How Hunter Biden Won the Internet

New Delhi, India Jul 1, 2026 ALN: About a decade ago, two dancers in a Midtown strip club met Hunter Biden for a lap dance in a private room, where he proceeded to play Fleet Foxes on his phone and smoke drugs.

You may already know this if you’re deep into QAnon or if you’re one of the nearly 50,000 followers of a new “hunter bidens is hot” stan account, which recently resurfaced this piece of lore from court documents—not to humiliate Biden, but to ogle him. In a TikTok slideshow, the folksy “White Winter Hymnal” plays over pictures of Biden that were famously leaked in 2020: topless Hunter in a bathtub, topless Hunter blasting cigs, topless Hunter inexplicably wearing a scarf or sunglasses inside.

The man in these grainy images—which are currently re-flooding certain corners of the internet—barely resembles the clear-eyed son of a former president proudly showing me his collection of oil-based paint markers on a balmy evening this May. Biden, now 56 and wearing a button-down, has spent much of the past three years in this modest garage in Malibu, which he’s transformed into a makeshift studio. It’s here, with the door wide open to let in light and a view of the Pacific, that he’s tried to shut out the world, spending 10 hours a day painting maximalist compositions of animals, nature, and symbols. He’s made at least 100 paintings while listening to audiobooks. Today, his 6-year-old son, a bright-blond surfer boy named Beau, after Biden’s late brother, sits on the ground beside him and fashions his own creation out of shells.

Meeting any public figure is alarming, as your whole nervous system strains to remember that you don’t actually know them. With Biden, it’s a little different: His celebrity is built largely on terms that denied him the luxury of scripting and editing any kind of persona. “There is no moat between me and anyone,” he says, “because they know all my shit is out there.”

Several months ago, he began a series of wide-ranging interviews with Biden, his first for a mainstream publication in seven years. Those conversations ultimately became a real-time analysis of his return to public life: On May 19th, whatever moat there was between Biden and the rest of us seemed to evaporate suddenly, when he posted on X for the first time in almost a decade. “I’m Hunter Biden,” he tweeted. “You’ve never actually heard from me.”

The shock waves from this self-reveal were bracing. Before late May, the horny proprietor of the aforementioned Biden fan account barely posted about the former president’s son. They preferred instead to thirst for the likes of Ariana Grande and Zendaya. Since then, they’ve posted over 150 fan edits of Biden with captions like “give me five minutes and a hair tie,” “my dream date,” and “need that old man realllll bad 😩.”

“I’m a social media star!” Biden tells me, with a smile of disbelief. For decades, Biden was the black sheep of the Democratic party, a wayward son in need of rehabilitation. Most online content about him was either revenge porn or nigh-incomprehensible conspiracy theorizing about his board seat on one of Ukraine’s largest natural-gas concerns while his father was vice president. Now, girlies match his tweets with astrological signs, and he gets to enjoy one of life’s simple pleasures: tweeting “Stephen Miller is an ugly fuck” just for the thrill of it.

The new public fascination with Biden has been suffused with a constant "will-he-or-won't-he" energy—an obvious suspense around his dynastic political prospects. In late May, Biden told me that his return to public life has nothing to do with political ambition. “I hate to talk about myself, I'm not running for office, I'm not running for school president,” he says, “and I'm not running to be the most popular person on Twitter.” His primary goal? He says it’s to help other addicts—a community that “doesn't have any political boundaries or economic boundaries”—who seem to find Biden’s frequent posts about recovery genuinely inspiring: “If I made it back from that global public humiliation, then you know what? They can too.”

Along the way, he gets to dunk on haters: “Do I look like I’m a part of the elite oligarch class,” he responded to one critic on X, attaching a selfie, long since exposed to the world, showing him heavy-lidded and smoking in bed. “This was taken at a Super 8 motel off I95 by the way.”

Biden at least deserves respect for finding poetry in his nightmare: Some of the world’s most powerful people reveled in the near-total violation of his digital privacy, and all they found was a case of illegal gun possession and some unpaid taxes—for which his father pardoned him, oligarch-style—and pictures of a middle-aged man in bathrobes with various women. “I think I benefit more from low expectations than anyone I've ever known,” Biden says. “The vast majority of people on both sides, their entire image of me was a ne'er-do-well, failson, drug addict, degenerate that couldn't string two words together. And so just by being able to sit upright and not drool, I think people are like, ‘Wow, that was amazing.’”

