Joe Biden holds these lies to be self-evident, that “the border is closed,” that his son “has done nothing wrong,” that gas prices have fallen during his presidency, that “take-home pay has gone up” and that he, “Honest Joe,” was the “poorest man in Congress.”
Not a joke. He gives you his “word as a Biden.”
Those are just a small sample of the lies the president tells on a daily basis. It’s hard to tell where reality and fantasy diverge in his mind, which has to have a debilitating effect on those closest to him, but more crucially on the entire country.
If pathological lying is the norm in the highest office in the land, why should we be surprised that soon enough everyone is lying about everything all the time and those with the least power are forced to suspend our disbelief.
When Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) was caught on camera late Saturday activating a fire alarm to delay a shutdown vote on the floor of Congress, and then pretended he somehow mistook the bright red box for a door handle, and the left-wing media uncritically parroted his laughable lie as if it were in any way believable, you knew we are living in the twilight zone of delusion and trickery.
We’ve come a long way from George Washington and the cherry tree.
The fish rots from the head down, and in the few sit-down interviews the president grants to tame media outlets, he is given mostly uncritical carte blanche to blurt out bizarre, self-aggrandizing, often malign fantasies.
Not-so-free speech
The irony is that the central, burning crusade of his administration is a war on “disinformation.” Stifling dissent and stamping out wrongthink is the goal, especially in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
Not only does Biden get a pass on his lies but he gets to reclassify them as the “truth” and punish anyone who disagrees.
That’s behind his relentless demonization of Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
In an interview released Sunday by nonprofit media outlet ProPublica, the plaything of feckless left-wing billionaires, Biden lamented Musk’s stewardship of X, claiming it causes Americans to “have no notion whether [news] is true or not.”
It’s hilarious that this prince of prevarication thinks he should be the arbiter of truth.
But that was a mild attack on Musk. Biden really has a bee in his bonnet about the non-compliant South African-born entrepreneur.
When Musk bought Twitter, Biden slyly told reporters the billionaire’s foreign connections are “worthy of being looked at.”
Musk’s outfit “spews lies all across the world,” the president said last year.
More potently, his administration last week launched its fourth federal investigation into Musk and his companies.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Musk’s electrical car company Tesla last week, alleging racial harassment and mistreatment of black workers.
Last month, the Justice Department sued Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, for allegedly discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees in its hiring practices.
Also last month, federal prosecutors in New York were reported to have opened a criminal investigation into Musk’s perks at Tesla.
Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and federal prosecutors in Washington and San Francisco, launched investigations into whether Tesla had overhyped the performance of its advanced driver-assistance system.
This is what happens when you cross Biden. He sics his law-enforcement agencies onto you. Just ask Donald Trump.
Pressure on X crew
Meantime, Musk’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, less than four months into the job, has been subjected to the most vicious, orchestrated bullying campaign. It was no accident that she was ambushed at Vox Media’s Code 2023 event last week, with the “last minute addition” of Twitter’s disgruntled fired chief censor Yoel Roth, who was given carte blanche to attack his former employers an hour before she was due to take the stage.
Slate and the rest of the left wing mediaverse ganged up on her, describing her performance variously as “disastrous,” “flustered,” “struggling,” “stumbling” and branding her the “The Chief Embarrassment Officer of X (Formerly Twitter).”
Yaccarino, to her credit, didn’t pull out of the interview, although she made it clear she didn’t buy the story that Roth’s appearance was a surprise to the organizers.
She kept her cool during a snarky and weirdly hostile interview by CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, who even stooped so low as to describe her as a CINO — CEO In Name Only. Yaccarino didn’t pick up the silly reference until Boorstin repeated it.
“Oh, OK, yeah, not nice,” said Yaccarino, with an amused sneer.
Anyone who watched the interview would have admired her aplomb. But the poison media narrative is preordained to demoralize and deride her to such an extent that she questions whether staying in the job is worth the stress.
The target, of course, is not her, it’s Musk, who must be destroyed if he refuses to join the “Censorship Industrial Complex” as independent journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi call the interconnected web of deep state censors, shady nonprofits, think tanks and universities that police speech on social media platforms.
Since 2016, the tech companies pre-Musk all fell into line after being threatened and infiltrated by state censors determined not ever to allow another Trump into the White House. Speech that dissents from the official line on COVID, masks, vaccines, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or the Ukraine war has been throttled and removed from sight under the pretext of “disinfomation” or “hate speech.”
Musk is the one naughty boy who has refused to comply.
Unlike Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he hasn’t turned to jelly. So far he hasn’t coughed up $400 million “Muskbucks” to help Democrats rig the election, or pre-censored users to keep in the administration’s good graces.
Let’s hope he survives.
