May. 23, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Watching Hunter Biden’s nearly two-hour interview with the antisemitic megastar podcaster Candace Owens was, as you might expect, not an intellectually rewarding experience. But that’s not to say it didn’t have some accidentally illuminating moments.

Despite Owens’ considerable talent for monetizing content that appeals to bigots and conspiracy theorists — a significant portion of the MAGA movement — she is not well-read, appears to have no principles that can’t be jettisoned at a moment’s notice and her body of work serves as further evidence backing up the scientifically documented link between racism and stupidity.

Hunter Biden, it’s hard to believe these days, was just a couple of years ago a very influential person by virtue of nothing more than being President Joe Biden’s son. He was a key voice in the Biden inner circle and infamously urged his father to continue his doomed re-election campaign even after his disastrous debate performance. That was absurdly inept counsel that proved to be a hugely important factor in returning Trump to office.

But that wasn’t the only way Hunter Biden was of great value to the Trump campaign. Although multiple investigations into his foreign business affairs found no evidence that the elder Biden did anything wrong, Trump and MAGA portrayed the Biden son’s alleged attempts at low-level influence-peddling as the ultimate examples in self-dealing and government corruption. People including Owens often said Hunter Biden was emblematic of the “Biden crime family.” (Owens also said in 2021 that Joe Biden was “an illegitimate President” and a “true dictator.”)

What a difference a few years makes.

The current president and his family have enriched themselves to the tune of billions of dollars since he’s been back in power, with investments in industries and cash-infusions from foreign entities with business considerations before the U.S. government. Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s comeback tour has him playing the self-pitying sad-sack, whining to Owens that people think he’s just some “ne’er do well who never did anything in their life.” To his detractors, he says in the interview, “Go look at my goddamn resume!” He cited his Yale Law education and serving on “16 boards” among his accomplishments.

Much of the excruciatingly boring first hour focused on Biden’s struggles with addiction, to which Owens showed great sympathy — even if she advertised the interview as being poised to “crack the internet.” (Get it?) Biden explained, convincingly, why the cocaine found at the White House in November 2023 was not his, and there was a lot of vaguely pious meandering chatter about finding salvation in his Catholic faith.

Among the interview’s few revealing moments included Biden assailing what he described as Israel’s “wholesale murder of a population in Gaza.” That’s interesting, if only because there’s ample data showing that President Biden’s “bear hug” strategy (throwing the occasional criticism toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his war on Gaza, but doing almost nothing to stem the brutality) was deeply unpopular among many Democratic constituencies and helped Trump win crucial swing states like Michigan.

Hunter Biden had his father’s ear when he gave him the horrible advice to stay in the 2024 race, but did he ever tell his father what a tactical, political and moral mistake he was making by rubber-stamping Bibi’s endless war? If he did, he didn’t mention it to Owens.

Owens, at one point, pointedly called out the Trump family’s shameless profiting off of the presidency, correctly comparing their galactic levels of corruption with the comparatively small potatoes of Hunter’s alleged chicanery.

Then came the truly unhinged portions of the interview, where Biden praised Owens’ supposed bravery “for asking questions” about the official narrative surrounding her close friend Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September 2025. Although the alleged assassin reportedly confessed to the crime and left a trail of evidence suggesting the killing was politically motivated, Owens has for months speculated that there was instead a conspiracy involving the Israeli government and perhaps even Kirk’s widow.

It’s worth noting that Owens’ rise was enabled by “anti-woke” critics of identity politics who nonetheless rarely skipped an opportunity to cite Owens’ identity for culture war street credibility. Bari Weiss praised her in a 2018 New York Times feature about the “intellectual dark web” as “a sharp, young, black conservative — a telegenic speaker with killer instincts,” and Christina Hoff Sommers wrote around that same time that Owens “is the pseudo-left’s worst nightmare: A formidable young black woman saying the emperor has no clothes.” Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire site also hosted Owens’ show for years.

She has since fallen out of favor with that crowd because of her antisemitism, but the damage is done: She’s a massively influential right-wing media star with nearly six million YouTube subscribers. And now she appears to be, at least superficially, pals with Joe Biden’s son.

The interview might not have “cracked the internet” as Owens promised, but there is something remarkable about the former Democratic president’s son chumming it up with an overt bigot, fabulist and purveyor of brain-rotting innuendos who relentlessly smeared him and his family for years. The whole thing has a professional wrestling kayfabe vibe to it — with heroes and villains regularly swapping roles amid performative shouting.

Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW.

May. 23, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

As Republicans seek to systematically dismantle Black political power, the pushback is extending far beyond the courtrooms and statehouses where these fights typically occur.

This week, it reached the arenas and stadiums where college sports are played.

First, the Congressional Black Caucus announced its unanimous opposition to the SCORE Act, a major reform to college athletics backed by university and conference leaders for the NCAA, the SEC and the ACC.

