Hunter Biden has claimed that a group of closeted gay politicians, largely within the Republican Party, represents the “biggest problem” facing the United States.
The son of former US president Joe Biden made the remarks during a recent appearance on I’ve Had It, the political and pop-culture podcast hosted by Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan.
Biden argued that the country’s central problem was not “the oligarchy”, but something he described as “the closetocracy”.
“Everybody knows there is this closeted gay mafia, largely Republican, that exists in Washington, D.C., and everybody knows every single one of them who’s gay,” he said.
Biden did not name any politicians or provide evidence identifying the people to whom he was referring.
Biden Links Political Hostility to Remaining Closeted
Biden said he believed the relevance of a politician’s sexuality lay in the emotional and psychological conflict created by concealing it.
“I believe that internal conflict creates so much vitriol inside a person that they take it out on the rest of the world, and they do,” he said.
“Their whole lives they’ve been closeted and so you have this… blackened heart by the fact that you can’t be who you want to be, so you take it out on everybody else.”
A clip of the remarks was promoted online by the podcast under the phrase “the Closetocracy of DC”, helping the newly coined term spread across social media.
Remarks Receive a Divided Response
Some social media users interpreted Biden’s comments as an attack on perceived hypocrisy among Republican politicians who oppose LGBTQ+ rights while allegedly concealing their own queer identities.
Others criticised the argument for relying on the familiar stereotype of the bitter or self-hating closeted gay man.
Critics noted that political hostility towards LGBTQ+ people cannot automatically be explained through assumptions about an individual’s sexuality. They also argued that speculating about unnamed politicians risks treating being closeted as evidence of dishonesty or moral failure.
The remarks nevertheless attracted widespread attention, adding to Biden’s increasingly outspoken and provocative public commentary about American politics.
