Never in history have we seen a party and a media apparatus seem to believe the average person will wake up one morning to find the Biden campaign and perhaps the presidency is no more, and think absolutely nothing of it, ask no questions, have no concerns, simply vote for whoever they tell them to after years of lies.
For over nine years, we have been told, often in rather hyperbolic language, that President Donald Trump represents a unique threat to democracy because of his failure to abide by so-called democratic norms, his authoritarian tendencies, and his serial prevarication. The combination of a leader who cannot be bound by either custom or law, his belief in his own almost unbounded authority and immunity from the law itself, and his inability to tell the truth on matters large and small were considered so potentially dangerous and destructive that the future of the entire country was literally at stake. In January, President Biden himself claimed that his predecessor was “willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power,” and solemnly declared “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. That’s what the 2024 election is all about.” If nothing else, President Biden’s disastrous debate performance late last month has revealed these statements and others to be the most dramatic, widespread instance of mass psychological projection in political history, an event with no modern parallel, something straight out of Plato’s Republic or the late Roman Republic. Before President Biden took the stage against his opponent, former President Donald Trump, we were told over and over again that concerns about his age and diminished mental capacity were merely a Republican talking point, something completely made up to damage his reelection chances. The Washington Post, for example, “awarded” Four Pinocchios to what were described as “cheapfake” videos depicting the President wandering off at a summit with global leaders in France, freezing during a Juneteenth video at the White House, and having to be lead of the stage by former President Barack Obama at a recent fundraiser. The New York Times, meanwhile, put it this way, “Biden Battles Age Doubts and a Trail of Misleading Videos.” Previously, the once respected publication had opined on “The Overlooked Truths About Biden’s Age,” how “Biden’s Age is a Campaign Problem, Not a Governing One,” that “Joe Biden Is More Than His Age,” and, perhaps my personal favorite, “For Joe Biden, What Seems Like Age Might Instead Be Style.” There are similar headlines from every leading publication and left-leaning outfit, down to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough claiming President Biden was at his best ever cognitive state, making it clear that this was a concerted months, if not years, long effort to dismiss any and all concerns about the President’s mental fitness. Moreover, all of these and others insisted this was the case even after President Biden’s own Justice Department ruled he was unfit to stand trial because he was “an elderly man with a poor memory” who could no longer remember basic facts about his own life.
This narrative completely collapsed less than fifteen minutes into the debate when President Biden bizarrely claimed that he “beat” Medicare, prompting many like myself to wonder if his defenders in the press were lying or just plain stupid. Over the last week, however, some in the press itself have come forward to confirm that they have indeed been lying the entire time, literally covering up for the President for purely political reasons. New York Mag’s Intelligencer provides perhaps the most comprehensive description of the scale and duration of the effort, claiming there was a “Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden,” and “The president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.” As Olivia Nuzzi reported, she “began hearing similar stories from Democrat officials, activists, and donors who came away from interactions with Joe Biden disturbed by what they had seen.” “Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth….His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals. The White House often did not engage when questioned about the president’s stare, which sometimes raised alarm on social media when documented in official videos produced by the White House.” As Ms. Nuzzi described it, the feeling that President Biden wasn’t all there was so extreme and prevalent that journalists actually joked about how dead he was. “Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. ‘Forty percent?’ one of them asked.” Even beyond the dead man’s stare, reporters could barely make sense of what he was saying. “The pool reporters often struggle with the challenge of how hard it is to hear or make sense of the president. Radio reporters do not always obtain usable audio of his remarks. Print reporters squint and strain and crane their necks, trying to find the best position by which their ears may absorb the vibration of his voice in the air. Reporters scrutinize their audio recordings and read quotes to one another after the fact. Is that what he said? You heard it? In that order? You sure?” These issues were apparent as early as 2020, when Ms. Nuzzi “had written that there were ‘[c]oncerns, implicit or explicit, about his ability to stay agile and alive for the next four years,’ and that ‘[f]or political reporters, marveling every day at just how well this isn’t going, watching Biden can feel like being at the rodeo. You’re there because on some level you know you might see someone get killed.”
