The YouTuber Andrew Callaghan has been documenting off-kilter American politics since before the 2020 election, but the recent interview on his web show with an indignant Hunter Biden caught wide attention. Some of that came from Melania Trump, who has threatened to sue Biden for defamation over his claims about how she met her husband (which he in turn sourced to the writer Michael Wolff). Though Callaghan hasn’t faced a lawsuit threat himself, the first lady’s demands included that he remove the video from the internet, he said. Instead, Callaghan invited Biden back on to reject the demands — the sort of bravado you don’t see in broadcast much these days.
Callaghan told me in an interview he finds the situation “just unbelievably preposterous” and that he’d never cave to the sort of Trump legal threats that have drawn a series of humiliating settlements from legacy media companies. He said he wasn’t sure if new media is braver or stupider in that regard: “It could be because you guys know more about [getting sued] than we do,” he said.
Callaghan said he had also been working with The New York Times on an op-ed about the growing space for independent news and the threats to its freedom — but that Times editors ultimately spiked it, telling him the paper needed to pick its battles. A Times spokesman, Charlie Stadtlander, said the paper doesn’t discuss why submissions don’t run, “but any fair reading of our report[ing] will show we haven’t shied away from guest essays that challenge the Trump administration.”
Callaghan said he plans to read the piece out on his YouTube channel: “You’re not supposed to be scared of the president!”
