Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I would like to talk a little bit about the strange, bizarre, endless, run-on, crazy interview that Hunter Biden, former President Joe Biden’s son, gave with Andrew Callaghan, a so-called Generation Z internet influencer.

In this long interview, it was a spirited defense of his father, claiming that he was not demented at all, that he was in full control of his faculties, and he had a wonderful administration, and he was unfortunately aborted, kicked out, deposed by a sinister array of characters, whom he accused of being incompetent.

So he attacked George Clooney, who had written a letter about, in an op-ed about Joe Biden’s cognitive problems. He went after David Axelrod, who was also an advocate of removing Biden and putting in then-Vice President Kamala Harris, said his only claim to fame is he won one election. That’s kind of true, in the case of former President Barack Obama. And as Hunter said, Obama was the reason he was elected, not Axelrod. He went after James Carville. He went after Jake Tapper. He went after the entire Democratic establishment.

But what was very strange about what he did, he revealed himself. He attacked grifters in the Democratic Party that made a lot of money. That’s what he did. He said, “These people were unethical.” That’s what he was.

Remember, he was a tax cheat. He never reported, fully, the income that he made by trading off his father’s name. He never truly gave us the full account of the Biden consortium—what his uncle, aunt, cousins, what they were actually doing to get such an enormous amount of money. He never explained why he accepted a pardon from his father. He never explained why his father actually signed his pardon, in opposition to what he did with everybody else, almost, with an autopen.

And then it got very bizarre. He never mentioned that he had dated his brother’s widow and got her hooked on dangerous drugs. In fact, when he mentioned drugs, I thought he might refer to the cocaine that was found in a mail slot in the West Wing. He didn’t. Instead, he gave a defense of cocaine and suggested it’s not nearly as toxic as alcohol.

When he was asked about the laptop—and remember the laptop was in the possession of the FBI for one year and they authenticated it as genuine, and they knew it was genuine. At the same time, they kept silent when “51 intelligence authorities” lied to the American people. And Joe Biden used that lie in the second debate of the 2020 campaign to say that Donald Trump was lying, that this laptop “had all the earmarks of Russian” information efforts—meaning “disinformation.”

He didn’t mention any of that. In fact, he just said about the laptop—in which he is seen using drugs, he’s in pornographic poses, but most importantly, he references his father as “the big guy” and “the 10% guy,” and he laments that he is the bagman for the family.

It’s very incriminating. But he doesn’t—as he has before—he has never denied that it was his. He never denies it’s his. He just says, “It’s irrelevant. If anybody had a laptop and you looked into it, all kinds of stuff would come out.”

He doesn’t talk about his art, that con where he was doodling and blowing paint on through his nose and then hawking that art to buyers, who wanted influence with his father.

His protestations that his father was heroic, that he was one of the best Democratic senators we’ve had, that his presidency was a smashing success are laughable.

So what am I getting at? What I’m getting at is this: It’s very dangerous to think that for four years we had a president who was mentally challenged, cognitively disabled, suffering dementia. And the close circle around them—whether they were former Obama operatives or Biden senatorial family, or his own real family—that these people were running the country.

And the last year or two, if you look at photographs, videos of Biden giving a speech, Biden traveling, there’s one constant. It’s Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden was his eyes and his ears. And he was a close—and maybe the closest—adviser to his father.

And after listening to that video, you can appreciate just how close we came to utter chaos and disruption, that a mentally challenged president and his addicted son had the most power of anybody in the entire world and were running this government with the help of who knows who. We have no idea.

Bottom line, if you listen to even a clip of that interview, it’s frightening that this man was anywhere near the presidency. And how he got near the presidency and how the president was the president is a scandal in itself of historical proportions.

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