Joe Biden has many problems right now, not the least of which is his surviving son, Hunter Biden, or as I now refer to him, Hunter S. Biden.

This new moniker is of course in homage to the late writer Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote several great books, among them “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” a quasi-fictional account of his drug-crazed adventures.

By way of coincidence, the new issue of The New Yorker has what is I presume a fairly accurate account of Hunter S. Biden’s drug-crazed adventures almost a half-century later.

As I read the magazine piece, I was amazed at the similarities between the two Hunters. For instance, Thompson’s Las Vegas book from 1971 begins with his drive across the desert from LA to Vegas under the influence of massive amounts of narcotics.

“And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car.”

I hadn’t thought of that passage in years, until last week, when I was reading the New Yorker story, which the younger Biden admittedly released to get all of his scandalous behavior out into the public eye at once, dictating it to an obsequious stenographer for the Democratic Party in an alt-left glossy.

In the new magazine story, Hunter S. Biden trashes his rental car, much like his namesake in the Vegas book. He then gets a new one, again like Thompson, after which Biden likewise takes off across the desert, stoned out of his mind, beyond Palm Springs.

“Later, on a sharp bend on a mountainous road, Hunter recalled, a large barn owl flew over the hood of the car and then seemed to follow him, dropping in front of the headlights. He said that he has no idea whether the owl was real or a hallucination.”

Bats, owls in dark western deserts – swooping down on rented cars driven by famous drug-addled alcoholic Democrats named Hunter. Weird, huh? But wait, there’s more.

In the follow-up to his Vegas book, Hunter S. Thompson went out on the 1972 campaign trail for Rolling Stone, which even in those early days was running a lot of fiction disguised as journalism, only then it was mainly for laughs, unlike their more recent hoaxes.

Anyway, Hunter S. Thompson didn’t like Sen. Ed Muskie, so he wrote a piece “exposing” the fading front-runner from Maine as being addicted to a drug called “ibogaine,” which at the time practically nobody had ever heard of.

Here is how Hunter S. Thompson described ibogaine’s effects on the senator, who served for many years in the Senate with Hunter S. Biden’s dad:

“He looked out at the crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people.”

For a few hours, the boys on the campaign bus went crazy. They actually believed Muskie was on ibogaine. Again, I hadn’t thought of that crazy footnote to the Watergate campaign until last week, when I was reading in the New Yorker about another of Hunter S. Biden’s endless trips to rehab centers across the globe.

“In July 2014, he went to a clinic in Tijuana that provided a treatment using ibogaine, a psychoactive alkaloid derived from the roots of a West African shrub which is illegal in America.”

I guess the apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree, at least if it’s named Hunter.

Actually, the New Yorker piece wasn’t the only recent Biden-inspired flashback to some famous 1970s magazine journalism. Think back to how Sen. Kamala Harris rebuked Creepy Joe over his long-ago opposition to busing at the debate in Miami 10 days ago.

A half-century ago, Tom Wolfe wrote a piece about San Francisco — Harris’ hometown — called “Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers.” It was all about how young black community activists would invade city offices to “mau-mau” — scream at — “hapless bureaucrats” — the flak catchers of the title — in order to grab more so-called anti-poverty funds.

Wikipedia describes Wolfe’s piece as demonstrating how the flak catchers, much like Biden at the debate, were “reduced to taking abuse” from younger blacks “who are seen as reveling in the new-found vulnerability of ‘the Man.’ The flak catchers smile pathetically, allowing their tormentors to indulge themselves in abuse; the process is seen as farcical but useful.”

That mau-mauing certainly was useful for Kamala Harris’ campaign, wasn’t it? Which again proves the truth of William Faulkner’s observation: “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”

At least if your name is Biden.