The Crisis Isn't Just About Joe Biden
We're living under a media-steered regime.
In the ten days since Joe Biden’s historically disastrous debate performance I’ve found myself ruminating on how often the Democratic Party, and the Left more broadly, has ascribed speculation about Biden’s mental acuity wholly to Donald Trump and his purported army of misinformation artists and provocateurs. And I’ve been thinking about how the press, stewarding the Official Democratic Line, attacked anyone who claimed that the president was cognitively infirm, assuring the public that such baseless impressions were “right-wing conspiracy theories.”
Just days before the debate, every single mainstream media outlet was regurgitating the White House spin that “misleading videos” about Biden’s age-related decline were part of a “right-wing misinformation campaign,” and that the voluminous number of videos of the president stumbling over his words and wandering off on stage were all “cheap fakes” produced by MAGA villains out to destroy democracy.1
This “cheap fakes” nonsense was perfectly in line with the way the press soft pedaled Biden’s condition for years, even as many of us plebeians were well aware of the truth thanks to the elementary powers of observation. One needn’t be particularly perceptive to see that the president presents himself like a Silver Alert patient at public events and is a ghost of his former self.
It’s been fascinating observing the media lately. The debate created what might be conservatively termed a climate of concern among the liberal commentariat—not because of the obvious constitutional crisis that Democrats and their media lackeys have driven us into and the treasonous betrayal of the country it implies, or because the public is now aware that Biden is unable to perform the basic duties of his office (like commanding the most powerful military and law enforcement apparatus in world history) even as several hot wars in which he plays a key operational role are raging around the world.
No, the panic isn’t about anything other than making sure Trump doesn’t become president.
That’s right: the self-described democracy defenders think Biden’s obvious impairment and the fact that his own aides have admitted he’s fully functional only 25% of the time should be ignored, and that the voting public should elect him to another four years in office for no other reason than he’s on the Good Side™.
The problem is that they can’t seem to agree on what new strategy should be pursued in order to defeat their bête noire. Some are adhering to the stay-the-course narrative, describing the president’s performance as an “out-of-sample event.” Among the excuses offered to explain why Biden spent 90 minutes bobbling mentally like an untethered buoy out at sea: he was assigned the podium on the right side of the screen; Havana Syndrome; over-preparation; “bad debates happen”; the president simply had a raspy voice and spoke softly; stuttering; jet lag; the pro-Trump CNN moderators; CNN intentionally used framing and lighting to convey “perceptions of fragility vs. dominance in visual composition”; etc.
Proponents of the stay-the-course narrative are completely fine with a senile vegetable posing as commander in chief, because “a presidency is more than just one man.” They’ve taken to defending the campaign’s principal not by expressing faith in Biden’s judgment but by touting the more responsible Democrats with whom he is surrounded. The idea of the president essentially functioning as the King of England — someone with ceremonial status, a figurehead for autonomous independent agencies who must ultimately defer to bureaucrats behind the scenes — is consistent with the broader progressive view of governance (authoritarian managerial technocracy) and helps explain why so many on the Left are okay with having a non compos mentis man in the Oval Office. The Democratic Party is the party of managerial elites, and they alone possess history’s mandate to reengineer society. An actual president would simply be an impediment to Progress™.
And then there are those resorting to the same tired argument that it is an unquestionable moral imperative to elect Biden to a second term, making the negative case for him. Yes, they admit, he might not be a particularly adept or even desirable president, but he’s at least a better steward of the executive branch than Donald Trump, whose restoration to the Oval Office would bring with it a variety of inevitable apocalyptic outcomes and endanger Our Democracy™.2
In some quarters of the media, messaging has changed from “Biden is fine” to “He’s better than a liar.” Is the president frail and impaired? Yes. But his character3 still shines through standing next to a serial fabulist like Donald Trump who lied throughout the debate.4 After all, what separates Democrats from Republicans is that Democrats tell the truth:
Let’s pause here a moment to note how incredible it is for MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch — above whom an atmosphere of bullshit permanently hangs like a cloud cap on a green mountain — to say something like this when he works for a network whose reportorial veracity is of an integrity somewhat less than unimpeachable. Equally astounding is the idea of reframing the race around which candidate is more honest after you’ve spent years lying about the aliveness of your candidate.
That needs to be talked about more.
They lied. Over and over again these North-Korean-level propagandists lied to the public with genuine conspiratorial malice about one of the most consequential facts in American life at a time of great instability in the world, insisting that questioning Biden’s cognitive capacity was immoral and wrong, and that anyone who doubted the president’s aptitude for the job was an ignorant rube too credulous of “right-wing narratives.”
They lied because they’re not journalists, they’re regime apologists who wake up in the morning asking, “How can I convince people that Republicans are fascists?” instead of asking, “How can I ensure the public is informed?”
They lied out of a corrupt desire to help the Democratic Party, worried that ratifying the observational judgments rendered by Republicans would advance Trump’s political prospects. And so they opted to function as the praetorian guard of a puppet ruler, keeping their knowledge of the president’s declining cognitive abilities private and, in public, conveying impressions and issuing reports at odds with their own senses. If there hadn’t been a debate, this praetorian guard would still be trying to get away with covering for a president who no longer reliably recognizes long-time friends. The contours of the race would be unchanged.
And they’re still lying.5 They insist that they were as shocked as anyone by Biden’s debate performance, that they didn’t know how much he’d declined, and that they’re not the perpetrators of a “conspiracy of silence” but the victims.6 And so just like that, they’ve switched to reading from the exact opposite script they’d been united around since 2019.
