It was like something out of a Tom Wolfe novel, or worthy of Marie Antionette’s “let them eat cake!” contempt for the common folk that precipitated the French Revolution.
In Minute One of the presidential debate Thursday night, the Democratic party and the entire class of mainstream media sycophants and pundits were exposed as conspirators in a “Big Lie” – the gaslighting of the American public that President Biden was not only mentally fit but better and wiser than ever for a second term when they knew that was false.
The burning question is what drove this self-delusion and the betrayal of the public.
Was it lobotomized groupthink?
Craven careerism and self-dealing that made them believe they could hold on to power and run the country like some sort of collective-ventriloquist?
A form of narcissism by family Biden who long craved this kind of power and would fight anything — including reality — that threatened to take it away?
In March of 2023, I wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal arguing that Biden had no business running for a second term because, among other reasons, of his mental capacity.
The plainly evident canary in the coal mine was September 2021, when Biden didn’t seem to have any clue that his senior military advisors opposed his total withdrawal from Afghanistan (they supported a smaller contingent to stabilize the civilian government and prevent the return of Al Qaeda there).
I was lambasted from many quarters for this unspeakable act of independent thinking and observance of plain truths.
Meanwhile the party and its mainstream media enablers kept snowing us that Biden’s incoherent verbal meanderings, his stumbles on bikes and Air Force One stairways, his jaw-dropping mistakes about foreign leaders (including dead ones), his wildly fantastical claims that Congress passed student loan relief, or Putin’s war in “Iraq” were all right wing conspiracies.
The gaslighting ran far and deep.
White House staff claimed the president’s compromised gait, blank stares and perplexing wanderings were “deep fakes” and enlisted none other than The New York Times to validate these plainly wrong claims.
Like Soviet commissars, the liberal cable network hosts, Biden administration officials and liberal pundits kept telling us Biden was better than ever.
Was Trump’s alleged “election interference” in the Manhattan trial really more serious than this misleading of the public on the president’s fitness for a second term?
Of course, this sort of left-industrial-complex is hoisted on its own petard.
We are now in the midst of a summer of panic, chaos and ridicule as the party, lacking a compelling bench, scurries to find a replacement for Biden by the August convention.
Meanwhile Russia, Iran, and China — the revisionist axis that keeps chipping away the well-documented decline of American deterrence — are encouraged by a belief that American leadership has suffered a deafening blow.
Thank you, my fellow Democrats!
Most disappointing of this sad saga now is how the left seems to be oblivious as to why the misrepresentations of Biden’s fitness fuels the revolt against the elites in the US in the recent elections in Europe.
It’s the same browbeating and insistence of orthodoxy that forced the hurtful COVID school closings with scant science to back its wisdom and that declares the borders are “not open” despite estimates of 10 million crossings amid credible reports that terror cells have infiltrated our porous borders in much greater numbers than acknowledged by the Biden administration and mainstream news.
This parroting culture has become all too prevalent on the left and substitutes for much needed critical thinking.
Critical thinking on whether “gender affirming” treatments and surgeries are really a form of child abuse and mutilation of teens that worsens their psychological conditions, as the highly credible Cass report now suggests.
Or whether DEI oppressor-victor theology is not about benevolent outreach to marginal groups but a massive reordering of society that patronizes favored groups with lower standards and quotas while discriminating against disfavored groups in ways wholly inimical to our national credo of e pluribus unum. Or whether inflation was “transitory.”
Or if de-policing in blue cities across the country was smart given crime spikes measured by a pre-COVID baseline.
Or if social media’s censorship of credible COVID dissenters — critical development of sound policy — represents Orwell’s slow creep of media conformity.
Or whether the $2 trillion annual budget deficit is not the biggest generational rip-off in history.
Centrist Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro — who has supported school choice and denounced many of the campus protestors who carry water for the racist, Nazi death cult of Hamas — offers Democrats the best path back to the common sense center where most voters reside.
Whether the Democrats will make that shift back to the center is another question.
The Biden debacle is surely an embarrassment to Democrats that will likely lead to their defeat in November.
But the silver lining here is a wake-up call that maybe what we need is less ideology and activism in our newsrooms and more skepticism and independence.
Julian Epstein is the former Democratic Chief Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.
