Hunter Biden, once again, seems to back at it, living off old dad's name.

He's been invited to "guest lecture" a "fake news" 10-week media course at Tulane University in New Orleans. He'll be one of a panel of very well-known left-wing names, plus #NeverTrump New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.

According to the Daily Mail:

Hunter Biden is helping teach a class on fake news at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana this fall.

The course titled 'Media Polarization and Public Policy Impacts' will include several guest speakers throughout its 10 weeks, including the president's son.

The course description, according to a copy of the syllabus obtained by DailyMail.com, says: 'America's rapidly advancing partisan divide is fueled substantially by the growing political polarization increasingly evident in our news media.'

The university didn't say whether he would be paid, but it would be surprising if he wasn't offered at least an honorarium. Getting big names such as former White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, Fox News's Juan Williams, Susan Glasser of the New Yorker, Kylie Atwood of CNN, Margaret Brennan of CBS, Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post and a couple of others, plus Stephens, all together at once is no small thing, and doesn't sound like a free gig courtesy of the speakers. At many universities, these honorariums and guest-salaries can get pretty big. Angela Davis, for one, was paid $43,000 for a one-day a week, few-weeks' course at UCLA in 2014. How much was Hunter paid? If it was little or nothing for Hunter, it's likely the university would have said in its statement to the Daily Mail.

Nice work if you can get it.

In the three main news accounts noted -- from the Daily Mail, which broke the story, to the New York Post, to Breitbart News, all noted that he wasn't exactly a guy with media experience. He had no experience writing articles or columns for newspapers, nor any broadcast experience. What he has a knack for is glomming off the fame of his dear old dad, whether as an 'artist' getting a fancy gallery gig, a writer, getting a big-dollar book gig, a Navy man, somehow getting into the Navy as an officer despite his drug use and advanced age, or a money-man, with gigs on the boards of skeezy foreign firms, in China and Ukraine, and possibly some other places. Somehow, Hunter always manages to enter fields with instant paydays on subjects he knows nothing about. Doesn't matter what.

Which rather contradicts Old Joe's promise that none of his family members would be profiting off his presidential name. Well, well, well.

The question that remains is why Tulane, a university that spends about a billion a year on its operation, good reputation, would want to do this. Would it be another personal-political favor to impress Old Joe?

Research grants and federal funding might be one place to look, for that. Tulane, it turns out, gets a lot of federal funding, based on some outdated but likely indicative documents I found from Tulane's own brochures. 

As of 2008, Tulane got $89 million from the National Institutes for Health, and $39 million from other federal sources, see page 40. The numbers have creeped up bigger, based on individual grants examined since, but I don't have a full total for now. The university's endowment, though, is big -- at $1.445 billion, based on its latest 2020 annual report. Big and getting bigger every year, as the dramatic charts show.

So yes, they've got a lot of federal money, lots of cash for salaries and honorariums, and an interest in pleasing old Joe.

The professors doing the course (Daily Mail seems to have erred in calling Hunter a professor, he's a guest speaker) are well worth noting, too.

Who are they? One is Dr. Mitchel Sellers, who is listed as a visiting assistant professor, which is about as low as the status goes in professor world, and he looks very young, based on his picture. He is, however, an expert in wokester studies. His bio says this:

Dr. Sellers’ research interests fall broadly into the field of state politics and policies, in addition to civil rights policy broadly defined (race, gender and LGBTQ concerns). He specializes in American politics, research design, statistics, and public policy. His research on policy diffusion, executive orders and transgender rights has appeared in several scholarly outlets, including Political Research Quarterly, Journal of Public Policy, Administration & Society, and was a with author for The Remarkable Rise of Transgender Rights (University of Michigan Press, 2018).

Not exactly a media expert, any more than Hunter is, but certainly in tune with the wokesterism of the Biden administration. He'd fit in. He'd also benefit from a job with them if he wanted one. Doing a favor with Hunter? The possibility exists.

The second professor is more interesting: He's not a "Dr." with a Ph.D but he's got a lot of political connections. His day job is working as the chief of communications for the very large Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, after a decent career in broadcast journalism. And politics, lots of Washington politics. He knows the politicians and the press as only a swamp creature could. His bio reads:

As a print journalist, Schwartz has written for the Washington Post, OffBeat, the definitive guide to New Orleans music, and various national newspapers and magazines. Early in his career, he served as a research assistant to former Carter domestic policy adviser Stuart E. Eizenstat at Powell, Goldstein, Frazer, and Murphy and as a legislative fellow in the offices of Senator J. Bennett Johnston (D-LA) and Representative Lindy Boggs (D-LA). 

As a P.R. man, his job is making political and media connections. And he's knee deep in establishment politics, it would not be surprising if he knew all of those guest speakers and invited them on. Would he, with his leftwing politics, have an interest in pleasing Old Joe by giving Hunter a speaker gig, probably with big money? It's hard not to ask that question.

As for Hunter himself, why would he be interested in doing this? Reliving all the true reports about his debauchery, supposedly left behind now? He was never a victim of fake news as President Trump was. He was actually the beneficiary of social media censorship of real news about him, as the New York Post, noted. They are the ones who know about fake news -- they got censored by Big Tech for its genuinely accurate reporting.

The usual reason for Hunter's branching out into fields he knows nothing about is money, so it's possible it was that.

It may also be a bid to shill his books, which seems to have quite weak sales based on Amazon rankings, despite his hefty book advance. I wrote about that here.

Lastly, it may be a bid to respectable-ize himself, clean up his drugs-and-hookers reputation, by suddenly reinventing himself as a respected professor, same as domestic terrorist Bill Ayers once did.

According to Breitbart News:

Hunter also made a failed attempt to get a law professor gig at the University of California Los Angeles, touting his family name and political connections, emails reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation revealed.

In 2019, Hunter reportedly offered to teach a class on drug policy and identified a list of possible guest speakers with close ties to his father.

That gig never panned out.

One thing in common with all these things is that they appear to involve influence-peddling off dear old dad. Were he just a basic crack addict, would the university have chosen him to be its guest speaker? He hasn't even come clean on his abandoned computer full of crack-smoking pictures, which was obviously his, while some watchers of addicts, such as New York Post columnist Maureen Callahan, don't think he's acting like someone who has really kicked drugs and become a changed man.

He's just same old Hunter, living off dad's name, and spreading potential corruption with everyone he comes in contact with.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of cropped images by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0, Acaben, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0, PxFuel public domain, ABC News YouTube screen shot, and Voice of America // public domain

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