How Hunter Biden Won the Internet

亨特·拜登是如何“赢下”互联网的

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” [sic] 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.

大约十年前，两名舞女在曼哈顿中城的一家脱衣舞俱乐部为亨特·拜登（Hunter Biden）提供私人包间服务，期间他用手机播放着 Fleet Foxes 乐队的音乐，并吸食毒品。如果你是“匿名者Q”（QAnon）的深度关注者，可能早就知道这件事了。又或者，你是那个拥有近 5 万粉丝的“hunter bidens is hot”（亨特·拜登很性感）粉丝账号的关注者之一，该账号最近从法庭文件中翻出了这段往事——目的不是为了羞辱拜登，而是为了欣赏他。在一个 TikTok 幻灯片视频中，伴随着民谣《White Winter Hymnal》的音乐，屏幕上滚动播放着 2020 年泄露的那些著名照片：赤裸上身的亨特在浴缸里、赤裸上身的亨特抽着烟、赤裸上身的亨特在室内莫名其妙地戴着围巾或墨镜。

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.

这些颗粒感十足的照片目前正重新席卷互联网的某些角落，而照片中的那个人，与今年五月一个温暖的傍晚，那位眼神清澈、自豪地向我展示他油性马克笔收藏的前总统之子，几乎判若两人。现年 56 岁的拜登穿着一件衬衫，过去三年里大部分时间都待在马里布这个简陋的车库里，他将其改造成了一个临时工作室。在这里，大门敞开，阳光洒入，还能眺望太平洋。他试图将世界拒之门外，每天花 10 个小时创作充满动物、自然和符号的极繁主义画作。在听有声书的同时，他至少完成了 100 幅画作。今天，他 6 岁的儿子——一个有着亮金色头发、像冲浪男孩一样的孩子，为了纪念拜登已故的兄弟而取名为博（Beau）——正坐在他身边的地上，用贝壳制作自己的作品。

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.”

与任何公众人物会面都会让人感到紧张，因为你的整个神经系统都在努力提醒你：你其实并不认识他们。但拜登的情况有些不同：他的名气很大程度上建立在一种让他无法奢求去编排或修饰人设的基础上。“我和任何人之间都没有护城河，”他说，“因为他们知道我所有的破事儿都在网上。”

Several months ago, WIRED 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.”

几个月前，《连线》（WIRED）杂志开始对拜登进行一系列广泛的采访，这是他七年来首次接受主流媒体采访。这些对话最终演变成对他重返公众生活的一种实时分析：5 月 19 日，当他在近十年内首次在 X（原推特）上发文时，他和我们之间那道所谓的“护城河”似乎瞬间蒸发了。“我是亨特·拜登，”他写道，“你们从未真正听到过我的声音。”

The shock waves from this self-reveal were bracing. Before late May, @popcultureiscool, 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 😩.”

这次自我披露引发的冲击波令人振奋。在 5 月下旬之前，上述拜登粉丝账号的运营者 @popcultureiscool 几乎从不发布关于这位前总统儿子的内容。他们更倾向于追捧爱莉安娜·格兰德（Ariana Grande）和赞达亚（Zendaya）之流。从那以后，他们发布了超过 150 条关于拜登的粉丝剪辑，配文包括“给我五分钟和一根发带”、“我的梦中情人”以及“太需要那个老男人了😩”。

“I’m a social media star!” Biden tells WIRED, 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.

“我成了社交媒体明星！”拜登带着难以置信的微笑告诉《连线》。几十年来，拜登一直是民主党的“害群之马”，一个需要改造的浪子。关于他的大多数网络内容，要么是复仇色情，要么是关于他在其父担任副总统期间担任乌克兰最大天然气公司董事会成员的、令人费解的阴谋论。现在，女孩们开始用星座来解读他的推文，他也能享受生活中的简单乐趣：仅仅为了快感而发推文说“斯蒂芬·米勒（Stephen Miller）是个丑陋的混蛋”。

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 WIRED 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.”

公众对拜登的新一轮迷恋中，始终弥漫着一种“他会不会……”的猜测——围绕他作为政治家族成员的未来前景，存在着明显的悬念。5 月下旬，拜登告诉《连线》，他重返公众生活与政治野心无关。“我讨厌谈论自己，我没有竞选公职，我没有竞选学生会主席，”他说，“我也不是为了成为推特上最受欢迎的人。”他的主要目标是什么？他说，是为了帮助其他成瘾者——这是一个“没有政治界限或经济界限”的群体——他们似乎觉得拜登关于康复的频繁发帖非常鼓舞人心：“如果我能从那场全球性的公开羞辱中走出来，那么你知道吗？他们也可以。”

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.”

在此过程中，他还能回击那些黑粉：“我看起来像是精英寡头阶层的一员吗？”他在 X 上回复一位批评者时，附上了一张早已公之于众的自拍，照片中他眼皮沉重，躺在床上抽烟。“顺便说一句，这是在 95 号州际公路旁的一家速 8 汽车旅馆拍的。”

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.’”

拜登至少值得尊重，因为他在自己的噩梦中找到了诗意：世界上一些最有权势的人沉迷于对他数字隐私的近乎彻底的侵犯，但他们最终只发现了非法持枪案和一些未缴税款——他的父亲以寡头式的方式赦免了他——以及一个穿着浴袍的中年男人与不同女性的照片。“我认为我从低期望值中获得的收益比我认识的任何人都多，”拜登说。“双方绝大多数人对我的全部印象就是一个游手好闲、一事无成的儿子、瘾君子、连话都说不连贯的堕落者。所以，仅仅因为我能坐直且不流口水，人们就会觉得，‘哇，那太了不起了。’”

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.”

在一个多月的时间里，拜登积累了超过 80 万粉丝，并实质性地改变了自己的形象——部分原因是他接受了 Channel 5、Armchair Expert 和 Soft White Underbelly 等独立媒体长达数小时、令人震惊的亲密采访。他甚至与曾经的对手坎迪斯·欧文斯（Candace Owens）进行了交谈，后者曾称他为“应该进监狱的堕落者”。

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

他喂饱了喷子们——而每个人都吃得很开心。