Liberals Were Blinded To Biden’s Senility By Their Own Speech Codes

What’s the biggest difference between the liberal and conservative news media in the United States over the past five years? Conservatives have consistently described Joe Biden as senile and liberals have consistently derided this and demanded expert evidence.

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write for Axios July 6, 2024:

It is a fair conservative critique that many reporters ignored obvious signs of cognitive decline… Rarely did other outlets follow our exclusive reporting on accommodations for Biden's aging — shorter hours for public appearances, fewer improvisational or late-night moments, and the rise in handlers and devices to help avoid tripping and falling. Some reporters enabled the White House by piling on reporters on social media who questioned Biden's lucidity…

There were so many early signs. Biden rarely did tough interviews — much, much fewer than his predecessors. It was almost always friendly questions on friendly terrain…

The denials — including the favorite line that Biden works so hard he exhausts the youngsters — strained credibility then, and look ludicrous in retrospect.

Conservatives spotted Joe Biden’s cognitive decline years before liberals because conservatives don’t accept ageism and ableism as real moral categories.

We all have concepts of the world and some are more useful than others. Israel, for example, had concepts about the enemy that left it unprepared for the enemy’s attacks of October 6, 1973 and October 7, 2023. The United States had concepts about the enemy that did not prepare it for attacks on December 7, 1941 and on September 11, 2001. Author Chimamanda Adichie gave a TED talk on “The Danger of a Single Story.” Summary: “The risk of the single story, the one perspective, is that it can lead us to default assumptions, conclusions and decisions that may be incomplete, and may lead to misunderstanding. Operating from the context of a single story can prevent us from a more complex, nuanced view of a situation.”

By July 2, it became clear to me that Joe Biden would go due to the desperation of the situation. At this point, most of the political elite believed that Biden would stay due to precedent. I don’t know as much about politics as they do, but if I am right, it is due to my having a superior conception – that the dire nature of the situation will prevail over precedent.

Similarly, most political elites believe that Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee for president if Joe Biden steps down. I do not. Due to the dire nature of the situation (that Kamala Harris has provided Democrats with no basis for believing that she can defeat Donald Trump), I believe the Democrats will select a different nominee.

Who’s the boss? Not the president, not the Senate majority leader, not the MSM. The situation is the boss. The situation determines the comparative power of all other factors including law and precedent.

Liberal elites had a concept regarding Joe Biden prior to the June 27, 2024 debate that ageism and ableism are so morally dangerous that we should require considerable evidence from experts before publicly raising the question of his competence.

How many of liberalism’s moral categories prevent people from seeing reality? Because of “racism,” we can’t discuss in polite company that different groups commit crimes at different rates. Common sense suggests profiling people according to crime statistics but liberals have made that, in many cases, illegal.

That which you are not allowed to say out loud is increasingly not thought. Once liberals speech codes are internalized, conservatives can’t even think like conservatives.

Liberals want to stigmatize frank and easy discussion of reality including the obvious fact that different ages, sexes, races, and religions have different gifts.

Jan. 6, 2022, Edward Luce wrote for the Financial Times:

On no topic is the bifurcation of America’s media more evident than that of the president’s age. To the conservative media world, Joe Biden’s imagined senility is a staple. Republican figures routinely call for him to take cognitive tests. The term “dementia” is bandied about. By contrast, the closest traditional outlets have come to addressing Biden’s age is a spate of reports into the low ratings of his vice-president, Kamala Harris. For them, it is as if openly acknowledging Biden’s advancing years would validate the conspiracy mongers…

There is no reason to think that Biden is suffering from anything more than traits that characterised him in younger decades, such as foot-in-mouth disease and a tendency to talk too much. Neither of these is degenerative… There are some grounds to suspect he is getting more forgetful — he implied twice last year that Taiwan was a formal ally of the US, a claim his staff had to correct. But there are none to suggest he is senile or suffering from dementia.

It turns out the conservatives were right and the liberal establishment was wrong.

Like most of the press corp, Edward Luce was checked out of reality with regard to Biden’s senility. And yet Luce is now making the rounds (including on the elite Morning Joe tv show) pronouncing on the story without admitting how wrong he was.

In a July 6, 2024 video, America’s best political reporter, Mark Halperin, says: “Republicans investigating Joe Biden during his presidency have been a clown show. They haven’t done it well and in part they haven’t done it well because like with the Hunter Biden investigations the press was against them. The press didn’t want to help them. Now the press is interested in these two stories too so the incompetent Republican party on Capitol Hill in terms of investigations is now going to have the wind at their back because they’ll be working with reporters. One is what did the president’s people know and when did they know it (his condition)… It’s been a conspiracy. The press has been in on it.”

Mark Halperin writes July 6, 2024:

Pretty binary options:

1. There was a massive coverup by the Biden White House to keep the president’s undiagnosed cognitive decline from being exposed.

OR

2. There was a massive coverup by the Biden White House to keep the president’s diagnosed cognitive decline from being exposed.

If it is (1), which it is at a minimum, it is very politically damaging to Joe Biden, his administration, and his campaign.

If it is (2), it is right up there w/ WMD & Russia-gate in its historic implications.

Would the Biden family, seeing the decline, really leave him undiagnosed?

Does one have to be a doctor to diagnose Chris Christie as obese? Maybe those fatty-looking layers are really muscle?

Veteran media reporter Brian Stelter writes July 3, 2024: “Many Trump supporters treated it as a given that Biden was senile, and any report that didn’t outright agree was seen as part of the alleged media cover-up.”

Isn’t “senile” the word that rises most readily to the lips with regard to Joe Biden’s condition over the past six years? “Senile” is easier to say than “cognitive decline.” What’s a better word to describe Biden’s cognitive collapse over the past six years? Perhaps “frail.” That’s regarded as a scientific and medical term.

How would you explain the MSM’s reluctance to point out Biden’s obvious senility?

According to the Cambridge dictionary, senile means “showing poor mental ability because of old age, especially being unable to think clearly and make decisions.”

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “Due to its negative connotations, use of senile relating to cognitive decline is now typically avoided in medical contexts and may be considered offensive in general contexts.”

Healthline.com notes:

Today, “senile” is generally considered an insult and is not used except as part of archaic medical condition names.

The more accurate way to refer to natural changes of aging, especially those related to mental and intellectual functioning, is “cognitive changes.”

Yes, and the homeless are just people going through a lack of housing phase and illegal aliens are just people without proper papers.

Liberals don’t like insensitive terms such as “senile” and “illegal alien” and “homeless” while conservatives embrace them. This verbal freedom enables conservatives to see and describe some parts of reality more easily than do liberals.

Every group has its blind spots. “Ties bind and blind,” notes Jonathan Haidt. Conservatives have their share of blind spots. For example, conservative distrust of expertise and big government placed them at a disadvantage with regard to minimizing Covid. Conservative veneration of certain first-hand experiences over expertise creates its share of problems. Conservatives who dismiss evolution are blind to much of reality.

June 28, 2024, the day after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate, lefty Ezra Klein said: “That isn’t to say he’s senile or any of the things that the more wild right-wing accusations say about him…”

Why is it wild to describe Joe Biden as senile? He’s clinging to power in a delusional way.

July 1, 2020, Axios noted: “Senility is becoming an overt line of attack for the first time in a modern U.S. presidential campaign.”

Red State publishes July 4, 2024:

One journalist who has not been hesitant to assess Joe Biden is Brit Hume. He said in a Fox Interview in September 2020, “I don’t think there’s any doubt Biden’s senile.”

Politifact did a “fact check” back then declaring Hume’s assessment “false,” while noting the term “senile” is an imprecise term.

PolitiFact contacted experts in the health care of older people for their take on Hume’s use of the word senile and its application to Biden. They said Hume’s characterization is wrong.

It’s “a shameful display of ageism and ignorance,” said Donald Jurivich, Eva Gilbertson Distinguished Professor of Geriatrics and Chairman of Geriatrics at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences.

The word “senile” may create a mental picture of someone who has stooped posture, is slow moving and cognitively impaired, Jurivich said. “I don’t think any of these descriptors match Joe Biden’s demeanor and vigor,” he said.

From a geriatrician’s perspective, Jurivich said, “the use of ‘senile’ is a pejorative descriptor and reflects unmitigated ageism.”

Anyone talking about ageism and ableism sounds like a retard to red America. Liberal fidelity to the virtues of avoiding ageism and ableism blinded them to Joe Biden’s obvious decline.

“Fit for office” is a common media trope. It is not a way that I naturally think because it neutralizes the political and expands the power of experts to make the important decisions.

The office of President of the United States is just one expression of the human urge for power, and it is not inherently greater or lesser than other forms of human striving such as preacher. I don’t want any moral or physiological requirement for political office because I don’t believe the electorate needs minders. Every candidate will likely be fit for certain situations and unfit for others.

This frenzy shows the elite catching up to the majority of grass roots Democrats who did not want Biden to run for a second term (and had minimal enthusiasm for him in 2020).

Oct. 23, 2020, Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:

Trump’s Plan to Make Biden Look Senile Disappeared Without a Trace

“They are going to put him in a home and other people are going to be running the country,” charged Trump last March. The anti-anti-Trump left gleefully embraced the narrative, conspiratorially asserting that Democratic insiders secretly knew Biden was a drooling invalid, but refused to say so. “Democratic insiders know Biden has cognitive-decline issues,” claimed left-wing activist Matt Stoller. “They joke about it. They don’t care.” Frequent Tucker Carlson guest Glenn Greenwald asserted “it is visible to the naked eye that the 77-year-old six-term senator and two-term vice-president is in serious cognitive decline.”

…Trump invested almost the entire campaign driving a singular theme against Biden. Now the results of that work have just sunk below the surface without a trace.

I put “insensitive words list” into Google July 6, 2024 and saw such perfectly useful terms as “long time no see,” “hard,” “unfeeling,” “soulless,” “unresponsive,” “callous,” “peanut gallery,” “grandfather clause,” “tactless,” “uppity, “moron,” and “unconcerned.”

The Society for Editing published Sep. 17, 2020 about insensitive language:

“G*psy”

Where you might see it: Lifestyle stories, perhaps an interview with an important person. It tends to be used as a shorthand for “free spirit.”
Why it’s insensitive: It’s a racial slur.

“Dwarfed”

Why it’s insensitive: Little people exist and using a term that reduces them to their bodies is incredibly insensitive.

“Grandfathered in”

Where you might see it: Often this is used as a shorthand for “exempted.” Sometimes you’ll see it in a policy story or in an education story.
Why it’s insensitive: This was a voter suppression tactic against Black people that Southern states used after the Civil War.

“Anemic”

Where you might see it: Often it’s used to explain that a policy is weak or to criticize a lawmaker’s performance.
Why it’s insensitive: Anemia is a disease. Not only is it wrong to reduce a person to an illness, but to criticize them for being sick is strange and in bad taste.
In general, avoid using medical terms as a value judgment.
Try instead: “weak,” “pathetic,” “lackluster.”

“Crippled”

Where you might see it: economic stories, of all the things. Writers tend to use this as a shorthand for “devastated” or “shattered.” I see “crippled” paired with stories about sanctions too.
Why it’s insensitive: It’s an outdated term for people who can’t walk or have limited mobility. A lot of ableist terms are outrageously insensitive.

“Turn a blind eye to”/ “fell on deaf ears”

Why it’s insensitive: It tells people who can’t hear or can’t see that they’re lesser because their senses are limited.

“Dark history of (racism)”

Why it’s insensitive: “Dark history of” tends to frame the issue as people of color existing in a predominantly white space, instead of emphasizing the racism.

“black and white issue”

Why it’s insensitive: This framing puts “black” as “bad” and “white” as “good.”