All of this was, of course, mercilessly suppressed because, “They lived and socialized in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. They did not wish to come forward with their stories. They did not want to blow a whistle. They wished that they could whistle past what they knew and emerge in November victorious and relieved, having helped avoid another four years of Trump. What would happen after that? They couldn’t think that far ahead. Their worries were more immediate.” From here, the remainder of the passage needs to be read in full to be believed. “When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that. Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. ‘Phhhhwwwaahhh.’ ‘Uggghhhhhhhhh.’ ‘Bbbwwhhheeuuw.’ Or with a simple, ‘Not good! Not good!’ Or with an accusatory question of their own: ‘Have you seen him?!’ Those who encountered the president in social settings sometimes left their interactions disturbed. Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names.” Further, this sad, frightening reality led Ms. Nuzzi and others to conclude that President Biden could not actually be running the country and making the thousands of daily decisions being the Commander in Chief required on his own. “Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew. But surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump. Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense. They were in full agreement.”
While President Biden’s debate performance finally exposed this conspiracy, rather than taking any responsibility for deceiving the American public in a matter of grave importance, Democrats, and many of their allies in the mainstream media, immediately embarked on yet another conspiracy, this time to oust the President from the Democrat ticket. The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and many others, along with at least five Democrats in Congress, have all come forward over the past ten days to urge President Biden to withdraw from the race, specifically so someone else with a better chance of beating Donald Trump can step forward. As the Times framed it, “As it stands, the president is engaged in a reckless gamble. There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency. There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden. It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.” They continued, “the United States needs a stronger opponent to the presumptive Republican nominee. To make a call for a new Democratic nominee this late in a campaign is a decision not taken lightly, but it reflects the scale and seriousness of Mr. Trump’s challenge to the values and institutions of this country and the inadequacy of Mr. Biden to confront him.” This, however, is not democracy, far from it. There is no campaign among Democrats. The primary is over. A presidential candidate is not anointed by the party or the press. They are picked by the people in the primary process, and President Biden has long since clinched the nomination, earning a majority of delegates on March 12. As of today, he holds 3,896 delegates after facing voters when only 1,968 are required to win and his nearest competitor, Dean Philips has four. In other words, none of the replacement candidates under potential consideration, some combination of Vice President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and possibly others, has earned a single, solitary vote from an actual rank and file member of the Democrat Party. The only way for any of them to become the nominee is for party leaders – as in the unelected Democrat elite – to pick the candidate at the convention, should President Biden ultimately choose to step aside.
Thus, the Democrat party, or at least key segments of it, proposes we move directly from a conspiracy of lies about the condition of the President of the United States, lies which prevented another candidate from coming forward during the rightful primary process and potentially avoiding this entire mess, to a conspiracy to install an unelected presidential candidate, one who has never faced voters or received any votes. Even worse, their contempt for basic democratic principles doesn’t end there. It extends to believing that President Biden can somehow drop out of the race and remain President for the next six months – fully knowing that he is not actually in charge and without knowing who might be making decisions in his place. That is, they are more than willing to allow a man they now view as too mentally defective to face voters to face foreign leaders and make decisions about war and peace, or more accurately to be guided in those decisions by an unelected, unknown advisor, solely because they understand that any transition to Vice President Harris would be necessarily chaotic and would further threaten their already slim chances in the November election. Of course, you cannot reasonably suggest that a person incapable of being a candidate for President is somehow capable of being President, much less that the country be run by some secret staffer, but they dare not speak that obvious truth because their political path forward is even worse in that case and they are willing to risk the country itself to serve their ambitions. So, they lie by omission and act as if you can have one without the other while the country is supposed to continue somehow without a duly elected President. Thus, contempt for democracy becomes contempt for the American people. They seem to believe the average person, either Republican or Democrat, will wake up one morning to find the Biden campaign and perhaps the presidency is no more, and think absolutely nothing of it, ask no questions, have no concerns, simply vote for whoever they tell them to. Tell me again who are the real threats to democracy?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 