I painted this self portrait from a photograph the New York Post and Daily Mail ran over and over again alongside horrible stories about me. They averaged about 3 stories a day between them for years. The image came from their complete theft of my digital life. In the photograph I am in the worst stretch of my addiction. Exhausted. Contemplating how I could end everything.
They published it over and over because they believed it showed something disturbing, something degenerate, something people would recognize as evidence of whatever they were accusing me of that particular day.
I set out to paint it because I wanted to take back what they were trying to steal from me. It wasn’t just the image they had stolen. They had stolen thousands of images. They wanted to steal my humanity. Their portrait was of a monster. My portrait is of a man being reassembled piece by piece, bit by bit, pixel by pixel through the hard work of recovery.
A portrait of someone worth saving. Someone worth forgiveness. For all of me. Past. Present. Future. Gratitude for all of it.
The images they meant as weapons are no longer weapons to me. The man in them is no longer theirs to describe. He is mine, and I love him.
We do recover.
The Bible Belt is also:
The divorce belt
The teen pregnancy belt
The obesity belt
The murder belt
The poverty belt
The high-school dropout belt
The uneducated belt
The MAGA belt
The prison belt
The disease belt
None of these are a coincidence. They are not simply correlation.
This is cause and effect.
BREAKING: In a stunning moment, Fox News just admitted that Donald Trump is responsible for inflation being at its highest levels in over 3 years. Woah.
So, people have been asking me my thoughts on Trump’s mishandling of the Lincoln Memorial Reflection Pool.
My response.
Why isn’t Trump in prison for sexually assaulting children on Epstein’s perverted island?
Trump just admitted it.
The President of the United States is personally directing federal prosecutors to start investigations into his political opponents when his preferred candidate may lose the election.
Trump will release the video evidence of vandals cutting a 350 ft gash in the Reflecting Pool lining when he releases the Epstein files, and proof that the 2020 election was stolen, and evidence that the ICE agents who killed Americans acted in self defense, and
Imagine a country where you can get a 10 year prison sentence for removing peeling paint from a pool…
And receive no prison sentence for raping a child.
Welcome to America.
WOW!! JD Vance got the Iranians to AGREE to the SAME thing we had under OBAMA in the agreement that TRUMP pulled out of!
All it took was months of war, 300 billion to Iran, and one of the biggest US capitulations in history.
ART OF THE DEAL, BABY!!
There are cameras that monitor the Reflecting Pool 24/7 - it's Washington DC ffs. There is no footage of anyone damaging or trying to cause damage or sprinkling algae spores or doing anything of the sort. These people live in a world of lies and only morons believe them.
BREAKING: Donald Trump is reportedly furious that the annual ranking of US presidents by a committee of 50 top presidential historians was released today, and the committee almost unanimously ranked Trump’s second term as the worst in US history.
Dear Joe,
I wish I could sit down with you face to face and explain why so many of us were offended by the UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House.
For me, it had nothing to do with the UFC or who showed up for the fights. The brand you and Dana have built is a bona fide American success story. More power to you. As for the fighters, in my book, anyone brave enough to put it all on the line in the arena is remarkable to witness. Their dedication and discipline inspire me. I don’t understand anyone who can’t admire that.
And as for the people who attended, I, for one, love Shane Gillis. I think he’s hilarious and brilliant. It was a show. A once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to witness it firsthand.
My problem is that I believe some of our public spaces are sacred. And unlike many of the great powers that came before us, these American monuments belong to all of us. Not to whoever happens to hold power at the moment.
The White House does not belong to Donald Trump. It does not belong to any President. It belongs to the people. To treat it as Caesar treated the Colosseum is antithetical to everything our founding fathers fought for.
This is not Rome. Presidents are not emperors doling out bread and circuses for the peasants. The White House is the People’s House. This “celebration” could have happened in any stadium within a stone’s throw of the South Lawn. No one would have had an issue with it.
But that was obviously Donald Trump’s whole point. By holding the event on the South Lawn, what he was saying to the rest of us is:
“This is my house. I own it. I will do with it what I please. I’ll build a colosseum and have the gladiators fight under my gaze. I’ll tear down the East Wing. I’ll pave over the Rose Garden. I’ll cover everything in gold and marble. I’ll erase the names of all the men who came before me.”
The fights were an exhibition of imperial domination, not a celebration of our 250th anniversary as a democracy.
The White House is not Buckingham Palace. It is not the Palace of Versailles. It is not the Forbidden City of Beijing. It does not belong to an emperor, or a king, or a commissar.
The White House belongs to us. All of us. The person who sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is nothing more than an honored guest. A temporary caretaker.
The President is our servant. Not our Caesar.
Respectfully, Hunter
P.S. Cage match between me and Don Jr.? Your call on the venue. Anywhere but the South Lawn.