There’s no such sensitivity displayed by the media elite towards Christians, Orthodox Jews, and members of MAGA.

Devon Delfino writes for writer.com:

“Using inclusive language helps build trust and credibility, particularly with groups that have felt historically underrepresented or misrepresented,” says Rachele Kanigel, editor of The Diversity Style Guide.

Here are ten outdated words to cut:

1. Addict → person with a substance abuse disorder

The desire for inclusion does not extent to traditional Christians, Jews and nationalists.

2. Non-white → person of color

3. Elderly → senior

4. Homeless → people experiencing homelessness

5. Sex change → transition

6. Exotic → just don’t, especially if it refers to a woman

7. Whitelist → allow list, permit list

8. Insane → just don’t

9. Man hours → person hours, engineering hours

10. Alcoholic → person with a substance abuse disorder

So what inclusive language do these elites want to use for those of us who consider their language policing absurd?

July 23, 2020, Jacqueline Howard writes for CNN:

Biden and Trump: Why doctors say attacks on age can be ‘dangerous’

But physicians with expertise on the aging brain urge voters not to be overly focused on age alone.

“It’s very important to focus on experience, on who the person is and policy issues rather than age,” said Dr. Gary Small, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and the Parlow-Solomon professor on aging at University of California, Los Angeles’ David Geffen School of Medicine.

“A lot of people assume that an older brain is not as good a brain, but that is not necessarily true. We know that as people age, they actually become wiser. They have more experience to solve problems. They have less anxiety. When we’re younger, we tend to be more concerned about peer pressure. We’re about managing for the future. When you get older, you solve a lot of problems in your life, and there’s a sense of having been there and done that,” Small said. “You develop mental resilience, which is an important asset of an older person.”

…Age should not be thought of as a single discriminating factor, according to Dr. Richard Isaacson, trustee of the McKnight Brain Research Foundation.

“I don’t really think of age as a discriminating factor in terms of when to choose someone that’s going to be in a leadership position, even if it’s in the most powerful position in the land,” Isaacson said. “What I would say is you have to pick the best person for the job.”

…Small called it “dangerous” to refer to stumbling over words on the campaign trail as signs of mental decline.

“I think it’s very dangerous to over interpret mental slips, when you see it in an older person, and I think when we do that, it strikes me that it’s a form of age discrimination – what we call ageism,” Small said. “We know that there are many factors that affect our mental acuity, people under stress, even giving speeches will increase mental slips of people who are distracted.”

So having a senile president is not the danger, the danger is when we point out that the blokes running for president might be senile.

Sep. 25, 2020, Timothy Egan writes for the New York Times:

Trump wants you to think Biden is senile, out of it, “dead as a rock.”

…The stutter is the source of Biden’s empathy. From his stutter, Biden has said, he developed “an insight I don’t think I ever would have had into other people’s pain,” and a life-motivating chip on his shoulder against men like Trump. In this fight, it’s Biden’s superpower.

Sep. 30, 2020, the New York Times reported:

Joseph R. Biden Jr. cast the first presidential debate as a leadership test for President Trump; Mr. Trump framed it as cognitive test for a supposedly senile Mr. Biden.

One [Biden] of them passed.

While Mr. Biden did not deliver a stellar performance on Tuesday — and the mud-spattered spectacle in Cleveland left neither participant unsullied — he easily surpassed the low expectations set for him by a Trump campaign that had portrayed him as a doddering weakling incapable of facing an alpha president.

April 5, 2022, France24.com publishes:

Misinformers target US President Joe Biden, 79, as ‘senile’

Misinformers…target [Biden’s] ‘cognitive decline’ and ability to govern through manipulated videos.

Philosopher Rony Guldmann writes in his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression:

* [L]iberalism must no less than the racism, sexism, and homophobia it denounces define itself in opposition to an Other, a role now assumed by conservatives

* The anointed reject the common sense of the benighted because its very commonness is an affront to their identity, which requires them to systematically invert every inherited norm and understanding. Their identity presupposes a world that resists their prescriptions, a world too benighted to recognize their superior wisdom and morality—and thus all the more in need of these. Whether the issue is the rights of criminals or the merits of avant-garde art, there is, writes Sowell, always a “pattern of seeking differentiation at virtually all costs.” Amorphous abstractions like the “politics of kindness,” “community spirit,” and “love of learning” permit just this, because they can always be reconfigured so as to generate a new chasm between the anointed and the benighted. Liberals are always “moving the goal post,” say conservatives, and this is because their political vision is also a vision of themselves. Since the vision of the anointed can at most enjoy the passive acquiescence, and never the lucid assent, of the great majority, it must be promoted and defended by an unaccountable intellectual class. Having captured America’s most influential institutions, including the media, Hollywood, the universities, public education, foundations, government bureaucracies, and, perhaps most importantly, the courts, the liberal elites employ their privileged position to foist their parochial values upon a silent and largely powerless majority of ordinary Americans. Even where democracy has not been legally disabled by the courts and the administrative state, this residue of freedom comes too late when informal coercion can achieve unofficially whatever cannot be achieved officially.

* Sowell charges that the anointed employ “preemptive rhetoric” to prevent fair, reasoned, and non-coercive debate with their political opponents. And this rhetoric may take the form of a seemingly innocent refrain. When a progressive tells a conservative “You can’t possibly mean that,” the point, charges Kahane,“is to stop the argument in its tracks,” to assert the progressive’s “higher reality.” “Everyone knows that” is likewise“[a]nother all-purpose put-down,” intended to broadcast that the conservative is a “complete idiot,” just as “You’re not really…” is meant to suggest that the conservative interlocutor “is little better than a cave-dweller, a superstitious moron whose walnut-size brain is probably stuffed with religious ‘dogma.’”68Here is the censorship of fashion in all its insidiousness.

* Imagining themselves uniquely objective, inclusive, thoughtful, and so on, liberals have cultivated an automatic social reflex that dismisses conservative opinions as mental or emotional immaturity, mindless reptilian instinct, unthinking fear and hatred that are easily recognized as such by more evolved souls. With this social reflex having become integral to the liberal identity and with this identity now woven into the fabric of American life, conservatives find themselves suffocated by an insidious and pervasive conservaphobia, the last socially acceptable bigotry.

* universities’ solicitude for diverse group identities does not extend to those who reject the dominant dispensation. Campus speech codes protect the sensibilities of left-wing students, but they allow these same students to label conservative blacks “Uncle Toms” and label anti-feminist women “mall chicks.” Studentswho believe homosexuality is sinful can be charged with harassing their gay and lesbian cohorts. But pro-choice students who surround a silent pro-life vigil and chant “Racist, sexist, antigay born-again bigots go away” are seen as engaged in protected speech.88Liberals ask us to put ourselves in the shoes of the less fortunate, so [Alan Charles] Kors proposes the following thought-experiment:

“Imagine secular, skeptical, or leftist faculty and students confronted by a religious harassment code that prohibited “denigration” of evangelical or Catholic beliefs, or that made the classroom or campus a space where evangelical or Catholic students must be protected against feeling “intimidated,” offended,” or, by their own subjective experience, victims of a “hostile environment. Imagine a university of patriotic “loyalty oaths” where leftists were deemed responsible for the tens of millions of victims of communism, and where free minds were prohibited from creating a hostile environment for patriots, or from offending that “minority” of individuals who are descended from Korean or Vietnam War veterans. Imagine, as well, that for every “case” that became public, there were scores or hundreds of cases in which the “offender” or “victimizer,” desperate to preserve a job or gain a degree, accepted a confidential plea bargain that included a semester’s or a year’s reeducation in “religious sensitivity” or “patriotic sensitivity” seminars run by the university’s “Evangelical Center, “Patriotic Center,” or “Office of Religious and Patriotic Compliance.”

* [Alvin W. Gouldner wrote in 1979:] “The culture of the New Class exacts still other costs: since its discourse emphasizes the importance of carefully edited speech, this has the vices of its virtues: in its virtuous aspect, self-editing implies a commendable circumspection, carefulness, self-discipline and “seriousness.” In its negative modality, however, self-editing also disposes toward an unhealthy self-consciousness, toward stilted convoluted speech, an inhibition of play, imagination and passion, and continual pressure for expressive discipline. The new rationality thus becomes the source of a new alienation.

Calling for watchfulness and self-discipline, CCD [culture of critical discourse] is productive of intellectual reflexivity and the loss of warmth and spontaneity. Moreover, that very reflexivity stresses the importance of adjusting action to some pattern of propriety. There is, therefore, a structured inflexibility when facing changing situations; there is a certain disregard of the differences in situations, and an insistence on hewing to the required rule.”

* The problem is not simply that political correctness has deprived conservatives of their right to express their beliefs—through media bias or campus speech codes—but that it has moreover and more insidiously obstructed their ability to even form beliefs, to translate their true sentiments into clear statements of position which they can then defend without embarrassment.

* The Ruling Class, writes Codevilla, “has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference.” And conservatives’ anti-intellectualism is before anything else an attempt to reverse these habits, to erode the social prestige that attaches to the “rhetoric and airs of the intellectual.”

* Alan Kors reports that Northwestern University hired “Self-Evaluation Consultants” to facilitate its New Student Week in 1989. There, the consultants admonished incoming freshmen that while they were not to blame for the “customs and habits of thought” they inherited from their parents and communities, they must now remake their lives, ridding themselves of “the ugliness, the meanness…[the] narrowness and [the] tribalism.”169Similarlyat Montclair State University, residential advisors attending sensitivity training were issue da “permission slip” granting them permission to be “imperfect with regards to homophobia and heterosexism.” Given the homophobic/heterosexist culture in which they were raised, their ignorance and bias were excusable so long as they were “struggling to change my false/inaccurate beliefs or oppressive attitudes [and] learning what I can do to make a difference.”

* [Kevin Williamson:] “The Left’s organizing principle is control, and the possibility that children might commonly be raised outside of its control matrix is an existential threat from the progressive point of view. Institutions such as free markets and free speech terrify progressives, because they are the result of arrangements in which nobody is in control…Home-schooling isn’t for everybody, but every home-school student, like every firearm in private hands, is a quiet little declaration of independence. It’s no accident that the people who want to seize your guns are also the ones who want to seize your children.”

Using a word like “senile” renders you a bad person from a liberal perspective. You’re engaged in othering, ableism and ageism.

March 12, 2020, conservative Marc A. Thiessen writes for the Washington Post:

It’s fair to speculate whether Biden is mentally fit to be president

His socialist rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is 78 — almost a year older than Biden — yet no one is questioning his mental fitness. On Monday night, Sanders spent an hour at a Fox News town hall where he was challenged to defend his policies and answered in great detail and without any gaffes or senior moments. Could Biden do the same?

April 7, 2021, Tara Law writes for Time:

Ageist Attacks Against President Biden Reinforce Outdated Stereotypes—and Hurt Younger People, Too

When President Joe Biden tripped on the stairs up to Air Force One on March 19, the incident immediately touched off a flurry of mockery. Fox News host Sean Hannity declared the President to be “frail.” “He didn’t know where the hell he was,” former President Donald Trump said in an interview with Lara Trump. Saturday Night Live, no stranger to easy jokes about aging Presidents, poked fun both at the fall and at a March 25 press conference when a reporter asked Biden if he planned to run for a second term—a question, quipped SNL’s Michael Che, which was “probably the nicest way to ask him if he plans on being alive in three years.”

…But experts say age-based attacks against Biden and others demonstrate how common ageist stereotypes are in American culture—to everyone’s detriment.

“Experts say” is a favorite phrase for liberals, the rough equivalent of “common sense” for conservatives. Conservatives believe that most individuals have common sense and can usually trust what their eyes tell them while liberals believe that common sense resides with expert consensus.

