Hunter the snark

It’s hard to keep a good man down, but it’s even harder to keep a bad man out. Hunter Biden is back. Best known as an influence-peddler, crackhead, whoremonger, struggling artist, and innocent man who got a presidential pardon from his father, the prodigal son and former first son reappeared on X, formerly Twitter, in mid-May.

“Just the place for a Snark!” cries the sailor as he lands the passengers who want to hunt the mythical creature in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem of 1876, “The Hunting of the Snark.” Social media rewards the worst in human nature, and Biden is to vice as Martha Stewart is to baking. He cracked the app’s code and latched on to its algorithm like a hungry baby or a lobbyist for Ukrainian natural gas. He now has half a million followers. That’s a lot of snark.

Americans love to forgive a sinner. The redemption script is as old as former President Bill Clinton. Biden is a penitent addict, seven years sober, and America has a chronic drug problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that illegal drug overdoses killed nearly 70,000 Americans in 2025. That figure was down from 2024, probably due to states handing out Naloxone anti-opioid kits, but it’s still higher than 2024’s casualties from kidney disease (55,081), liver disease and cirrhosis (52,274), and more formal methods of suicide (48,824). The subtitle of “The Hunting of the Snark” is “An Agony in Eight Fits.”

“I’ve taken a lot of hits, and I’ve deserved some of them,” Biden quipped on June 5. “This isn’t about me. It’s about every person in recovery who shows up and tries again.” It’s good if he thinks this, but of course, it’s about him. “You’re the ones who’ve obsessively pored over the 10,000 photos, the 30,000 text messages, and the 128,000 emails from my hacked iCloud and stolen devices,” he posted on June 7.

Hunter Biden, son of U.S. President Joe Biden. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Every accusation is a confession. In this case, Biden confesses that the notorious “laptop from hell” really was his, just as the FBI said. In October 2020, when his father was in a close election race with then-President Donald Trump, 51 former intelligence officials, including the former CIA directors John Brennan and Michael Hayden, the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, told us that the laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Biden told CBS in 2021 that he had “no idea” about the laptop and suggested it might have been hacked or planted by spies. He now promises “Total transparency.”

Biden’s digital relaunch is as “the MAGA whisperer,” the insider outsider who was born with a silver spoon but filled it with so much coke that he lived like the little people. He was high-class, then he was lowlife. He has no class and believes, as the wayward rich often do, that this makes him classless. Told that he was part of the “elite oligarch class,” Biden posted a shiftless selfie from his voluminous archive. A cigarette dangled from his lip in a passable impersonation of an old-time American who worked for a living.

“Do I look like I’m part of the elite oligarch class?” he asked. “This was taken at a Super 8 motel off I-95 by the way.” Biden crisscrossed the battlefield of the class war from the West Wing to the West Haven Super 8. These kinds of transition are supposed to endow wisdom. The mythical figures Tiresias and Bruce Jenner lived as both man and woman. Biden has lived as a rich man, a poor man, and, his text messages with his father show, a beggar man and a thief. Biden saw that the fix is in up top and the pitchforks are out down below. Reduced like a French aristocrat to the rank of mere citizen, he now survives in the protective coloration of class traitor.

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“Jared and Ivanka are building a private island paradise on Albanian protected land,” Citizen Biden snarked on June 3. “Don Jr. married the daughter of Epstein’s banker, and a startup his fund backs just got a record $620m Pentagon loan. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5B in the middle of a war with Iran that nobody wanted.” Time was when Biden expected to wet his beak. Now he is appalled that the Trump circle’s corruption exceeds that of the Biden gang. Biden goes on Candace Owens’ podcast and tweets, “We’re being divided on purpose by the Epstein Elite Oligarch class because as long as we’re at each other’s throats, they get fat and rich off our misery.”

In Carroll’s poem, the one hunter who sees the Snark disappears. The Snark, we learn, may in fact be a Boojum, which might also be a chimera. Hunter the Narc tells us that we saw him “completely nude in the public square” in “wild technicolor,” so he has nothing to hide. But he does. The corruption of the American oligarchy is no chimera, and Biden is its shameless proof. I wish him peace, for he’s already had too much luck. I wish he’d go away and spare us his snark. I wish he’d tell us everything before he disappears.

Dominic Green (@drdominicgreen) is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.