) (supervisor constantly belittled, berated, and screamed at the plaintiff, constantly mocked plaintiff by calling her fat, threw objects at or near plaintiff, and, on at least one occasion in front of others, grabbed a cigarette out of plaintiff’s mouth and/or hands, while screaming at her); Leone v. New England Communications (Conn. Super. Ct. 2002) (owners subjected plaintiff to constant ethnic slurs, sexually offensive comments, sexually offensive pictures placed on plaintiff’s computer, and insulting comments on his sexual preference).” Cortazar v. Staples the Office Superstore (Conn. Super. Ct. 2012)….

With respect to the specific word at issue in this case, our Supreme Court [in State v. Lienbenguth (2020)] provides an in-depth discussion of the highly offensive and demeaning nature of the use of the word “nigger.” The court states:

Not only is the word “nigger” undoubtedly the most hateful and inflammatory racial slur in the contemporary American lexicon; …; but it is probably the single most offensive word in the English language. See, e.g., Ayissi-Etoh v. Fannie Mae (D.C. Cir. 2013) (Kavanaugh, J., concurring) (“[The] epithet [‘nigger’] has been labeled, variously, a term that ‘sums up … all the bitter years of insult and struggle in America,’ [L. Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography], ‘pure anathema to African-Americans,’ Spriggs v. Diamond Auto Glass (4th Cir. 2001), and ‘probably the most offensive word in English.’ [Random House Webster’s College Dictionary]. See generally [A. Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family]; [H. Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird]…. No other word in the English language so powerfully or instantly calls to mind our country’s long and brutal struggle to overcome racism and discrimination against African-Americans.”); R. Kennedy, The David C. Baum Lecture: ‘Nigger!’ as a Problem in the Law, 2001 U. Ill. L. Rev. 935 (although “[t]he American language is (and has long been) rife with terms of ethnic, racial, and national insult: kike, mick, wop, nip, gook, honkie, wetback, chink, [etc.] … ‘nigger is now probably the most offensive word in English'”); Dictionary.com, available at https://ift.tt/ucEetlx (“The term nigger is now probably the most offensive word in English. Its degree of offensiveness has increased markedly in recent years, although it has been used in a derogatory manner since at least the Revolutionary War.”).

In fact, because of the racial prejudice and oppression with which it is forever inextricably linked, the word “nigger,” when used by a white person as an assertion of the racial inferiority of an African-American person, “is more than [a] mere offensive utterance …. No word … is as odious or loaded with as terrible a history.” … “[T]he term is generally regarded as virtually taboo because of the legacy of racial hatred that underlies the history of its use among whites” …. “[N]o fact is more generally known than that a white man who calls a black man a ‘nigger’ within his hearing will hurt and anger the black man and often provoke him to confront the white man and retaliate. The trial court was free to judicially note this fact.”). The word being “one of insult, abuse and belittlement harking back to slavery days”; it is uniquely “expressive of racial hatred and bigotry”; and “degrading and humiliating in the extreme ….” For all these reasons, the word rightly has been characterized as “the most provocative, emotionally-charged and explosive term in the [English] language.”

In the present case, Noble allegedly referred to the plaintiff as a “nigger” multiple times, on three different days. Thus, for purposes of the motion to strike, the plaintiff has sufficiently alleged facts to support the extreme and outrageous element.

The defendants further argue that the plaintiff fails to allege facts that, if proven true, would show that the plaintiff has suffered “severe” mental distress. Here again, the court disagrees. “The distress necessary to sustain a claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress has been defined simply, but clearly, as ‘mental distress of a very serious kind.'” Count two alleges “severe” emotional distress. The severity of the distress is to be determined by the evidence of its intensity and duration in future proceedings; thus, the cases relied on by the defendants involving summary judgment do not assist the court in determining the sufficiency of the allegations…. Whether the plaintiff suffered “severe” mental distress is for a finder of fact to determine.

But the court rejected plaintiff’s other claims. As to his slander claim, it reasoned that the slur did “not assert objective fact, but only an opinion.” As to the negligent infliction of emotional distress claim, it reasoned (among other things) that that tort applied to a narrow set of cases involving risk of illness or bodily harm. It similarly rejected the claims for negligence and for “wanton and reckless conduct,” which generally require a risk of bodily harm. And it rejected an unfair competition claim, in part because it is limited to conduct within business relationships:

The supplemental objection argues that Noble’s statements occurred during conduct of trade and commerce by way of the defendant’s use of the lot while going to and from work. The plaintiff reasons that the claim is satisfied because one of Noble’s responsibilities is to show up to work for business and events, and the defendants lease the parking space from the plaintiff’s employer; thus, they are engaged in trade or commerce with the parking lot.

However, the plaintiff has failed to provide the court with any binding authority that Noble’s act of parking a car in the lot leased by Buckley Institute and/or Noble creates an action in trade or commerce by Noble. “[A]ctivities constitute trade or commerce only if the party is engaged in the business of conducting such activities.” The complaint fails to sufficiently allege that Noble was engaged in trade or commerce.

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