July 15, 2022, conservative Newsweek columnist Joshua Hammer writes:

There is something very, very clearly wrong with the president of the United States. Even The New York Times, which for former Biden boss Barack Obama functioned as Democratic Party Pravda, ran a recent piece entitled, “At 79, Biden Is Testing the Boundaries of Age and the Presidency.” A mere three days later, Michelle Goldberg, a reliably progressive columnist for The Gray Lady, entitled her own column, “Joe Biden Is Too Old to Be President Again.”

Nov. 2, 2022, George Will concluded that Biden was senile: “Biden is not just past his prime; even adequacy is in his past.”

Nov. 19, 2022, the New York Times publishes: “[E]xperts…who have reviewed the available White House medical records said that so far, [Biden] appears to be aging in a healthy way.”

Former New York Times ombudsman Margaret Sullivan wrote Feb. 13, 2023:

The conservative Washington Post columnist George Will (81 years old himself) wrote recently that – based on a factual error in Biden’s description of his loan-forgiveness policy – the president must either be senile or a pathological liar. The Maga Republican crowd would have you believe Biden can hardly move a muscle, including his lips, without his handlers.

Even in the wake of the president’s much-praised State of the Union address, the calls mounted for him to step aside for 2024.

…I wish Biden were 20 years younger; I wish he didn’t stumble over his words and sometimes make inexplicable mistakes. I worry about his cognitive decline and physical frailty. But right now, he looks like the best bet to stave off a likely-disastrous Republican presidency and his record, while not flawless, is impressive.

Feb. 16, 2023, Julianna Goldman writes for Bloomberg: “By calling for cognitive testing of any politician older than 75, Nikki Haley is engaging in age discrimination.”

Feb. 28, 2023, Jacob Hess writes for Deseret.com:

I listened to President Joe Biden’s recent speech in Warsaw, a few days before the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You should check it out, too. I’m often surprised when I listen to the president speak, maybe because of how many times I’ve heard friends say disparaging things like so many others, including:

  • Politicos: Former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller said that Biden should be in “assisted living” and “is not cognitively present.”
  • Podcasters: “He’s so gone. He’s got dementia. There’s no if and or buts about it.” (Joe Rogan)
  • Cable news: “President Biden is plagued by his own cognitive decline. … Does he really fully comprehend and understand what is exactly going on?” (Sean Hannity)
  • Even billboards insist: “He is not fit.”

In my view, the 20-plus minute speech in Warsaw strongly disconfirmed these blanket condemnations.

June 11, 2023, The Guardian reported:

The notion that Biden is suffering from cognitive decline or lacks the mental acuity to be president has been a fixture of conservative media for years, but questions about his abilities appear to have increasingly become a mainstream concern…

Biden’s physician released a five-page summary of his current health status in February, detailing some issues such as arthritis and a need to take blood thinners, but describing him as “healthy, vigorous, 80-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency”.

July 29, 2023, Zachary B. Wolf writes for CNN:

When is it not ageist to ask questions?

There’s an awkward gray area between legitimate questions about a person’s health and ageism.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley got some early attention for her presidential campaign when she suggested a mental competency test for politicians over 75.

It was ageist…

By not answering his own question – when is it not ageist to ask questions? — Zachary Wolf implicitly argues you should never question a politician over his age. He did his bit to protect Joe Biden from healthy scrutiny by ruling such questioning unethical.

Sep. 8, 2023, Mary Mitchell writes for the Chicago Sun Times:

Joe Biden’s age isn’t the problem. We are.

…Unsurprisingly, a NewsNation poll released last week found that 80% of those responding said they’re “very concerned or “somewhat concerned” about Biden’s age.

But what’s the big deal?

Let Biden speak from a comfortable chair and use a walker when he has to go a distance.

The shame isn’t that Biden is showing his age. The problem is that the Democrats couldn’t find a promising candidate to challenge the Republicans and let Biden go home and get some rest.

Americans should be concerned if the medical professionals caring for Biden determine he can’t carry out his duties.

Otherwise, our concern is just ageism.

Ageism is one of the last acceptable prejudices, “so ingrained in our culture that we often don’t even notice,” according to the American Psychological Association.

Time magazine publishes Sep. 27, 2023:

By Mauro Guillén — the author of The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society and Vice Dean at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

As the 2024 Presidential Election picks up steam, voters—particularly those from the Democratic party—seem to be overly concerned about age, and the cognitive and physical decline that come with it. Perhaps it is inevitable given how rampant ageism is in America. According to a 2018 survey conducted by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), 1 in 4 American workers aged 45 and above have experienced negative comments related to their age, and 76% of older workers have been forced to leave their jobs.

At the end of the day, however, the current debate over the impact of age on the presidential race has descended into ageism, which is a serious conscious and unconscious bias we all fall for ever so frequently. The American Psychological Association has determined that it is one of the “last socially acceptable prejudices.” My research on demographics and the economy indicates that we are wasting the talents of many people above the age of 60, 70, or 80 because we unjustifiably deem them not capable of performing a job or any job. It is simply not true that younger workers are always preferable. As human beings, we start to decline from a cognitive point of view when we are in our late twenties. But, typically, experience more than compensates for cognitive decline. It is fair to argue that Biden’s legislative and presidential records speak to the importance of experience in American politics…

Instead of endlessly debating whether Biden is fit for a second term on age grounds, we should be celebrating the fact that a second term would reflect the increasing diversity of American society in terms of age…

Like in so many other respects, the political debate over aging politicians has become polarized and is not contributing to making the nation stronger.

Nov. 1, 2023, the AP reported:

WASHINGTON (AP) — To hear Donald Trump tell it, President Joe Biden is so senile that he doesn’t know where he’s speaking and feeble enough that others are making decisions for him…

“Looking at videos of Biden and really reading into it, I just — he mentally just can’t handle, I think, an election at all,” said Skylar Swan, 23, who attended a recent Trump rally in Summerville, South Carolina. As for Trump, she said, “When you look at him, yeah, he says things that are crazy, and he’s a little hardcore. But it’s also like, that’s the type of guy I wouldn’t want to mess with.”

Stephen Collinson wrote for CNN Feb. 9, 2024:

Age and the question of diminished capacities as a person heads into their twilight years is a deeply painful and sensitive one. It’s something that many families have to wrestle with and so understand intuitively, a factor that may be reflected in public opinion on the matter as it relates to the election.

Many of the attacks on Biden by Republicans certainly reek of ageism and come across as cruel.

Graeme Wood wrote Feb. 12, 2024 for The Atlantic:

On Fear Of A Senile President

The Presidency Is Not a Math Test

Neither of the old men running on a major ticket shows any sign of catastrophic senescence.

Many people already think Biden is senile, and now they think they have a legal document certifying their judgment. The document does not quite say what many believe it does. It doesn’t say that Biden is unfit to stand trial, just that he’s forgetful enough to evade conviction on the basis of a particular utterance.

Jeet Heer wrote for the Nation Feb. 12, 2024:

In New York magazine, centrist pundit Jonathan Chait, who styles himself a liberal, boldly argued that senility should not prevent someone from having control of enough nuclear weapons to extinguish all life on earth. In a transcribed conversation with his colleague Benjamin Hart, Chait responded to concerns about a cognitively impaired president by saying,

“Well, if [Biden is] controlled by advisers, is that unacceptable? If the advisers are making good decisions? Reagan was pretty senile and controlled by advisers. Everybody’s forgotten this, but the accounts of his mental state are harrowing. Nobody cared because the results were fine.”

Another centrist pundit, Michael Cohen, made a slightly more restrained version of this argument by tweeting that “memory loss is not necessarily a factor in being able to do the job of president.

Chait went to say, “Biden seems more feeble than Reagan.” Trying to put the best possible spin on his own account of Biden’s incapacity, Chait argued that “there’s no aspect of the presidency other than communications that [Biden has] been inhibited from doing.”

The media, by and large, did not want to engage with the most cogent critique of Joe Biden – that he’s too old to serve as president — because it was too sensitive for their hero system.

The New York Times reported Feb. 13, 2024:

Mr. Biden’s voice has grown softer and raspier, his hair thinner and whiter. He is tall and trim but moves more tentatively than he did as a candidate in 2019 and 2020, often holding his upper body stiff, adding to an impression of frailty. And he has had spills in the public eye: falling off a bicycle, tripping over a sandbag.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, does not appear to be suffering the effects of time in such visible ways. Mr. Trump often dyes his hair and appears unnaturally tan. He is heavyset and tall, and he uses his physicality to project strength in front of crowds. When he takes the stage at rallies, he basks in adulation for several minutes, dancing to an opening song, and then holds forth in speeches replete with macho rhetoric and bombast that typically last well over an hour, a display of stamina.

“It is the perception of how you communicate,” said Carol Kinsey Goman, a speaker and coach on leadership presence. “When Trump makes those kinds of faux pas, he just brushes it off, and people don’t say, ‘Oh, he’s aging.’ He makes at least as many mistakes as Joe Biden, but because he does it with this bravado, it doesn’t seem like senility. It seems like passion.”

With Mr. Biden, Ms. Goman said, “it looks like weakness.”

…“Trump is big,” Ms. Goman said. “He simply takes over. He has that kind of full-charge-ahead persona that does correlate with being younger, healthier, more active. Biden doesn’t. He is a different kind of person. And, unfortunately, in this situation, it doesn’t work out well.”

Leah Donnella writes for NPR Feb. 16, 2024:

How ageism against Biden and Trump puts older folks at risk

What would you do if I told you there’s a whole demographic group that can’t be trusted to work because they’re unreliable, bad with technology, slow learners, and most likely not a good “culture fit”? What if I said that group probably shouldn’t even be incorporated into the rest of society – that they should live in their own, separate communities where the rest of us don’t have to see or interact with them unless we choose to?

Would your hackles be raised? Would that language have you dialing up the ACLU?

It probably should. It’s called stereotyping. (Heard of it?) And while many of us — OK, some of us — have trained ourselves to notice how stereotypes work when it comes to things like ethnicity or gender, there are other categories where the practice goes painfully unnoticed — like age.

As it becomes increasingly inevitable that our next presidential election will be a contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, everyone from comedians to competitors to journalists to doctors to the candidates themselves has had something to say about how old these two men are, and (in some cases,) why that proves that they’re unfit for office. Recently, those conversations have gotten to a fever pitch.

That’s a big problem. Tracey Gendron is a gerontologist and the author of the book Ageism Unmasked. She says that like many other giant identity categories, “age in and of itself does not tell you what somebody’s experiences are, what somebody’s values are, what somebody’s health status is, what somebody’s cognitive status is.”

…fixating on someone’s age can actually put them at higher risk for exhibiting negative behaviors associated with that age. It’s called stereotype threat. For instance, when people are told that members of their age group are likely to struggle with things like memory and word recall, they perform worse on memory tests than people who are primed with information about the vast cognitive capabilities of people their age. Similar studies have been done with gender, race, and many other categories, and guess what? Being told you’re going to be bad at something is a remarkably consistent self-fulfilling prophecy.

Claire Thurstans writes for the Sydney Morning Herald Feb. 20, 2024:

Biden has consistently been described by his political rivals and their supporters as “senile” and “mentally unfit” over the years, despite having a clean bill of health. This has escalated recently with a Department of Justice report into Biden’s retention of classified documents describing Biden as likely to come across as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

…So when we are critiquing presidential candidates, and other people in positions of power, should their age come into it?

…we shouldn’t be…attributing every mistake to someone’s older age, seeing everything through a negative lens about ageing, or levelling casual ageist remarks against Biden and Trump, like calling them “bumbling” or “grumpy”, or describing them as “well-meaning” – a condescending description for one of the most successful people in the world.

June 18, 2024, AP noted:

CLAIM: Biden froze onstage during his fundraiser in Los Angeles on Saturday night and had to be led away by Obama.