In a statement, members argued they could not support athletic institutions that “remain silent” in the face of Republican moves to eliminate majority-Black congressional districts. According to recent reportsthe NCAA, SEC and ACC do not appear to have publicly responded to the redistricting controversy, a silence that has become central to criticism from the Congressional Black Caucus and NAACP.

Then, the NAACP launched its “Out of Bounds” campaign, calling on Black athletes, potential recruits, families and fans to reconsider supporting universities in states aggressively moving to weaken Black political representation after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais.

Taken together, the moves signal something larger than frustration. They reflect a growing consensus among Black leaders that neutrality from powerful institutions is not acceptable when democracy itself is under attack.

Conservatives predictably attacked the moves, casting student athletes as pawns in a political game, arguing that athletes would rather get a paycheck than stand in solidarity or just mocking the idea of playing somewhere other than a big southern college.

But young people have always been central to movements for democratic change in this country.

During the civil rights movement, students and children marched, sat in at lunch counters, filled jails and faced police dogs, fire hoses and violence in the streets of the South. Young people were not treated as too inexperienced or too uninformed to participate in democracy. They were often the moral force pushing the country to confront what older institutions were too comfortable tolerating.

That history matters now.

No one is demanding college athletes single-handedly save American democracy. The question is whether the people whose talent, labor and cultural power sustain these institutions are willing to recognize the leverage they already possess.

This is not about college sports being politicized. They already are. The question is where that political energy is being directed.

In the South especially, college football is not just entertainment. It is culture, money, political influence and state identity rolled into one. Governors campaign on the sidelines, state legislatures protect these programs like state assets and entire economies orbit around them.

And Black athletes are central to sustaining that political economy.

For years, universities and athletic conferences have wrapped themselves in the language of diversity, equity and opportunity. They have recruited Black athletes aggressively, celebratedBlack excellence on Saturdays and profited from Black visibility, labor and culture.

But when the rights of Black voters to choose their own representatives are being weakened, those same institutions suddenly become silent.

The CBC and the NAACP are just calling attention to that inaction. Their mission is to make it politically and economically costly for college athletic institutions to stand on the sidelines. Because this is bigger than sports.

When politicians manipulate maps to dilute communities where political participation threatens their power, democracy itself starts to rot from the inside out. Silence is not neutrality; it is standing by the oppressor.

History has already taught us that lesson.

The collapse of Reconstruction was not sustained by violent extremists alone. It was sustained by respectable institutions that convinced themselves silence was the safer course.

Business leaders prioritized economic stability over democratic equality. Universities accommodated themselves to segregationist power structures. Newspapers sanitized democratic backsliding as mere political disagreement. Northern political elites grew tired of the political cost of defending Black citizenship.

Too many institutions decided protecting multiracial democracy was simply no longer worth the effort and learned to make peace with oppression.

This is why the current moment feels so dangerous to me. Because once again, America is watching institutions attempt to distance themselves from a democratic crisis unfolding directly around them.

The burden of defending democracy cannot continue falling solely on the communities most targeted by democratic erosion. Our democracy is not some DEI initiative that can be pulled when it’s inconvenient.

History shows attacks on Black political power rarely remain confined to Black communities. Again and again, America has used race as the testing ground for democratic rollback — from voter suppression to gerrymandering to weakened federal protections — before expanding those tactics to the rest of the country.

They are testing whether the people who built these athletic empires are willing to use their own leverage: athletes and their families; alumni, fans and boosters; occasional viewers and allies alike.

Institutions rarely move simply because they are asked nicely. This campaign is attempting to make silence expensive.

And perhaps that is the deeper message of this moment. The coming fight will not just be confined to politics, or even to sports. Democracy will survive when neutrality in the face of oppression becomes untenable for everyone.

Don’t forget to subscribe to “MS NOW Presents: Clock It,” Symone Sanders Townsend’s new podcast series with Eugene Daniels on the latest political news, the catchiest cultural moments and how they converge. Listen to the latest episode here.

Symone D. Sanders Townsend is a co-host of “The Weeknight,” which airs Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MS NOW.

May. 23, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Therapists across the country are seeing a surge in clients who say politics is taking a toll on their mental health, according to a new article in Blue Light News Magazine. One therapist told the publication, “This is the first time that we’re really seeing people initiating therapy because of political [anxiety].”

An American Psychological Association survey found that about two-thirds of Americans said politics was a significant source of stress in their lives in 2025. Blue Light News reports that psychological associations are holding workshops on addressing mental health problems tied to politics, and clinics are holding staff meetings on tackling the issue. Some therapists are even specializing in political anxiety. A friend who works as a therapist told me that he lists “climate grief” as an area of expertise.

