The Trump administration is intimidating voters like the Ku Klux Klan did in the 19th-century Reconstruction era, Hunter Biden has claimed.

In an interview with the YouTube account Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan, Joe Biden’s son compared deportations and the behavior of ICE agents to the racial violence directed at black people after the American Civil War. Across the country, Biden claimed ICE agents are “openly terrifying people for the purpose of scaring the shit out of them”.

Biden said the campaign of violence targeting black Americans unleashed after the Reconstruction era is similar to what is happening today. Callaghan described the Ku Klux Klan as primarily a “voter intimidation force”, a characterization Biden agreed with. “And that’s exactly what they’re doing right now,” he replied. “Whether it’s voter suppression through violence and intimidation or disinformation, it’s the same goddamn thing, whether it’s an algorithm or whether it’s a cross burning in your yard.”

As Biden outlined, from 1865-77 there were over 1,500 African American officeholders, spread across the Senate, the House of Representatives, and state legislatures. The emancipation secured by the Union forces in the Civil War eventually gave way to a renewed system of rigid racial segregation. “We are caught in the permanent reconstruction loop, the permanent Jim Crow loop,” Biden said. “Every single time we get closer to that idea, that promise, that potential of a more perfect Union, what ends up fucking happening is, they come in and shut the door down, because there’s this evil symbiosis between money and power.”

After drawing parallels between Trump’s America and the Reconstruction era, Hunter Biden then compared present-day America to Nazi Germany, saying that prisons in El Salvador were concentration camps. “If you think that a prison in El Salvador is not a fucking concentration camp, you’re out of your fucking mind. Tell me anybody that is returning from there.” On deportations, he said: “It’s a fucking crime what they’re doing.”

During the interview, Biden also discussed his troubles with addiction and the conspiracies in which his political opponents allege he is involved. He confessed that he had learned to make his own crack cocaine to avoid going to dangerous locations and said he was “very proud” of being sober since 2019. On conspiracy theories, he said that Fox News “got stuck on” the idea “that I funded the Wuhan lab”. In 2021, there were reports that an investment firm led by Hunter Biden was a financial backer of a company which partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In January this year, the CIA concluded that this was where Covid-19 most likely originated from.

Elsewhere in the interview, he rejected CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s claim that he was operating as his father’s “chief of staff”, saying that he only spent 12 days in the White House during Joe Biden’s term, and dismissed Democratic strategist James Carville for not having won “a race in 40 fucking years”.

In December 2024, Joe Biden pardoned his son, who was due to face sentencing later that month on federal felony gun and tax convictions. Trump called the pardon a “miscarriage of justice”. In March, after his father had left office, Hunter claimed in a court filing that he was “millions in debt” and could not access his Pacific Palisades rental home because of the damage from the wildfires. As a result, he asked the court to dismiss his lawsuit against ex-Trump aide and political activist Garrett Ziegler because he did “not have the financial resources to continue litigating this case”.

In October last year, just before the election, Hunter Biden said that a second Trump presidency could mean “the end of America as we know it”. He added: “I agree with Gen. Mark Milley that Donald Trump is a ‘fascist to the core’.” In his latest interview, he reiterated his previous claims, describing the President as a “fucking dictator thug”.

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Max Mitchell is UnHerd’s Assistant Editor, Newsroom.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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