THE FACTS: Biden paused amid cheers and applause as he exited the stage with his predecessor following an interview moderated by late-night host Kimmel.

June 19, 2024, Snopes reported:

In June 2024, online users and some news publishers shared videos claiming to show U.S. President Joe Biden “freeze up” for seven seconds at the conclusion of a campaign fundraiser with former President Barack Obama…

The apparent implication of the claims presented alongside these videos was simply the latest chapter in the unproven rumor the president, who is 81, experiences symptoms of an undisclosed medical diagnosis or other type of mental issue related to his age. For the record, Biden has not been diagnosed with any cognitive issues related to his age. Further, in a situation like this one where users imply Biden experienced a symptoms of a larger mental issue causing him to “freeze up,” the people who started the rumor own the responsibility of providing worthy evidence to lend credibility to their implied claim. They have presented no such evidence.

Biden’s disastrous debate occurred on June 27, 2024 and media coverage of Biden’s age exploded. It was now clear that Biden was not likely to defeat Donald Trump so the MSM wanted Biden out of the race. In the course of the first five minutes of the debate, the MSM went from covering for Biden to dispatching Biden. He was now an embarrassment for their agenda.

Conservative columnist Mark Hemingway writes for The Federalist July 1, 2024:

The only reason anyone ever believed Biden was up to the job is that they were lied to, even though most Americans have always understood Biden has been exhibiting signs of dementia before he ever became president. At this point, it’s impossible to deny that Democrats and their media allies have betrayed and endangered America by spending the last few years lying to us about Biden’s age-related mental competency.

…It’s not just that the debate made it impossible to deny Biden’s cognitive decline, it’s that the media’s desperation to defend him is also laying bare the total moral and ethical collapse of journalism.

Sheila Callahan writes for Forbes July 5, 2024:

Regardless of President Biden’s performance in last week’s debate, saying, “He’s too old to run again” is wrong.

Why?

Competency is not tied to chronological age because everyone ages differently.

So headlines that read “Too Old to Run for President” perpetuate the ageist myth that competency is directly tied to age, which is inaccurate and misleading.

In the first article I wrote about Biden announcing his 2020 Presidential run, I argued the irrelevance of age when evaluating where to cast one’s vote and how the topic of age took away from the real questions…

As Maggie Koerth-Baker wrotes in her article, Even Brain Function Tests Can’t Tell Us How Old Is Too Old To Be President, “The knowledge, political savvy and wisdom of a lifetime in office could be a decent tradeoff for a president who needs a little more help from aides to take notes.”

The public has judged Mr. Biden too harshly…

Hadas Gold writes for CNN July 2, 2024:

Biden’s age was also a right-wing talking point for years, something the White House was quick to point out to reporters, which may have inadvertently turned off any serious investigation.

For example, deceptively edited clips of Biden from the G7 spread widely by right-wing media figures were made to seem as though he was aimlessly “wandering off” from fellow world leaders when really, he was speaking to parachutists who had just landed during a demonstration.

“The right-wing media was calling him senile from day one, and that wasn’t true,” the reporter said. “Then whenever you report on the age you were in some ways solidifying, giving credence to some people that were actually of bad faith.”

Alex Thompson, a White House reporter for Axios, said on CNN the day after the debate that “the White House’s response every single time it has come up for three-and-a-half years has been to deflect, to gaslight, to not tell the truth – not just to reporters, not just to other Democrats, but even at times to themselves about the president’s limitations at his age.”

Liberal Fintan O’Toole writes for NYBooks.com July 2, 2024:

Political campaigns are embodied narratives—the medium for the message is the candidate’s physical and linguistic presence. Like it or not, Trump’s looming, swaggering, domineering mien personifies his insistence that America needs a giant to stand between it and the forces that are about to destroy it. He must surely be the first presidential candidate to draw specific attention to his own body in a formal debate: “I think I’m in very good shape. I feel that I’m in as good a shape as I was twenty-five, thirty years ago.” The corporeal Trump, in his telling, is almost ageless. He has arrested the ravages of time on his own body—just as he will stop the decline and decay of the American body politic.

Biden can’t do this. His political story is not one of time arrested but of time renewed. He wants (and needs) to evoke a sense of future possibility, a rebirth of social and racial justice and a bold adaptation of the economy to meet the climate crisis. Yet his body is not in sync with this message. Unable to exemplify an idea of progress, he is forced to play Trump’s game by pretending to have stopped his own physical decline. The little running motions, the aviator sunglasses, the protesting-too-much displays of youthful energy are failed efforts to do what Trump is so good at: appearing ageless. But time will not play along. It is all too easy to look at a photograph of Biden in 2020 and compare it to his present, more withered self.

Thus, even in this most obvious physical sense, it is Trump who has set the terms and Biden who has allowed himself to be sucked into accepting them. In 2020 the pandemic saved Biden from the consequences of this mistake. It wiped out Trump’s advantage in physical presence.

Ross Douthat writes July 6, 2024:

Democrats generally see themselves as the party that trusts the mainstream press and academic expertise and respectable opinion, whereas Republicans generally assume that those forces are biased or blinkered or somehow out to get them.

Christian Lorentzen writes for the July 18, 2024 London Review of Books about the three books that have come out on the Biden administration:

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future by Franklin Foer.
The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House by Chris Whipple.
The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump by Alexander Ward.

It’s difficult to divine from the histories of the Biden administration written so far just how active a role the president has played in governing the country…

Whereas accounts of the Trump White House varied from clown show to cesspool, with backstabbing among hacks, mercenaries and scumbags, the histories of the Biden administration present a succession of earnest and credentialled professionals lining up to help the president better the country and the world.

…The issue​ of Biden’s age is not much discussed in these books. Whipple, whose previous books include a study of the job of White House chief of staff, recounts a Zoom meeting between Klain and some of his predecessors during the transition in 2020. Jim Jones, the 82-year-old former chief of staff to LBJ, asked: ‘Could a soon to be 82-year-old man, battered by four years of stress and crisis, serve effectively for another full term as president?’ The question became pertinent in April 2022 when at a ceremony at the White House to unveil a proposed expansion of Obamacare, the former president was mobbed by admirers while Biden, in Whipple’s phrase, ‘looked a little lost’. Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida said: ‘Let’s be honest here. Joe Biden is unwell. He’s unfit for office. He’s incoherent, incapacitated and confused. He doesn’t know where he is half the time.’ ‘This was, of course, false,’ Whipple insists. ‘Biden was mentally sharp, even if he appeared physically frail.’ Bruce Reed, the deputy chief of staff, told Whipple of a long flight home from Geneva in 2021 during which Biden regaled his jetlagged entourage with old stories, including the one about the time he visited the Kremlin and told Putin he had no soul, until everyone except the president passed out. But Foer writes that Senate Republicans ‘doubted Joe Biden was running his own show. Because of his advanced age, they whispered that he was a marionette, wiggling his arms as Klain manipulated him from above. Aides to Mitch McConnell were blunt in their analysis. They dubbed Klain “prime minister”.’ Tucker Carlson has made Biden’s age one of the central themes of his twerpy routine. Defenders of the president have written off such claims as ‘right-wing talking points’, but like left-wing and centrist talking points, right-wing talking points occasionally have some basis in fact.

July 11, 2024, Ian Ward writes for Politico:

Conservatives See a Conspiracy Around Joe Biden’s Stumbles

Since before the 2020 election, Republicans and their conservative allies have loudly proclaimed that Joe Biden’s lack of mental fitness disqualifies him from America’s highest office. Now, in the wake of the president’s disastrous performance in the presidential debate, many of those same voices are taking up a different rallying cry: We told you so. And the media covered it up.

July 14, 2024, veteran journalist David Samuels writes: “the press…functions as the propaganda arm of the [Democratic] Party…”

In a podcast released July 15, 2024, New Yorker politics correspondent Susan Glasser says: “Seeing what we’re seeing here, the real issue that’s hardly aired at all: is Biden fit to govern for four more years? I suspect that the voting public has a strong conclusion that the answer is no. Far from elites being the ones hounding poor Joe Biden, the man of the people, it is the elites who have refused to look at the evidence in front of their eyes because it didn’t suit the Democratic party to have this big fight beforehand or they were worried about Kamala Harris. Can you really look at Joe Biden and looking at his trajectory the last few years, you think he’s going to be a good president at age 85? I don’t think anyone can honestly say yes to that.”

“Biden’s problem is that his single biggest liability is his age. That is a chronically worsening condition. That’s part of the unreality of the political conversations Democrats are having in public — their squeamishness at addressing this. It’s not like other political handicaps. It would not have become so salient if it hadn’t manifested the way it has manifested – that the president of the United States is taken off the board as an effective communicator. He can’t answer in a compelling way why he’s running against Donald Trump. He couldn’t answer that in a compelling way more than a year ago when he announced his re-election campaign. It didn’t get the attention it should have at the time. I went back and watched the press conference he gave the week he announced his re-election bid, and he was asked a softball question by ABC’s Mary Bruce — why are you running again? He gave a nearly 700-word answer that was a word salad. ‘I feel good. I want to finish the job.’ What job, sir, he was asked this week and he started rambling about trickle down economics and how when he was a senator, he really cared about this. That is not prosecuting an effective case.”

“Part of the [reason] that Democrats are so furious over the past few weeks is his perceived choice of himself at the potential expense of not just the party but the country. That’s been reinforced by the insular nature of his decision making, the small inner circle, listening to Hunter Biden’s counsel, bringing him into formal White House meeting. I have talked to people who are incandescent with rage that Hunter Biden is involved in making this decision rather than people who have a long record of service to this country. Biden’s failed methods of damage control were revealing. He spoke about himself. I’ll give it my all, rather than thinking about winning and losing in the existential terms he framed for the country.”

A July 12, 2024 search of Google Scholar reveals not one academic publication about Joe Biden’s dramatic cognitive decline over the past six years but many publications about how there are no signs that Joe Biden’s is in a serious decline while there is abundant evidence that Donald Trump is not fit for office.

July 15, 2024, an academic philosopher responds to my question about why liberals were years behind conservatives in recognizing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline: “They went crazy over [special prosecutor Robert] Hur, denying what he said in a legal report, and there were other doctors talking about it. They didn’t have problems citing those kinds of people about Bush and Trump. It is just bias. There is no principle here. Even if there was an expert diagnosis, they would only accept the one they wanted to hear.”

July 13, 2024, Martin Gurri wrote:

The fantastic universe erected around Biden wasn’t focused on the president but on his fiercest antagonist: Trump became the predicate of Bidenworld, its reason for existence. The logic is pretty straightforward. As a moral and political abomination, Trump provides the rationale for establishment rule in perpetuity. Loathing of Trump in the highest places is no doubt sincere, but that’s not the point. If the former president had never existed, someone else would be found to occupy the supervillain slot. (One could see glimmers of this dynamic in early 2023, when for a few months it seemed like Ron DeSantis might eclipse Trump and win the GOP nomination for president, prompting the media and others to begin characterizing the Florida governor as the next dark lord.) An imminent threat to democracy is required to justify extraordinary measures. The prime directive of Bidenworld has always been: Anything is licit if it helps defeat Trump.

Protection against reality holds the highest priority. Whatever whisper of truth pierces the wall of fictions is ruthlessly attacked as the product of crazed or bigoted minds. If Robert Hur, the special prosecutor tasked with looking into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, reports that he won’t move forward with the case because the president is “an elderly man with a poor memory,” then Hur must be a Trumpian tool. If a video shows Biden wandering off to nowhere, then the video is a lie. It’s all malicious disinformation, “cheap fakes,” deranged conspiracy theories. To strengthen the faith, punishment had to be meted out to heretics. MAGA fanatics were treated like domestic terrorists. Political opponents were prosecuted like common criminals. An elaborate censorship apparatus was constructed to protect against offending opinions and factual discrepancies. Anything is licit if it helps defeat Trump.