I am not a therapist. But I have thought about and engaged with politics day in and day out for most of my life without going (entirely) crazy. When friends and acquaintances ask me, with increasing frequency, how to deal with the stress of paying close attention to a world awash in crisis, I share the following thoughts.

As many political thinkers on the left have argued, optimism is not just a temperament. It is a strategy and outlook that can be consciously cultivated, especially in concert with others. Even when it may feel pointless, focusing on what can be done is worthwhile. Expressing dissent, minimizing harm, notching incremental wins and building networks and ideas for the future are not just the right things to do — they build discipline and faith in action that can pay off in the future when better opportunities arise.

Many people’s instinct is to gorge on news in response to major — and often horrible — developments. But this can confuse political awareness with political involvement. A good citizen is broadly informed about what is happening in their society. But that doesn’t mean letting the hourly news cycle land blow after blow to your psyche.

A healthy media diet is not unlike a healthy food diet: It requires deliberate, moderate consumption and balance and variety. Rather than endlessly doomscrolling on social media or having thousands of notifications hold your attention span hostage, budget how much time you allow yourself to consume political news in a given day or week. Read weekly and monthly magazines that take a longer view and try to make sense of the daily mess. Read about issues other than politics — there’s a lot more neutral or good news in the science world, for example.

Books are even better for a big-picture perspective. Novels are great for many reasons but from a political perspective, they remind me that many of our social problems constantly recur in different forms and encourage us to consider them with empathy and nuance. History books remind me that while things can feel rough at the moment, humanity has overcome problems that dwarf many of the ones that plague us today — total global warfare, plagues that wipe out huge swathes of humanity, famines, slavery and many other normalized acts of cruelty and exploitation that boggle the mind.

Learning about the history of the left in particular reminds me to think of our contributions to society as part of a series of cycles stretching across time; no one person’s actions can change the world permanently, but those of us immersed in the struggle for progress are, at our best, helping create links between the best traditions of the past and the needs of the future. It might not sound relaxing to contemplate past catastrophes, but there is consolation in knowing you have good company across generations in facing off against the world’s problems and injustices.

Healthy consumption of information is only one way to build resilience. A huge source of political anxiety and depression stems from a feeling that one is helpless. But you’re not — there are always opportunities to get involved in civic, political and labor organizations. Problem-solving helps restore one’s sense of agency and purpose. And it is grounding to seek alignment between one’s values and one’s actions. Find your people, focus on a handful of issues and find a way to sustainably contribute to putting in work and problem solving in a routine manner. Plus, people tend to treat one another a lot better at political meetings than they do online, and it’s also a way to make friends and have fun.

Conveniently, this is both a way to feel better and to actually build democratic power. Particularly at a time when many people are realizing how our political parties are not up for the task of solving the scope of problems we face, it’s more important than ever for people to act in solidarity to advocate for the kind of world they want to see, instead of delegating it to empty suits.

Of course, nobody can — or should — be immune to feelings of uneasiness, despair and rage in response to oppression and devastation. I myself am hardly a picture of total equanimity. And when you yourself are facing the direct consequences of a harsh policy that is restricting your freedom, it makes perfect sense that it would be a blow to your mental health. But my intention is to try to flesh out how we can have at least some self-sovereignty and influence over our ability to be functional in the world in the face of a seemingly never-ending torrent of bad news.

It can also be helpful to draw from a spiritual tradition to renew one’s sense of the purpose of being and acting. For methat includes meditation that draws from Buddhist lineages and deliberate community-building. For you, it could take an almost infinite number of forms. This is not about withdrawing from the world, but connecting with it in a way that’s calm and unmediated by algorithms and alarmism or demagogues and doomsayers.

Lastly, I would note that one small thing we can do at the level of social norms is buck the ritualized doomerism that often prevails on the internet. The stance that “everything is bad and getting worse” is commonplace on social media sites, where many people are endlessly cynical and often vicious toward their fellow users. This blinkered view rewires people’s mindsets to constantly scan for a slow drip of bad news as proof of society’s endless freefall and lose perspective on what is working and worth cherishing.

And there’s another doomerist-adjacent custom that we should also discard. People will sometimes sheepishly offer a bit of good news — about the world or themselves — to others by prefacing it with, “I know things are terrible in the world right now, but….” I say: Drop the guilt-laden preamble! Say it boldly! Human experience is varied and complex, good things and bad things always coexist.

Hope is more essential than ever when things feel particularly dark. Don’t let tyrants and oligarchs ruin the pleasure of a good meal, a job promotion, a beautiful piece of art or falling in love. Don’t let them temper your pride in a burgeoning mutual aid group or small garden or tiny ragtag neighborhood patrol to protect immigrants in the community. Savoring that, which is pleasurable or encouraging — or just simply working OK — is going to help us get through this mess. Celebrate life when you can. It’s all we’ve got.

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.