Biden’s disastrous debate performance brought to a screeching halt a multi-year campaign from the media to present the president as mentally fit.
Do you really remember how hard the press pushed you not to trust your lyin’ eyes on Biden’s decline?
Start here ⤵️
I suspect most of you remember the allegations from the White House that videos showing Biden behaving erratically were “cheap fakes.”
The media rushed to repeat this claim. Look at the extent @nytimes went to say you didn’t see anything and that Biden was fine.
Perhaps the wildest was @washingtonpost, who gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to videos showing Biden displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as fakes, “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype.”
Part of their defense was that Biden “doesn’t dance.”
Really.
Just look at this headline from @AP.
And it only gets worse from there.
Again, your lyin eyes are the problem. Not Biden. Allegedly.
@AP took specific issue with one supposed “fake”: a video where Biden freezes and needs to be led off a stage.
The video looks brutal.
But why would you believe what you can see, rather than Biden’s and Jimmy Kimmel’s comms teams?
@TheWrap blamed Biden’s stutter.
Really. Line highlighted.
@NBCNews lamented how hard all these deceptive “cheap fakes” were for our noble fact checkers.
But this headline was everywhere.
An obviously dubious statement from a White House official was repeated as gospel truth.
Here’s @ABC, @NBCNews, @thedailybeast and @CNN.
Really. I’m not exaggerating. There are even more at my full write up (link is in bio) but here’s another four boxer courtesy of @washingtonpost, @CBSNews, @Salon and @RollingStone
But what you may have forgotten are the ways that this was just the latest attempt from the press to hide the fact that the president might lack the mental wherewithal to execute the duties of his office.
Remember the special counsel report on Biden’s documents?
Back in February, special counsel Robert Hur determined that Biden lacked the mental fortitude to face a jury without seeming like a feeble, affable old man.
The press were incensed. @nytimes threw up the roadblocks, saying we needed more evidence to make a real diagnosis.
@washingtonpost claimed that what had been disclosed about Biden was just like anyone mixing up the names of their children.
Nothing to see here!
It was a popular refrain. Here’s @AP doing the same. Just like mixing up your kids’ names!
How silly! Even the leader of the free world does it!
@CNN assured us that it was nothing to worry about, Biden was fine, especially at his age.
They quoted a comms professor as their authoritative source.
These built off longstanding claims that criticism of Biden’s mental capacity were “ageist.”
Here’s @TIME pushing that claim repeatedly.
And some more from @Forbes, @NPR, @TheView and @Will_Bunch
Perhaps the richest of them all came last year from @nytimes.
Biden was so spry and vigorous that his young staff couldn’t keep up! Everyone was saying so!
It reads like North Korean propaganda.
The debate dashed this narrative that the press had worked so hard to build. Biden has lost even the editorial boards of @nytimes, @BostonGlobe and more.
It’s time, the press laments, to move on. And maybe we should’ve seen this coming.
I don’t think it’s a mystery why this topic wasn’t covered well, @CNN
That isn’t to say that some outlets haven’t maintained the fiction.
Biden had a cold at the debate. That was the problem, they claimed. I won’t let @CBSNews, @axios, and @NBCNews forget.
Or @AP…whatever this is.
It should go without saying, but the media actively working to hide from the American people that the commander and chief is exhibiting signs of serious cognitive decline is an enormous problem.
As I conclude in my newsletter (again, link in bio):
And that the press, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say, pushed this fiction to give one side a leg up in the election?
I think the media’s word for that is “election interference”
I know it’s hard to believe, but there are many more examples of the media covering for Biden’s mental state than what I could fit in this thread.
I was struck by the number of dubious statements and flat-out lies at the DNC.
It appears the mainstream media isn’t much interested in them, amid their jubilant, joy-full coverage. So I decided to do some fact-checking, focused on Biden’s speech.
There’s a lot. ⤵️
1. The first thing that jumped out to me was Trump’s alleged “very fine people on both sides” description of Charlottesville.
Haven’t we been over this, time and again? The context makes clear Trump didn’t mean the neo-Nazis. Even @snopes admitted it!
Yet Biden trotted it out.
2. Biden claimed he and his admin “demonizes no one.”
What, then, about Biden’s remarks about Trump supporters? That they are “determined to destroy democracy,” practitioners of “semi-fascism,” and “a threat to the very soul of this nation.”
The media haven’t been interested in providing voters with much of a picture of Kamala Harris beyond “vibes.”
So I did the work for them and went back through what she’s actually said and done on policy and beyond.
It isn’t a pretty picture. Follow along ⤵️
There’s nowhere better to start than on immigration. Back in 2020, Harris was among the Dem candidates who supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
Now @politico claims she “promised to go tough on border security.”
Color me skeptical.
Especially considering she supported eliminating ICE, tried to stop production on the border wall, and otherwise unwind the Trump policies that actually reduced illegal immigration.
I know it’s difficult to keep track of all of Tim Walz’s “stolen valor,” exaggerations & false claims about his time in the military.
I tried to compile as many as I could, as well as a few egregious cases of the media spinning for him.
Buckle in, there’s a lot. ⤵️
First, the false claims. To avoid a sort of journalistic stolen valor, I want to be clear: others did this work.
I’ll try to source as well as I can, starting with the latest Walz whopper: saying he took part in the Afghanistan surge in a 2010 debate.
From @NoVA_Campaigns:
There’s been a lot of good reporting. Perhaps none better than from @ChuckRossDC of the Free Beacon.
His first is on that Afghanistan claim, citing Walz’s repeated description of himself as a veteran of “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the gov’t name of the fight in Afghanistan.
You remember Russian Collusion. But do you remember the “Russian bounties” allegation, where the press ran with a conspiracy theory to make Trump look like a monster?
With the debate tonight, I think it’s timely to revisit a falsehood Biden pushed. Follow along ⤵️
It started with a scoop from @nytimes that claimed Russia had placed bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan, that Trump knew about it, and he did nothing.
Days later, @washingtonpost followed up with the claim that these bounties—again, allegedly ignored by Trump—led to the deaths of American servicemen.
Do you *really* remember the Hunter Biden laptop story? I fear we’ve lost the plot.
With Hunter’s name in the news I wanted to revisit the extent to which the media went to cover up corruption allegations against—and at the behest of—his father.
Follow along. ⤵️
You have to start with the scoop from @nypost and @EmmaJoNYC.
Their lede from October was damning:
“Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
The story was fundamentally about Joe Biden’s alleged corruption. It was huge news, on the eve of an election.
The press leapt to claim the scoop wasn’t legit. And they reframed the issue: now it was about Hunter, not Joe. Here’s @NPR before/after