The fixation with Trump had another advantage: He was perceived as a weak and wounded animal. When he took out DeSantis and former South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, his primary rivals, the Democrats cheered. He was their chosen foe—the worst, to their way of thinking, the Republicans had to offer. From a position of strength, Bidenworld planned to set the terms of the general election as it had done with the Democratic primaries. No debates would be allowed. A new basement would be found in which to hide President Biden. With Trump in the race, all they had to do was coast downhill.

The uncanny political resurrection of Donald Trump is a subject for another time. An obvious factor, though, had to be the policy failures and unpopularity of the Biden administration. Another, of course, was the president’s visible deterioration. Promoting an official fiction isn’t really feasible in the age of the internet. For whatever reasons, Trump surged when he was supposed to sink. At some point, he must have passed the president in the internal polls of the Democratic Party: And at exactly that moment began the panic that has now swelled to a glass-shattering shriek.

Why did the president’s people change their minds and challenge Trump to a debate? The only explanation I can think of is that they had migrated intellectually to the fantasy universe. They had come to believe their own comforting lies. Truth had become the habitual enemy, something to shun in horror—so they dreamed they could preserve Bidenworld by producing the real Biden.

The debate was a transcendental event, far more significant than anything that was said in it. While Biden gargled and mumbled, a ripping noise could be heard by those who listened closely, a sound like the rending of a veil, as the whole Gothic fortress of fantasies disintegrated, the replica vanished like a ghost and 100 million Americans could suddenly behold the cruel struggles of a man tormented by a dying body and a dying mind. The shock of what we saw still lingers, not because it was surprising but rather because it was so predictable and consistent with what we already knew: It was truth, and we have grown used to lies. We had witnessed, in real time, the unraveling of a colossal fraud and the end of Biden’s political life.

There is no way forward for the president, although he is a vain and stubborn man and it may take outside intervention to persuade him of this fact. The media that once sheltered him is now competing to expose his frailties. The prime directive remains supreme but Biden now finds himself at the pointy end of that argument. He has fallen behind Trump and, in consequence, he has lost the New York Times. No Democratic politician can take that kind of hit and remain a competitive candidate.

Biden may well be done, but what happens next is uncertain. If indeed he goes and the hierarchy holds, then Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president, will replace Biden at the top of the ticket. Harris carries her own burden of weirdness but at least can be trusted not to drool in front of the cameras. The establishment, however, may not survive the public unmasking of its prurient fantasies. The magic has been lost, and with it the authority to anoint the next chieftain. The Democratic Party, long held together by its collective will to power, may shatter from a clash of personal ambitions. They need only peek across the aisle at the Republicans to learn what this looks like. That would be the strongest argument for keeping the president as a sacrificial offering in November.

I see no reason to pity Biden. He perpetrated a hoax on the American people and has had the misfortune of being found out. The punishment will fit the crime: humiliation for heedless vanity. If he is forced to withdraw from the presidential contest, that will be all the world remembers of his brief tenure at the top. If Trump regains the presidency in 2024, Biden will end up detested by the very elites whose good opinion he has groveled all his life to obtain. Failure, this time, will be fixed and final, like destiny itself.

He will not bear these blows stoically. I expect he’ll spend whatever time remains to him as a 21st-century version of King Lear—fallen, baffled, victim of his own fatal misjudgments, an old man lost on the heath and railing at the storm.

The WSJ reported July 21, 2024:

How the Bet on an 81-Year-Old Joe Biden Turned Into an Epic Miscalculation

President Biden had just finished trying to persuade a group of congressional Democrats to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill when Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, took the microphone.

In 30 minutes of remarks on Capitol Hill, Biden had spoken disjointedly and failed to make a concrete ask of lawmakers, according to Democrats in the room. After he left, a visibly frustrated Pelosi told the group she would articulate what Biden had been trying to say, one lawmaker said.

“It was the first time I remember people pretty jarred by what they had seen,” recalled Rep. Dean Phillips (D., Minn.), who would go on to mount an unsuccessful primary challenge against the president.

That was October 2021. That month was the last time Biden met with the House Democratic caucus on the Hill regarding legislation.

Nearly three years later, concerns about the 81-year-old president’s age and mental acuity have put an abrupt cap on his half-century political career. They had grown from a murmur among allies, who said they believed—or hoped—they were catching the president on a bad day, to a deafening roar, as many of those same allies called on him to step aside in the wake of his disastrous June 27 debate performance.

While the news media was quick for years to reject the conservative characterization of Joe Biden as senile, with one of their own, Helen Thomas, they were quick in the summer of 2010 to write her off as senile and shove her into retirement. Professors Elizabeth Blanks Hindman and Ryan J. Thomas published April 18, 2013:

On June 7, 2010, the career of veteran journalist Helen Thomas, who had covered the White House since the days of President Dwight Eisenhower, came to an abrupt and ignominious end. The previous month, she had been interviewed on camera by New York rabbi David Nesenoff, who asked if she had any “comments on Israel,” to which Thomas responded, “tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.” When Nesenoff asked if she had “any better comments on Israel,” Thomas replied that “they” (Jews) should “go home” to “Poland, Germany . . . and America and everywhere else.”

In trying to explain Thomas’s comments, editorials and columnists made frequent references to her age, suggesting that perhaps Thomas was the victim of senility. Attribution theory posits that wrongdoers’ actions can be explained through characteristics inherent to the perpetrator (internal attribution) or through broader, communal factors (external attribution). By positioning Thomas as a veteran journalist of declining faculties, commentators engaged in internal attribution, indicating that Thomas was solely—though perhaps not willfully—responsible for her conduct.

Paradigm repair was demonstrated by a fellow member of the White House press corps who suggested that many among this community-within-a-community, so to speak, had grown tired of Thomas, and argued privately for her retirement, believing she was an embarrassment to the institution. Consider this example: “Nature, we told ourselves, would take care of the problem. In 2008, health issues kept Helen off the job for months. Many of us hoped she would fully recover and fully retire. She did and she didn’t.” The community here came together against a common enemy.

Writers suggested that “the ravages of age . . . [have] loosened her tongue to utter some pretty deplorable thoughts,”93 indicating that Thomas was simply too old to be in the industry. One editorial, ominously titled “Helen goes home,” reinforced this idea, arguing that “[u]ltraliberal columnist Helen Thomas has long been American journalism’s crazy old aunt in the attic,” a dangerous figure with a tenuous grip on sanity. But, readers were cautioned, they would dismiss this figure at their peril:

“If this were your crazy old aunt, she’d be a harmless eccentric. A bigot and a hater, certainly. But harmless. Not so with Helen Thomas, White House correspondent for Hearst Newspapers, and whose concise and precise denunciation of Israel’s existence has already been parlayed into a public relations coup in radical Muslim circles.”

With the power she wielded as a journalist, she was not “harmless,” and as a result, she needed to be shuffled off the scene where her “crazy” views could no longer do harm…

The news media engaged in paradigm repair by (1) situating Thomas’s remark against a backdrop of journalistic excellence, which subtly reinforced the point that her career should now come to an end; (2) suggesting Thomas’s remarks were caused by senility; (3) condemning her remarks as racist and intimating that she had privately held these views for a long time; and (4) pointing to confusion between fact and opinion that blurred the lines between acceptable and unacceptable speech.

By contrast to the late mighty columnist Helen Thomas, the president of the United States Joe Biden is presumably harmless in his senility.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson released Oct. 15, 2024, Mark Halperin said that in the summer of 2024, Joe Biden did not believe that Kamala could win nor be a good president. “She did not run a good operation [as VP],” said Halperin. “There was leaking and her approval ratings were ridiculously low. The people around him would have told you to a person that she could not beat Donald Trump.”

“It started with her vetting vice-presidential prospects by her [while Biden was still running for a second term]. She started maneuvering for the nomination well before the Sunday morning when he called her and said he was not going to run.”

“I’m very frustrated with our business and with our political media culture that for seven years, there could be this cover-up [of Joe Biden’s senility]. I think this is the worst scandal in American journalism history because anyone knew what was happening. The public knew what was happening. The cover-up continued. And when the cover-up was exploded, he spoke to a dead congresswoman. That was a loss of acuity that would disqualify him from being a museum docent. That cover-up goes because of affection for Biden, bullying of his staff, but primarily because of a desire to make sure that Donald Trump doesn’t win.”

“When there is no choice but to say we got to get rid of him because he’s a threat to the republic because Trump could beat him, they turn again him, they never acknowledge their participation in a seven-year cover-up and then the same people get to cover the new candidate… There’s been zero soul-searching acknowledgment. The press turned on him and then acted as if they had not propped him up for seven years.”

“I saw his mental decline in 2017. I saw him do a public event for a book in 2017 and I said after the event, thank goodness he’s off the public stage.”

Posted in Joe Biden, Journalism, Rony Guldmann | Comments Off on Liberals Were Blinded To Biden’s Senility By Their Own Speech Codes

Liberals Blinded To Biden’s Senility By Their Own Speech Codes (7-5-24)

01:00 The dire situation of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline is more powerful than all laws, precedents and traditions
05:00 Mark Halperin reverses his position from two days ago, today he realizes that Joe Biden is dropping out, https://markhalperin.substack.com/p/lean-harder-into-biden-declining
06:00 Mark Halperin live stream today: Will Joe Biden Stay In The Race? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx7m_hAtjcc
21:30 Did the Media Cover Up for Biden? (Or Are They Just Bad at Their Jobs?), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ejzcCq4EFE
https://www.thefp.com/p/joe-nocera-mind-the-gap
https://the-smerconish-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/mark-halperin-joe-biden-is-still-the-most-likely-democratic-nominee-probably-by-far
Alex Thompson, https://x.com/AlexThomp

Posted in America | Comments Off on Liberals Blinded To Biden’s Senility By Their Own Speech Codes (7-5-24)

Minding The Gap Between Your Eyes And The Arbiters Of Truth (7-4-24)

01:00 Donald Trump was not playing 3D chess
02:00 Democrats are not playing 3D chess, https://www.stevesailer.net/p/the-biden-crisis-deep-state-theory
03:00 Twitter is still the number one public space
04:00 Alex Thompson from Axios, https://x.com/AlexThomp
08:00 The conservative media provided strength to people to believe their own eyes, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156067
09:00 The gap between your eyes and the arbiters of truth, https://www.thefp.com/p/joe-nocera-mind-the-gap
25:00 Mark Halperin: Joe Biden is still the most likely Democratic nominee “probably by far”, https://the-smerconish-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/mark-halperin-joe-biden-is-still-the-most-likely-democratic-nominee-probably-by-far
1:00:35 Colin Liddell joins, https://x.com/ColinLiddell3
1:03:45 Colin Liddell on Donald Trump, https://neokrat.blogspot.com/2024/07/nuanced-and-balanced-supreme-court.html
1:08:00 Britain’s Conservative party can’t control immigration
1:11:48 Nigel Farage
1:14:50 France’s National Rally party surges, https://neokrat.blogspot.com/2024/07/french-electoral-system-that-no-one.html
1:19:00 Japan’s politics
1:28:00 Will other countries be emboldened by Biden’s decline?
1:30:00 The trite analysis of Matt Goodwin, https://neokrat.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-trite-analysis-of-matt-goodwin.html
1:38:00 Bronze Age Pervent
1:38:30 Academic Agent, https://neokrat.blogspot.com/2023/12/midwit-academic-agent-bails-out-of.html
1:39:00 Millennial Woes
1:40:00 Matt Forney
1:41:30 Richard Spencer a fed?
1:43:00 Milo
1:46:00 Bari Weiss talks to Alex Thompson of Axios, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/will-president-biden-drop-out/id1570872415?i=1000661099340
2:45:00 Journalists were afraid of reporting on Joe Biden’s decline because they didn’t want to help Trump
2:53:25 How Did The WASHINGTON PRESS Corps Miss Biden’s DECLINE?
2:58:30 Psychiatrist: What the Biden-Trump Debate Reveals about their Mental Health, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdEb1hN-3DE
2:59:00 Donald Trump, Joe Biden appear to have ADHD
3:02:00 Joe Biden shows the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease
3:19:00 The Hard Truths About Biden’s Dicey Position, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inside-the-hive-by-vanity-fair/id1232383877?i=1000661155156

