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.