So who is the Bill Clinton Kid, The Game Awards’ ‘Elden Ring’?

The game prizes

TGA

Last night at The Game Awards, unsurprisingly, Elden Ring took home Game of the Year in the final prize of the night. But when the director Hidetaka Miyazaki, his translator, and his team came up on stage, something… weird was happening behind them.

A child was lurking there. A teenager maybe. He seemed out of place among the middle-aged Japanese men there, and everyone on Twitter was asking who exactly he was. One of his children?

And then he took the microphone.

The best transcription of what he said with some kind of unidentifiable accent is “I think I want to thank everyone and say that… I think I want to nominate this award to my Reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton, thank you all.”

At that point, it became clear that he wasn’t supposed to be there, and he was promptly removed from the stage. Geoff Keighley, organizer and presenter of The Game Awards, tweeted shortly after he had been arrested. And then the internet positively exploded with Elden Ring-based memes and jokes and just…disbelief, trying to understand what they had just seen.

Here’s what we think we know about this boy and what he was doing there, though I’ll refrain from posting his name because he appears to be a minor.

A Twitter account that appears to belong to the boy posted about the outage and takes credit for it. It’s an old account, linked to his past online activities, mainly protesting against police brutality and government oppression in Hong Kong.
This kid previously did something similar in 2019 at BlizzCon, where he interrupted a World of Warcraft panel by yelling “Free Hong Kong.” That is documented in this same Twitter account.
Also in 2019, he appeared on TV at a Clippers game holding a Hong Kong jersey that the cameraman had to walk away from:

He has a TikTok that’s mostly about Hong Kong, and at times, he’s put on an accent similar to the one we hear in this rambling Game Awards speech.
Perhaps strangest of all, he appeared on the InfoWars conspiracy network two years ago, who described him as “one of the young stars of the conservative movement” and got him to talk about his protests in Hong Kong.
Unverified DMs are being posted showing him claiming he was going to pull this stage-walking prank ahead of time, and posting in the moments leading up.
It turns out that he follows me on Twitter, so I asked him to verify his identity and comment on why he did what he did on stage, and I’ll update if I hear back.

Of course, what he said when he got there was unrelated to Hong Kong, and the references to his “reformed orthodox rabbi Bill Clinton”, while nonsensical, seem like they could be related to some sort of anti-Semite and Clinton-. focused conspiracy of which there are a thousand variants online. Or he is just a kid who is trolling.

But it’s more than just trolling, because for Keighley and The Game Awards, a show that was last watched by 85 million people in 2021, this represents a serious security breach. While the kid just went up there and spouted nonsense, it’s easy to imagine a different scenario where a troubled kid walked on stage in a voluminous black coat during an event watched by tens of millions of people packed with industry celebrities and the things could have gone… very wrong, if he had bad intentions. There will need to be security checks after this, as well as an examination of how he was at the show in the first place, how he was fit to just walk on stage, why he stayed there so long, and why he was even allowed. speak without the microphone being cut off.

So that’s what we know so far. He’s a kid who’s done this kind of thing before, but now, on the biggest stage in the industry. We’ll see what happens next from here, and I’ll update with anything new.

Update (11:50 a.m.): Alright, I’ve been talking to him, and while I still feel like he’s joking, here’s what I’ve been able to glean:

He said he couldn’t talk about being arrested.
He bought an AXS ticket and made sure he was sitting decently close to the stage to implement this plan.
He says Bill Clinton is his hero, and he didn’t know who better to dedicate the award to at the time.
He says he didn’t make a statement on Hong Kong like he has in the past because “it wasn’t the right time” but he’s still with the people there.
He played Elden Ring and said it was good, but apparently stopped at the Tree Sentinel (so immediately?).
He says he doesn’t think he ruined Miyazaki’s big moment because he purposely waited until after he finished speaking to make his own statement.
He’s not fully explaining the “reformed orthodox rabbi Bill Clinton” comment in a way I understand, but he does say that he wasn’t saying that Clinton is secretly Jewish, when I said that’s part of many globalist conspiracies. He claims that he himself is Jewish.
In conclusion: “There was no underlying anti-Semitic or far-right message. I just couldn’t think of a better person than Bill to turn heads at the time.”

So uh yeah. There you go

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