Posted in ADHD, America, Joe Biden, Journalism | Comments Off on Minding The Gap Between Your Eyes And The Arbiters Of Truth (7-4-24)

How Did Conservatives Spot Joe Biden’s Cognitive Decline Years Before The Liberal Elites? (7-3-24)

01:00 Conservatives saw Joe Biden’s decline before liberals did, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156067
11:00 George Stephanopoulos vs Nikki Haley
21:40 Dan Senor host of “Call Me Back” talks debate last week, Israeli Hamas war and how to move forward, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ8j4oANTjM
42:30 Ari Emmanuel torches Joe Biden
48:40 Will Michelle Obama run for president?
53:00 The Debate That Changed Everything | Joe Biden’s Common Knowledge Moment, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EMFY-WgCe0
55:30 Mollie Hemingway on the NYT hoaxes propping up Joe Biden
56:00 Did the media botch the Biden age story?, https://www.vox.com/politics/358877/biden-age-debate-media-coverage
57:00 DB: White House Reporters: Biden Handlers’ ‘Credibility’ Is Shot, https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-reporters-biden-handlers-credibility-is-shot
58:00 Joe Biden and the tragedy of liberal denialism, https://www.ft.com/content/d431b97f-7431-4066-bd80-9dab3b215fea
59:00 Jill Abrams castigates the MSM on missing Biden story, https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/07/02/2024/mixed-signals-special-blame-the-media

Full transcript.

Podnotes AI summary: Today we’re discussing why conservatives, often working in everyday jobs like plumbing or nursing, recognized Joe Biden’s cognitive decline long before many intelligent liberals did. It’s not about putting down liberals; I try to stay above partisanship despite my right-wing stance.

Conservatives rely on common sense based on life experience, while liberal elites value facts and expert consensus more. For example, during the Covid pandemic, conservatives were hesitant to accept the new vaccine based on instinct, whereas liberals trusted medical advice.

However, when it came to Biden’s mental state, conservative instincts proved correct earlier than the liberal acceptance of this issue. The media now seems embarrassed for previously supporting Biden without acknowledging his decline – perhaps partly because they viewed Trump as a greater threat and held higher standards for what constitutes a fact.

The conservative media also failed to comprehensively report on Biden’s condition in a factual manner; instead of investing in investigative reporting that could have influenced mainstream coverage like Steve Bannon did with Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

Liberals generally respect scientific evidence over common sense unless it conflicts with their values. In contrast, conservatives trust individual perception more readily without waiting for expert validation. This difference highlights how each group approaches understanding reality – through expertise or intuition.

Lastly, there is an ongoing debate about whether ageism should be considered when discussing public figures’ capabilities – something more pertinent to liberals who see ageism as morally significant compared to some conservatives who dismiss such sensitivities.

They exploit the prestige of norms to push their partisan views as common sense. Where’s the proof Biden is in decline? The media didn’t question it until recently. The elite replace competition, patriotism, and traditional values with bureaucracy, multiculturalism, and progressive ideologies. Conservatives see this as an inversion of truth.

The liberal elite dismiss ordinary Americans’ views because they’re different from theirs. They aim to stand out by rejecting what’s common and imposing their wisdom on issues like criminal rights or avant-garde art.

Liberals constantly shift goals to maintain moral superiority over the ‘common people.’ They dominate influential institutions like media and education to promote their agenda while dismissing popular votes that contradict them.

The ruling class can’t stop us from speaking our minds but can make it socially unacceptable—like smoking—to express certain opinions openly. Liberals believe we can’t find morality without considering every group affected by our actions.

Conservatives trust in common sense and self-reliance against claims of expertise from liberals who prefer scientific truths over tradition. This conflict was evident when ordinary Americans recognized Biden’s impairment before elites did.

Universities want science to replace common sense; some argue that wisdom lies with the people rather than elites. As for Trump’s potential re-election bid, he emphasizes support for Israel based on his past presidency record.

Despite political differences, both sides need inspiring candidates who unite rather than divide—a task neither Biden nor Harris seems up for according to some critics within their own party.

Molly Hemingway and others have long discussed Biden’s lapses, now even The New York Times reports his confusion and forgetfulness.

Fox News hasn’t seriously covered Biden’s mental decline while conservative talk radio has been vocal about it. Media bias has evolved into propaganda; they’ve lied for years and will continue to do so. Trust in media is eroding as they prioritize political power over truth.

Talk radio provides a space to affirm shared truths like Biden’s cognitive issues. When someone speaks an obvious truth loudly enough, it can shift public perception – this ‘missionary’ effect changes what we all know collectively.

Harvey Weinstein was another example where widespread private knowledge became public through a ‘missionary’, leading to immediate behavior change despite no new facts. Similarly, when Joe Biden makes mistakes on camera or during debates, it reinforces concerns about his fitness for office.

The contrast between on-air discussions and behind-the-scenes panic reflects the dissonance in handling sensitive topics like leadership capacity. Charismatic commentators amplify these moments of realization that can rapidly shift common understanding within society.

Joe Biden will be under constant scrutiny for life—every word and action watched closely since his blunder. Imagine living like that; it’s why many are angry.

I bring this to the Zeitgeist because as someone experienced in improvisation, I understand narrative power. While Biden could stay in the race, if DNC power brokers want him out, they’ll likely get their way despite not always playing by the rules.

Improvisational acts like jazz or comedy thrive on audience tension—they expect failure but love being proven wrong. This isn’t true for Biden; there’s no comeback speech that can erase doubts now.

Nellie Bowles of the free press points out how legacy media delays reporting inconvenient truths—Biden’s age, Hunter’s laptop—to form a consensus behind closed doors. Such information is withheld from the public for years.

The current political mood suggests no future for those tied to the sinking ship of Biden-Harris 2024—it’s seen as unsalvageable post-Thursday night. The state of surprise and delight is gone; everyone sees through teleprompter-read speeches now.

Reporters actively seek flaws instead of covering them up—they know what’s happening with an 81-year-old candidate. It’s over, yet nobody invested in Democratic politics wants to admit it or be seen abandoning ship too early—even though all are subtly distancing themselves already.

Posted in Joe Biden, Journalism | Comments Off on How Did Conservatives Spot Joe Biden’s Cognitive Decline Years Before The Liberal Elites? (7-3-24)

How Did Conservatives Spot Joe Biden’s Cognitive Decline Years Before The Liberal Elites?

For the past five years, liberal elites (with few exceptions) tried to do everything they could to make it socially unacceptable to declare that Joe Biden was senile. “On what basis?” they’d challenge conservatives, and then pour on the scorn. Now, however, the MSM is embarrassed, humiliated, and angry. They feel like they’ve been caught out carrying water for Joe Biden.

Part of the reason that conservatives saw Biden’s decline faster than liberals is partisan — enemies often tell harsh truths more quickly than do friends.

Joe Nocera writes July 2, 2024:

The Biden debacle is just the most recent example of what I’ve come to think of as ‘the gap.’ By this I mean the gap between what many of us believe to be true, because we’ve seen it with our own eyes, and what the ‘arbiters’ of truth allow us to say… On Covid, on Black Lives Matter, on Russiagate, on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the elites told us there was one correct viewpoint only until finally, years later, they acknowledged that our eyes hadn’t misled us. The elites had.

Why isn’t the news media focused on the threat to national security from Joe Biden’s senility?

There is no decline in interest in the Biden decline story as of July 4.

Not only the MSM, but the conservative media failed to nail down the Biden decline story with overwhelming granular detail.

Conservative pundits provided comfort and strength to people who saw something blindingly obvious but downplayed by our elites. Everybody who said publicly that Biden was senile (such as Michael Smerconish, Mark Halperin) did the Lord’s work by furthering truth.

Red State publishes July 4, 2024:

One journalist who has not been hesitant to assess Joe Biden is Brit Hume. He said in a Fox Interview in September 2020, “I don’t think there’s any doubt Biden’s senile.”

Politifact did a “fact check” back then declaring Hume’s assessment “false,” while noting the term “senile” is an imprecise term.

PolitiFact contacted experts in the health care of older people for their take on Hume’s use of the word senile and its application to Biden. They said Hume’s characterization is wrong.

It’s “a shameful display of ageism and ignorance,” said Donald Jurivich, Eva Gilbertson Distinguished Professor of Geriatrics and Chairman of Geriatrics at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences.

The word “senile” may create a mental picture of someone who has stooped posture, is slow moving and cognitively impaired, Jurivich said. “I don’t think any of these descriptors match Joe Biden’s demeanor and vigor,” he said.

From a geriatrician’s perspective, Jurivich said, “the use of ‘senile’ is a pejorative descriptor and reflects unmitigated ageism.”

Foxnews.com reports July 3, 2024:

Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley dunked on ABC’s George Stephanopoulos after their tense exchange last year about President Biden’s mental acuity resurfaced on Tuesday.

During an interview last August on “Good Morning America,” Haley repeated her assertion that “a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for Kamala Harris.”

“There’s no way Joe Biden is gonna finish his term,” Haley said, “I think Kamala Harris is gonna be the next president and that should send a chill up every American spine. But also think the fact that we have a primary-”

“Excuse me, excuse me,” Stephanopoulos interrupted with a scowl on his face. “How do you know Joe Biden’s not gonna finish his term? What is that based on?”

“Ask Americans, do you think he’s gonna finish his term? Do you think that he’s actually gonna finish what he started?” Haley responded. “We look at the decline he’s had over the last few years. You have to be honest with the American people, George. There’s no way that Joe Biden is gonna finish out a next term. We can’t have an 81-year-old president. We have to have a new generational leader. The Senate has become the most privileged nursing home in the country. We’ve got to start making sure we have a new generation. Everybody feels that- Republicans, Democrats and independents feel that, and it’s time that the media acknowledge that.”

“You all want to talk about Joe Biden and Donald Trump, we want to talk about the future of this country. That’s what we have to start doing,” she added.

“Again, you didn’t answer the question,” Stephanopoulos pushed back. “What evidence you have that he’s not gonna finish the term? What Americans feel has no basis on whether he’s gonna finish his term or not.”

“I mean, if you look at the decline… every person should be able to tell what country they were in the week before. He couldn’t do that,” Haley told the anchor. “Every person should be able to tell how many grandkids they have. It’s the reason I’ve asked for mental competency tests for anyone over the age of 75. I don’t care if we do it for over the age of 50! But we need to understand that the people in DC, they’re making decisions on our national security. They’re making decisions on the future of our children’s economic policy. We need to make sure we’ve got someone at the top of their game. Joe Biden is not at the top of his game. You know it. I know it. The American people know it.”

Conservatives have more faith in common sense than liberals do. Liberals want studies. Liberals believe more in science than in common sense.

Liberals wanted to wait for credentialed medical elites following protocol to declare Joe Biden unfit for office. Regular folks didn’t wait for this expertise. They trusted what they saw. They trusted their common sense.

Incidentally, I don’t side with either common sense or studies. In some circumstances, one will be superior to the other. I don’t think there’s a magic key to detecting reality. The best tests of a theory are explanatory and predictive value.