In a little over a month, Biden has amassed over 800,000 followers and materially changed his image—in part by giving hours-long, shockingly intimate interviews to independent media outlets like Channel 5, Armchair Expert, and Soft White Underbelly. He’s even talked to former foes like Candace Owens, who once called him a “degenerate that should be in prison.”

He’s fed the trolls—and everyone is eating.

It’s been almost a year and a half since the Palisades fire, and Los Angeles is still littered with buildings in various states of decay, piled up sandbags, and seemingly abandoned construction materials. Among the detritus is one house that somehow withstood the blaze: Hunter Biden’s hiding spot.

After the inferno took out 23,000 acres on the West Side of Los Angeles, Biden decamped to the East Coast and to Cape Town, South Africa, where his wife, Melissa, has family. He’s only recently come back to Southern California.

Before the laptop, Biden was the kind of person who could only be politely described in euphemisms—someone whose messy personal life had always been a political liability. There were multiple rehab stints, a discharge from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine, and the revelations that he’d cheated on his wife with his brother’s widow, insisted on a paternity test after he had a child with a woman who worked at a strip club, and gotten married to his current wife after only knowing her for about a week. We could go on.

All of it was traceable, to anyone psychologizing from afar, to serious trauma: When Biden was 2 years old, he and his older brother Beau survived a car accident that killed their mother and their younger sister. Hunter says his first memory is waking up in the hospital to Beau holding his hand, saying “I love you” over and over. Naturally, the brothers were inseparable. When Beau, a decorated veteran with political aspirations, died at age 46 of brain cancer, Hunter unraveled.

In April 2019, a new catastrophe forced him into a kind of exile in Los Angeles, moving between hotels and motels. According to the right, Biden took his laptop to a repair shop in Delaware and never picked it up. (Biden has consistently disputed this claim and says he has never been to the store.) Just before Christmas that year, The New York Post revealed the Hollywood Hills neighborhood where Biden lived, complete with real estate images of the grounds, which he says prompted zealots in MAGA hats to show up at his door. His wife was home alone. When she tried to leave, they tailed her in cars and almost “ran her off the road,” he says. Out of fear, the couple eventually moved to Venice, California, with their young son.

In October 2020, the Post struck again, publishing a front-page story on the contents of Biden’s supposed laptop. Before long, any reporter—and, inevitably, anyone who wanted it—had access to 22 years of Biden’s most intimate communications. The next year, a conservative journalist sat in the Venice canals, in a canoe, yelling questions for Biden through a bullhorn. At one point he even parked a truck in front of Biden's Venice rental with a digital billboard that projected some of the pictures from the leak.

What Biden’s electronic data showed—beyond the aforementioned nudes and crack pipes, beyond the texts with his dad where he calls himself a "fucked up addict who can't be … trusted”—was never quite clear. But to those who wanted to believe, it was evidence of something. To be fair, it’s hard to read a 2017 email about an equity split in a venture with a Chinese energy company—in which one Biden associate writes “10 held by H for the big guy”—without having some questions.

The leak, mostly ignored by the mainstream press for ethical reasons (their claim) or squeamishness about an alleged ratfucking campaign (the more likely story), exacerbated a witch hunt that had already been underway for years. For a time in the mid-to-late 2010s, Biden, a lawyer and businessman, held a non-executive seat on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company; this entailed being paid $65,000 a month for five years, seemingly just to be Hunter Biden. During that period, his father and other Obama administration allies strong-armed the Ukrainian government into dismissing an allegedly ineffective prosecutor who was said to be looking into the company. Since 2019, President Donald Trump had held up Hunter’s personal woes and business relationships as evidence of Joe Biden’s squalid ties to a diabolical elite. During the tough early days of Biden’s sobriety, the Trump campaign turned “Where’s Hunter?” into a rallying cry printed on T-shirts. “I couldn't afford to pay the rent, let alone for security,” Biden says of that time. “It was awful.”

These days, Biden is mostly buffered from the chaos that defined the previous decade. He wakes up at 5:30 am to paint. When “Beau-y” (his parents’ pet name for him, pronounced Bowie) gets up at around 7 am, Biden makes him an egg, Takoyaki-style. Then they take a walk or go for a swim. In the afternoon, he writes. He’s in bed by 8:30 pm.

Biden’s first book, Beautiful Things, a memoir published in 2021, “ties up in a really super neat bow” with him getting married and sober. In some ways, that’s when the story began: Biden says he’s finished a draft of a new book about the laptop scandal and everything that came after. He says he’ll start publishing it in serial form on his Substack in July. “It’s about the plot against me, the conspiracy that was led by figures like Rudy Giuliani.”