Hunter Biden Just Named Washington's Biggest Open Secret
The former first son says D.C.'s real problem isn't oligarchy. It's closeted men in power taking their shame out on the rest of us.
Hunter Biden has a new word for what he thinks is wrong with Washington. Not corruption. Not partisanship. “Closetocracy.”
Biden introduced the term this week on I’ve Had It, the podcast hosted by Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan, in an episode posted July 18. His argument: some of the country’s most anti-LGBTQ+ politicians are closeted men, and their shame turns into policy.
“Everybody knows there is this closeted gay mafia, largely Republican, that exists in Washington, D.C.,” Biden said. “The only reason that is relevant is because 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 kept going: “Their whole lives they’ve been closeted, and so you have this... blackened heart about the fact that you can’t be who you want to be, so you take it out on everyone else. And these men, largely men, have done exactly that, and everybody knows who they are.”
Biden named a mafia. He didn’t name its members, not with anything that holds up. What he did next is why this clip spread past LGBTQ+ media into mainstream political and entertainment coverage within a day.
Why Ted Cruz, Not Mike Johnson, Was the Real Flashpoint
Welch had asked Biden a pointed question: given how obsessed the GOP got with his own leaked laptop during his father’s 2020 campaign, whose laptop would he want to see? Biden’s first pick was Sen. Ted Cruz.
What followed wasn’t reporting. It was speculation, and Biden said so himself. “You know what I get? I get a really, really kinky weird shit-type thing,” he said of Cruz, adding, “It may be gay, it may not be gay... It may be a little bit of this, it may be a little bit of that.” Then the walk-back: “I don’t know these to be true at all.”
That line matters more than the joke. Biden spent the segment arguing that closeted shame curdles into cruelty, then, in the same breath, aimed sexual speculation at a sitting senator with nothing behind it. Cruz’s office hasn’t responded publicly.
His second pick was Sen. Josh Hawley. His third was House Speaker Mike Johnson, which is where Welch’s nickname for him, “Little Moses Mike ‘Grindr’ Johnson,” came from.
The Mike Johnson Grindr Rumor Is Still Unproven, and It Already Cost Someone Their Job
The Grindr nickname isn’t new, and it isn’t Biden’s invention. It traces back to a TikToker who goes by @razzledazzlemo, who claimed in fall 2025 to have screenshots proving Johnson used the gay dating app, and threatened to release them unless Johnson swore in Arizona Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva by October 1, 2025.
No screenshots ever surfaced. The TikToker said he handed the material to a journalist who never published anything. Fact-checkers at Snopes and Yahoo News have both examined the claim and found no evidence to support it. Johnson’s office has not addressed it directly.
The rumor had a real cost for the person who started it, regardless. The TikToker says he lost entertainment work and received threats after the claim went viral, and he launched a GoFundMe legal defense fund that has raised more than $27,000.
Johnson’s own record on the subject is better documented, and it isn’t about a dating app. In a 2023 clip that resurfaced widely, Johnson said he and his then-teenage son used Covenant Eyes, an app that shares a porn-viewing report with an “accountability partner,” which was his son. That much is on the record, in Johnson’s own words.
Biden isn’t wrong that internalized homophobia has shaped American politics. It’s a real, well-documented pattern: men who spend careers voting against LGBTQ+ rights while privately living something else. But naming a real pattern doesn’t excuse skipping the evidence. The same logic that lets Biden speculate about a senator’s sex life for laughs is the logic that cost a random TikToker his job over an unproven claim. Closeted or not, guilt by vibes isn’t accountability. It’s the same rumor mill queer people have spent decades trying to escape, just pointed in a different direction.
The Queer Agenda will follow up if Cruz, Hawley, or Johnson responds on the record, or if any of this moves past speculation. Subscribe to get that update when it happens, not just the version that goes viral first.
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Sources
PinkNews · LGBTQ Nation · Primetimer · Snopes · Yahoo News · Rolling Stone