With regard to dealing with covid, the liberal approach was more adaptive. With regard to transsexual surgeries, the conservative approach is more adaptive.

During the 2016 Brexit debate, virtually all of Britain’s elites opposed Brexit, and yet the people passed the referendum and it became law. As of 2024, this looks like a massive mistake.

Populism has no thinktanks. There are few career prospects for a populist intellectual, while dozens of scholars have jobs churning out articles and books promoting American intervention overseas.

As children of the Enlightenment, liberals have more respect for facts (in many parts of life that don’t touch on their sacred values) than do conservatives. While “common sense” for conservatives means something that strikes you as obvious, for liberals, “common sense” means the consensus of experts. Without medical experts following protocol diagnosing Joe Biden as senile (or the equivalent), the MSM wasn’t going to pronounce on something that struck millions of conservatives as obvious.

The MSM takes “ableism” and “ageism” as substantial moral categories, while conservatives are just as likely to mock these classifications as revere them. For the liberal, [r]eporting on anyone’s old age requires extreme sensitivity.” For the non-lefty, not so much. It would never occur to me to exercise sensitivity in reporting on a public figure’s old age. If a public speaker looks like he’s dying of AIDS, I note he looks like he’s dying of AIDS.

Rachel Ulatowski writes:

The 2024 presidential debate left much to be desired of President Joe Biden’s performance. However, instead of offering valid criticisms of his performance, many are simply resorting to ableism and ageism.

This hero system is foreign to me.

You can’t think straight about anything you regard as sacred.

When I Google “Trump unfit for public office,” I get arguments that are primarily moral and psychological and often referencing the diagnoses of experts. When I Google “Biden unfit for public office,” I get visceral answers that are primarily physiological. Conservatives trust their instincts, liberals trust expertise.

Journalist friends say the MSM didn’t want to make a partisan talking point and to get caught up in Hillary’s email type nonsense but this story was real. Also, the decline may have been recent.

The rage directed at the Biden administration is not primarily about Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, rather it is about the bad faith exhibited by Biden’s team. Notes Cornell Law School: “Bad faith refers to dishonesty or fraud in a transaction. Depending on the exact setting, bad faith may mean a dishonest belief or purpose, untrustworthy performance of duties, neglect of fair dealing standards, or a fraudulent intent. It is often related to a breach of the obligation inherent in all contracts to deal with the other parties in good faith and with fair dealing.”

Remember all the talk about brilliant Trump playing 3d chess and then he becomes president and it became obvious he is not good at running things and there was no 3d chess. I don’t think there was any brilliant Democratic strategy to embarrass Biden and get him out of the race with an early debate. I don’t think the deep state has been running Biden. Instead he’s looking to crack addict Hunter for advice.

Rony Guldmann writes in his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression:

* Liberals’ bemused incredulity toward conservative grievances may itself be a natural byproduct of the very oppression being alleged, because the dominant culture’s language and concepts will always privilege the perspectives of its ruling elites, who shape the “common sense” to which oppressed groups are made to answer.

* While the liberal elites present themselves as defending uncontroversial democratic norms, they are in fact exploiting the prestige of these norms to advance their parochial cultural predilections as taken-for-granted common sense. And this new common sense consists in the systematic inversion of all the values held dear by the largely powerless and often voiceless ordinary American: the replacing of competition and “standards” by bureaucratic intervention and social engineering, of patriotism by multiculturalism or anti-Americanism, of capitalism by environmentalism or socialism, and of traditional morality by sexual libertinism or feminism. The elites may present themselves as public-minded pragmatists, but they are in fact driven by a perverse will to effectuate these inversions.

* The anointed reject the common sense of the benighted because its very commonness is an affront to their identity, which requires them to systematically invert every inherited norm and understanding. Their identity presupposes a world that resists their prescriptions, a world too benighted to recognize their superior wisdom and morality—and thus all the more in need of these. Whether the issue is the rights of criminals or the merits of avant-garde art, there is, writes Sowell, always a “pattern of seeking differentiation at virtually all costs.” Amorphous abstractions like the “politics of kindness,” “community spirit,” and “love of learning” permit just this, because they can always be reconfigured so as to generate a new chasm between the anointed and the benighted. Liberals are always “moving the goal post,” say conservatives, and this is because their political vision is also a vision of themselves. Since the vision of the anointed can at most enjoy the passive acquiescence, and never the lucid assent, of the great majority, it must be promoted and defended by an unaccountable intellectual class. Having captured America’s most influential institutions, including the media, Hollywood, the universities, public education, foundations, government bureaucracies, and, perhaps most importantly, the courts, the liberal elites employ their privileged position to foist their parochial values upon a silent and largely powerless majority of ordinary Americans. Even where democracy has not been legally disabled by the courts and the administrative state, this residue of freedom comes too late when informal coercion can achieve unofficially whatever cannot be achieved officially.

* …liberals have now managed to insert elite prejudice into mainstream common sense. The “Ruling Class,” says Codevilla, “cannot prevent Americans from worshipping God.” But “they can make it as socially disabling as smoking—to be done furtively and with a bad conscience.”

* [Liberals despise] unreflective common sense.

* Conservatives’ preferences cannot be permitted to enter into the utilitarian calculus because these preferences reflect what a failure of virtue, a failure of discipline, a failure to resist reflexive “common sense.”

* Someone might embrace a liberal “Nurturant Parent” morality in his politics and yet be a Strict father in private family life, or vice versa. He might also be a Nurturant Parent politically and yet be a conservative Strict Father in his professional life. This constellation of attitudes, notes Lakoff, describe many academics, who are politically liberal but for whom “academic scholarship is conceptualized metaphorically as a version of Strict Father morality.”142With scholarly life having been neurally bound by that morality, it follows that “[t]here are intellectual authorities who maintain strict standards for the conduct of scholarly research and for reporting on such research,” that “[i]t is unscholarly for someone to violate those standards,” and, therefore, that “[y]oung scholars require a rigorous training to learn to meet those scholarly standards.”

* [Conservatives defend] individual self-reliance and common sense against the claims of expertise and professionalism.

* Harris writes that the social ascendance of the “cognitive elites” betrays America’s original self-understanding as “the promised land of common sense,” eroding the spirit of “cognitive egalitarianism” which it was once assumed “would keep the common people from being manipulated by intellectual charlatans of every ilk.” As we saw in Chapter Two, conservatives see the liberal elites as the charlatans of today, pretenders who employ their claims to intellectualism, expertise, and professionalism to cow ordinary Americans into silence and submission. Conservatives oppose, not only the specifically left-wing cultural priorities of the anointed, but also their more general assault on cognitive egalitarianism, on the ordinary American’s capacity for autonomous self-reliance, the psychological bulwark of his conservatism.

* Questioning whether the post-war professionalization of education, business, and journalism was genuinely necessary, Gelernter observes that universities had an obvious interest in “convert[ing] as much of the landscape as possible into fenced-off, neatly tended, carefully patrolled academic preserves,” so that the “smooth, manicured green lawn of science” might replace the “wild sweet meadow-grass of common sense.”

* Religious traditionalists may downplay the secularism of America’s founding generation. But this downplaying is a distorted articulation of their primordial intuition that we are porous by default and that what now presents itself as essential human nature—the buffered identity—is a cultural superimposition upon this default condition. This is why traditionalists believe they represent the common sense of humanity—the “center” rather than the “fringe” as the Websters put it—and that “religious neutrality” unjustly compels them to undergo a cognitive dissonance with which the liberals who reject that common sense are not burdened.

Populists believe that wisdom resides with the people rather than the elites. With regard to Biden’s unfitness for office, the people saw this years ahead of the elites.

Stephen Turner noted in his 2021 essay, “Ideology of Anti-populism & the Administrative State”:

* The people, the state, and expertise form an unstable triad, and relating the three in a coherent way, either institutionally or theoretically, is ultimately not possible. Finding a way of dealing with these relations nevertheless is a problem that needs to be solved and re-solved…

* Harvey Mansfield defined populism, by which he meant populism as a political idea, as the belief in the virtue of the people. ‘A populist let us say is a democrat who is satisfied with his own and with the people’s virtue’ (Mansfield, 1996, p. 7). Populism is thus based on a myth as well. But it is a myth whose role is primarily negative: it does not constitute an order, but rejects one in the name of the people. Actual rule requires more. But to deny the myth of the superior wisdom of the people is to threaten the democratic idea itself. And this poses a special problem for ostensibly ‘democratic’ regimes. The need for rulers requires its own ‘democratic’ myths, such as the theory of representation. But the myth of the people constrains these myths.

Mansfield follows his line on the populist with another: ‘This distinguishes him from a reformer who is satisfied with his own virtue but not with other people’s. Giving over government to the people is not the same as lecturing them’ (Mansfield, 1996, p. 7). Progressivism took this tack. The progressives of the early twentieth century wanted the support and enthusiasm of ‘the people’, and envied populism for this. But they wanted to lead the people themselves.

* Progressivism was to be the alliance of experts and an aroused ‘people’ (Turner, 1996). And this followed an emerging practice of social movements based on expertise, notably the prohibition movement, which employed the techniques presently associated with climate science under the heading alcohol science (Okrent, 2010; Turner, 2001, 2014), through this and other movements, became the third leg in the modem triad. And anti-populism came to take the form of a set of assertions about expertise and governance.

* The place to begin, with populism, is with the pure democratic idea itself. Classically, it means rule by the people, the demos. But we are accustomed to adding disclaimers and qualifications, or specifications, to this idea: that expressions of the will of the people must take the form of laws and procedures, such as election laws and laws governing representation; or from a liberal perspective, that genuine democratic will-formation requires free individuals with freedom of speech and various individual rights; or from the Left, that substantive equality rather than mere formal equality is required for meaningful democratic participation.

* Populism is intrinsically a denial of the special superiority of rulers and elites. …one can think of government as a scheme of reconciling the two: of adjusting the relation between the wishes of the ruled and the superior power of the ruler necessary to achieve political goods. …desirable governmental actions require expertise that the public lacks.

* The anti-populist, who is, unlike the populist, not satisfied with the people’s virtue, faces a fundamental problem: to deny populism is to deny democracy, or a founding element of the democratic idea, that the people should be, and are the best, governors of themselves. Thus anti-populism, if it pretends to be democratic, cannot overtly deny the myth of the people. But the need for rulers and for the justification of their rule creates an opportunity to redefine the democratic idea, to create an appropriate counter-myth that enables the people to have a place, but not to rule.

* Populism, by asserting the superior wisdom of the people, rejects the identification of power and expertise. But in doing so it calls into question the notion of democracy itself. If governments are legitimated by experts, what, exactly, is the point of democratic accountability? What role do ‘the people’ have other than to obey, or perhaps to occasionally ratify the system of governance as a whole?

* Populist movements happen when political parties, traditional leaders, elites, and politics as usual fail to deliver the expected goods, or fail to accord with the popular sense of reality, or are perceived as untrustworthy and corrupt.

* Populist tendencies are prone to co-optation, and typically do not outlast the situations that produced them, though they do represent a reserve of general sentiment against elites and particular ruling groups that can be activated in new situations. They differ from ideologies and ideological parties in that they are situational rather than analytic, in the sense that they have concrete targets and grievances rather than a developed analysis of political life that is extended to new situations and refined and elaborated. This accounts for many of the distinctive features of populist movements, especially the preference for leaders who promise to act decisively, in contrast to normal ‘politicians’, and their hostility to ‘politics as usual’.

Populisms are situation-driven rather than analysis-driven, or to put it differently, driven by specific crises or grievances, rather than by a permanent ideological viewpoint… Populism typically arises in situations in which there are larger failures, failures which extend beyond normal political processes, and therefore beyond mere legislation within existing political practices.