You’ve no doubt noticed over the past week a gushing torrent of breaking stories reporting past incidents of Biden’s mental malfunctions heretofore concealed from the public, which has coincided with Biden’s (now former) media myrmidons demanding answers to the very same questions they shut down for years. What you’re witnessing from the press is not some newfound commitment to honesty about the president’s condition, but rather 1) complete rage that he didn’t do what he needed to in order to continue the lie they’ve been helping to legitimize, dropping the curtain and revealing how deep of an inside game the press plays with Democrats; and 2) a concerted media campaign directed by faceless Democratic elites eager to increase public pressure so that Biden will withdraw.
And why do they want Biden to withdraw? Not because he’s showing signs of senility and dementia, but because they’ve concluded that Democrats are going to lose in November with him at the top of the ticket. The same people who flamboyantly lecture us about the sanctity of Our Democracy™ are actively working with the press to subvert the will of Democratic voters to help the establishment push out Biden. So after already rigging the primary, they’ve decided they’re going to rig it again by teaming up with the media to oust the president and hand select his replacement—to “protect democracy,” of course.
It cannot be emphasized enough: This is about electoral implications and the craven desire to cling to power—not the fundamental question of Biden’s fitness for office. The press covered up his decline when they thought it was benefiting the Democrats; now they’re spotlighting his decline because they’ve decided replacing him would benefit the Democrats.
Do not believe for a second that the ongoing media blitz undermining Biden is because reporters feel “duped and embarrassed.” Ask yourself: Can you recall a single other government lie/hoax over the past few years where the response to learning the truth triggered this kind of aggressively adversarial, self-recriminative “make up” reporting? The implosion of Russiagate? The authentication of Hunter Biden’s laptop? The NIH-EcoHealth Alliance cover-up? No.
And our noble media patricians are in a bind, because their attempts to push Biden out by belatedly publishing stories serve as proof of complicity in this scandal, which severely undermines their epistocratic authority—not just in the eyes of conservatives, but also “low-information voters.”
Most people are too busy to follow politics all that closely. They don’t have the time or inclination to explore whether outlets like The New York Times and CNN are basically operating as DNC propaganda organs; it’s unlikely that they subscribe to multiple Substacks or alternative media sources (or spend much time on X); and they don’t really question, or even notice, the unrelenting coordination of our journalist class—a coordination so thorough that it “resembles the consumer landscape of the Soviet bloc,” with the same product on offer everywhere. Such a casual and sporadic relationship to press discourse, along with how fast the modern world now operates and the short-term focus of the news cycle, allows the mainstream media to maintain authoritative credibility and construct a subtly adjusted simulacrum of the world—an alternative reality in which the Truth™ just happens to always accord with left-wing ideology.
But the dam may have broken. The sudden reversal on the subject of Biden’s mental capacity was impossible to miss and incredibly revealing. It could very well end up permanently altering the way less engaged members of the voting public see the mainstream media.
This whole affair is obviously a disaster for the Biden campaign. But it’s also an incredibly damning indictment of Blue institutions, strengthening Trump’s outsider/burn-it-all down position.
As Matt Stoller puts it, “Want to know why people get Trump-pilled? It’s because what Biden is doing, and the response of the entire party, is systemic and has been for decades. At some point some voters say ‘fuck this blow it all up.’”
Note that the “Misinformation Industrial Complex,” as Nate Silver calls it, dutifully did its part to spread misinformation about the clips being misinformation.
In recent days, the Left’s rhetorical grandiosity has reached new heights, as the Supreme Court’s verdict defining the parameters of presidential immunity seems to have given Biden acolytes — who sincerely believe they are elect members of society both blessed and cursed with foreknowledge of our fates — new license to indulge their wildest fantasies. Trump, they say, has just been handed license to order the extrajudicial murder of his opponents, cancel elections, and take bribes with impunity.
The problem is that such warnings ring hollow. While pundits, journalists, Democratic officials, and Biden acolytes have obsessively bleated about how a second Trump administration will be defined by its lawlessness, the public has watched Biden repeatedly take actions beyond his constitutional remit: extending amnesty to migrants, abrogating property rights, transferring individual debt burdens onto the taxpaying public, etc. Biden has repeatedly (and boastfully) flouted the rule of law and the courts that enforce it.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA): “Rocky wasn’t the most eloquent in speech. But he was a fighter. His character conveyed his eloquence. Our message: Biden’s character is his eloquence.”
Never mind that Biden himself lied repeatedly; never mind that there was no Trump lie as damnable as Biden’s claim that he’s “the only president this century” that did not have any troops “dying anywhere in the world.”
They’re even coming up with new ways to continue to deceive the public. The Huffington Post says that Biden’s senility “has impeded his ability to communicate with mass audiences with consistent success. AI augmentations and video renderings could serve to smooth out these bumps while allowing the Biden campaign to effectively disseminate true information about the state of our democracy and the Biden administration’s accomplishments.” Sort of like… “cheap fakes”?
We’re supposed to believe that the people paid to inform us were ignorant of what 86% of Americans knew before the debate, and that it’s just a coincidence that the mainstream media devoted obsessive coverage to Mrs. Alito’s “Appeal to Heaven” flag but zero coverage to the president’s health. Did they not have access to Robert Hur’s report? Was that not a reasonably strong lead?
I'm having a wonderful time munching the popcorn (heavily salted with irony) and watching the show. This is often the result of authoritarians -- the lies become too big to maintain.
I´ll just repeat a point you made that I think bears repeating: the Democrats have been lying. They´ve been lying about Biden´s mental fitness. And what makes this cringingly ironic is that these same Democrats make such a big deal about Trump´s lies. According to them, we shouldn´t elect Trump because he´s a liar. After the debate, Biden made a big deal about how he knows how to tell the truth. Only he doesn´t. He won´t come clean about his condition. He won´t take a neurological exam and share the results transparently. He´s as dishonest as the rest of them.