* The antinomy of populism is elite rule. Elites rule through particular strategies, and fail through typical issues. Elite solidarity is essential to elite rule; division among the elite is a typical cause of elite failure (Shipman, Edmunds & Turner, 2018). Elites rule through alliances between the elite and a significant non-elite group. The most stable of these alliances have been with the middle classes, normally under an ideology of meritocracy, property rights, and support of business, an alliance which is played off against the demands of the excluded group, the poor. But an upstairs-downstairs alliance is always possible, and the upper hand the elite has in dealing with the non-elite segments of society depends on its ability to choose alternative groups to ally with. Thus pluralism favours the elite, because it provides more opportunities to change alliances. Populism, in contrast, must produce enough unity in the population to effectively counter the elite, and must therefore transcend differences between segments of society in the name of the people. Both Left and Right populisms are anti-pluralist, as a simple consequence of the dynamics of elite alliance-making: neither kind of populism could succeed if the elite used its alliance-making power to divide the movement. To the extent that elite rule depends on manipulating and shifting alliances with non-elite groups, as is the norm (Shipman, Edmunds & Turner, 2018), an attack on pluralism is a threat to elite rule as a political system itself.

* Weber famously praised [William E.] Gladstone for his ability to break out of the constraints of party and speak directly to the people, and promoted a constitutional design that was intended to maximize the possibility of this kind of leadership. He thought of this as the only means to control the bureaucracy, which parties would not do. Just as Weber viewed the fundamental form of democratic rule as plebiscitarian, and wished to amplify plebiscitary possibilities and forms, the American populists endorsed ‘the legislative system known as the initiative and referendum’ (National People’s Party Platform, [1892] 1966, p. 95).

The point of anti-populism was to prevent the use of these means, and restrict accountability even more – to the point that it was anti-democratic in the name
of democracy.

Another reason that populism doesn’t get much done is that it tends to be narrow, shallow, and lacking in complexity. It’s often politics for dummies.

A 2011 academic paper “Ears Wide Shut: Epistemological Populism, Argutainment and Canadian Conservative Talk Radio” noted:

* What is the epistemology of AOL [Adler On Line, hosted by Charles Adler] and how does it function? Broadly, it is a perspective which we call epistemological populism since it borrows heavily from the rhetorical patterns of political discourses of populism to valorize the knowledge of “the common people,” which they possess by virtue of their proximity to everyday life, as distinguished from the rarefied knowledge of elites which reflects their alienation from everyday life and the common sense it produces. Epistemological populism is established through a variety of rhetorical techniques and assumptions: the assertion that individual opinions based upon firsthand experience are much more reliable as a form of knowledge than those generated by theories and academic studies; the valorization of specific types of experience as particularly reliable sources of legitimate knowledge and the extension of this knowledge authority to unrelated issues; the privileging of emotional intensity as an indicator of the reliability of opinions; the use of populist-inflected discourse to dismiss other types of knowledge as elitist and therefore illegitimate; and finally, the appeal to “common sense” as a discussion-ending trump card. Let’s examine how these parts fit together in concrete terms.

“Opinions that are armed with life experience, that’s what we’re looking for on this show.” One of the many promos that transitioned AOL into commercial breaks, this particular declaration offers an excellent entry point into our analysis of AOL’s epistemological populism as it deftly captures the program’s unequivocal preference for political sentiments which emerge directly from the crucible of both ordinary and extraordinary experience at the individual level. Such individual experience is what lies at the core of the common sense which is consistently celebrated on the program as a counterpoint to the excessively ideological, intellectual or idealistic politics of those who lack grounding in the “real world.”

“Opinions are great, I always say on this program. Opinions are wonderful. But opinions armed with personal experience, knowledge. Man, those opinions are a whole lot better” (December 14, 1–2 p. m.) On this view, knowledge that grows out of an individual’s lived experience is knowledge one can trust. Indeed, knowledge and experience become virtually identical. An individual’s lived proximity to something becomes an index of their capacity to truly understand it, care about it, develop valid opinions about it and speak about it with authority. Conversely, the more abstract the form of knowledge and reasoning, the less rooted in concrete individual experiences, the more such knowledge is to be regarded with suspicion, especially when their conclusions contradict the wisdom of common sense and practical, everyday experience.

…the type of guests, callers and experiences through which the program legitimized certain opinions and knowledge about crime rely on and reinforce epistemological populism. There was virtually no discussion of statistical crime rates at all. Instead, evidence of the urgency of this issue largely took the form of guests and callers serving up a mix of anecdotal confirmation and common sense observations which themselves function as theoretical generalizations while simultaneously disavowing their theoretical status. Has violent crime become a major problem in Canadian cities? Has Canadian penal practice become a revolving door for violent offenders? The answer for Adler was clear. “If I opened up the lines and simply discussed situations that people are aware of,” he explained, “I mean, some people actually, you know, have scrapbooks on this stuff, of situations where people involved in heinous crimes are either those out on parole or have committed two, three, four, five, six other crimes and simply sit in the bucket for a year or two. We could do a show like that and go for twenty-four hours and still have phone calls to do” (January 6, 1–2 p.m.) As the anecdotes pile up in segment after segment, they not only immunize listeners against countervailing arguments and evidence about declining crime rates or the futility of law-and-order campaigns. Equally importantly, they valorize the accumulation of anecdotes as a viable form of populist knowledge making, enabling out-of-hand dismissal of contradictory arguments, reasoning or facts as untrue.

What is key here is how Adler’s affirmation of a mode of experiential political reasoning, which effortlessly shifts back and forth between personal experience (either one’s own or others) and broader social and political questions, invariably champions the former as providing answers to the latter. Broader trends or perspectives are never allowed to challenge the generalizability of certain individual experiences. But one of the challenges faced by such an experience-based epistemology is that not everyone’s experience is the same. Not all anecdotes fit the common sense conclusions served up by AOL. So how does Adler distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of individual knowledge, experience and common sense?

Part of the answer lies in a straightforward ideological filtering of guests which, for the most part, strains out those whose experiences, opinions and epistemological framework differ from Adler’s own.

* Epistemological populism, however, goes well beyond opening up space for individual experience as one type of valid knowledge that deserves its place alongside a variety of others. Rather, epistemological populism tends to elevate individual experience as the only legitimate form and extend that epistemological authority well beyond the realm where the person’s immediate experience itself might be seen as relevant.

* …police officials and correctional workers though not social workers were consistently positioned as having a monopoly on expert knowledge in this area.

* Adler’s introduction encourages the audience to accept the constable’s opinions as facts—as the objective truth—not on the basis of any evidence presented but rather because the constable’s “day to day level” experience as a police officer… grants him a special, automatic epistemological authority.

If the persuasive force of epistemological populism flows, in part, from its ability to activate and apply (at an epistemological level) the populist celebration of “the people” and common sense, it also uses the other side of the populist trope—the attack on elites—to dismiss contending forms of knowledge and political opinions. The laudable voices of the people are contrasted with the “elitist” views of academics, defence lawyers and political progressives who were condemned as representing the “special interests” of criminals and gangs.

* we call the performative model embodied in AOL’s discourse argutainment and argue that this style has several defining characteristics. Self-consciously adopted and defended by means of a populist logic which defines itself as a utopian alternative to
mainstream models of journalism, argutainment justifies itself through its ability to speak to and represent the interests of “the people.” In defining what is good for the people, it moves effortlessly between political and market tropes in which commercial success and the public good are fused together. What people want in commercial terms (as evidenced by market share) and what people need in political terms (alternative perspectives which cut through the morass of mainstream media) is represented as ultimately the same thing: a provocative and entertaining style of debate, defined as highly emotional and passionate, strongly opinionated, simple and brief and very confrontational. Moreover, argutainment assumes that an aggressive and opinionated host is needed to filter out ideas and modes of speech which he… judges the audience does not want to hear…

Adler frequently uses populist tropes to implicitly and explicitly justify his style of discourse. He regularly celebrates his style as ushering in a “broadcast revolution” in which the antiquated conventions of journalism and the bland, empty rhetoric of public relations are swept aside in the interests of energizing political discussion and debate. He invites us to participate in a populist renewal of the public sphere in which public discussion and debate simulates what he imagines at kitchen tables and coffee shops of the nation, a frank, honest and confrontational exchange of opinion that is open to anyone who wants to join the conversation. Unsurprisingly, one of the most powerful rhetorical defenses offered for his style is the supposed contrast between it and the decayed elitist forms it seeks to replace. For Adler, mainstream media’s traditional commitment to balance, objectivity and politically correct speech—all of which tend to be lumped together—have led to an anemic (and boring) public sphere in which an unconditional respect for the views of others has emasculated our capacity and desire to make difficult but necessary political judgments. According to Adler, such norms have become the shelter of those whose claims could not otherwise withstand the scrutiny of common sense reasoning and experience. Calls for balance and objectivity merely encourage an apathetic public sphere and allow the political claims of vocal special interests to exercise disproportionate influence. In this context, a style that is confrontational, aggressive and highly passionate is politically valuable since it shakes people free from an elite-induced apathy and ignorance.

* For Adler, a pervasive elitist commitment to a polite, nonconfrontational, politically correct style stands in the way of an open, honest and frank discussion of social problems and how they should be addressed. Complexity is stigmatized as little more than an excuse to avoid asking the tough questions and, conversely, a willingness to violate PC conventions of “cultural sensitivity” becomes, in and of itself, a sign of lucid and honest speech. In fact, it becomes a sign of moral courage.

* Adler often openly ruminates on the value of his style, congratulating himself for having the fortitude to challenge political correctness as an organic defender of the people’s interests and pointing to his ratings as the market share equivalent of a democratic vote of confidence in support of his approach. In the final days of the campaign, for example, Adler boasted that the show’s higher ratings were a tribute to his bold and aggressive style.

* The populist genius of talk radio may very well lie in its ability to portray the logic of commercialism (treating political talk as an entertainment commodity) as a politically virtuous invigoration of democracy. According to this logic, the discipline imposed by the need to entertain also keeps political speech honest, accessible and authentic and counteracts the mainstream media’s counterproductive pursuit of diversity, balance, objectivity, moderation. In this view, “giving the people what they want” does not lead to the decline of public discourse but instead to its invigoration and democratic rebirth by welcoming in the values and priorities of ordinary Canadians. Market logic, the logic of commercial culture, is recast as an instrument of political democratization, the means by which the people are put back in charge of the public sphere…

* Adler consistently reminds his audience that serving their needs and interests is his top priority and that all interventions he makes to discipline and shape political speech are designed to make the discussion more palatable to them.

Philosopher Stephen P. Turner wrote in his 2003 book Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts:

* Expertise is a kind of violation of the conditions of rough equality presupposed by democratic accountability. Some activities, such as genetic engineering, are apparently out of reach of democratic control, even when these activities, because of their dangerous character, ought perhaps to be subject to public scrutiny and regulation, precisely because of imbalances in knowledge. As such we are faced with the dilemma of capitulation to ‘rule by experts’ or democratic rule that is ‘populist’; that valorizes the wisdom of the people even when ‘the people’ are ignorant and operate on the basis of fear and rumor.

* …the socialist idea was implicitly an idea that was antipopulist or at least hostile to the notion that untutored legislative preferences, that is to say the opinions held by ordinary people of what laws should be enacted, ought to be paramount, and thus implicitly hostile to a related idea that government by discussion ought to be the center of constitutional order. The ‘collectivist current’ and socialist doctrine emphasized instead the superior wisdom of the state, and the consequent necessity of intrusions into freedoms of individuals.

In his 2013 book The Politics of Expertise, Turner wrote: “populism [relies upon] the expertise of the people… [in] contrast to that of the administrative class.”

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