RUTHFULLY YOURS

And so the spin begins. Within minutes of Joe Biden announcing that he was dropping out of the presidential race, his sycophants were gushing over his ‘grace’. The New York Times marvelled like a wide-eyed idiot at the ‘historical rarity’ and ‘fundamental humility’ of a president bowing out for the good of the nation. Celebs lauded his ‘integrity’ in stepping down to ‘save democracy’. He has restored ‘honesty’ to politics after years of ‘scandal and chaos’, said Mark Hamill, as if Old Joe was Obi-Wan Kenobi to Trump’s Darth Vader. One Democratic governor hailed Biden for setting the ‘ultimate example’ to the American people. That example being what, exactly? That you should stubbornly stay in your job even when you know you can’t do it any more?

The propaganda machine is in full swing. The spindoctors are working overtime. They’re determined to depict Biden’s retreat from the race as an act of unparalleled altruism. As a brave effacement of the self in order that democracy might yet live. As something ‘utterly extraordinary’, in the words of the NYT. Be awed at the ‘bigness of what Biden just did’, it says. Get a room. History is being rewritten in real time. And we cannot let it stand. Not in order that we might kick Biden when he’s down, but in order that we might uphold the truth. The truth here being that Biden’s late retreat, and his anointing of Kamala Harris as his rightful successor, speaks not to the integrity of his administration but to its chaos and corruption.

The speed with which Biden’s relinquishing of his candidacy has been turned into a tale of ‘integrity’ should horrify everyone who cares for truth. It is three weeks – three long weeks – since he took to the stage of that CNN debate and shocked the world with his confusion and incapacity. And in those three weeks we all saw him furiously cling to the Oval Office desk. We all watched him haughtily dismiss concerns that he was no longer fit for office. We all heard that Jill Biden was batting aside his critics – from George Clooney to Barack Obama – as just so many Brutuses come to remove her perfectly capable husband. Grace? Humility? This was one of the most unseemly spectacles of jealous power preservation of modern times.

The truth is that Biden has not elegantly bowed out – he’s been forced out by Democrat big dogs and donors. He has not fallen on his sword – he has fallen victim to an internal coup executed by Dem elites who realised they could no longer keep up the lie about him being perfectly compos mentis. That Biden was ousted from the race by a bloodless mutiny of coastal power-brokers, rather than waking up one morning and heroically deciding to step down, is clear from how messy his exit has been. The ‘vast majority’ of his aides, including people who’ve ‘spent years working on his re-election campaign’, found out he was stepping down the same way every other American did: from the news. Does that sound like a considered exit to you, or more like a sudden, Saigon-style fleeing from power following weeks of bitter in-house brawling?

The Democrat establishment, with the craven compliance of the liberal media, is dolling up a coup as a calm handover of power. It was Biden’s humility, not our knives, that led to his stepping down, they fib. We shouldn’t be surprised by such shameless agitprop. For wasn’t it their misinformation about Biden’s health that landed America in this crisis in the first place? The same politicos and papers who now say Biden has graciously accepted that he’s no longer fit to rule were telling us for years that he was fit to rule, and that anyone who said otherwise was a liar and possibly ‘far right’. Their gall is astonishing: for years they fed us falsehoods about Biden being fit as a fiddle, now they feed us the falsehood that the stepping down of this sick man is a model of good behaviour all us plebs should aspire to.

Even as Biden’s candidacy comes to an end, even as the Biden years start to be wrapped up, we mustn’t forget the chattering classes’ mythmaking about his health. These people, over the past three weeks, have converted to a belief that they previously damned as ageist, Trumpist and untrue: namely, that Biden isn’t all there. Media people branded the talk of Biden’s ‘alleged mental decline’ as ‘utter bullshit’. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said video clips of Biden looking confused were ‘cheap fakes’ made by right-wingers in ‘bad faith’. Now, finally, the Democrat elites accept that he’s knackered and CNN confesses that ‘Biden’s mental fitness could have been better covered [by the media]’. You think?

The question is: why wasn’t it? We all know: because the forgers of elite consensus opinion, the political class and their friends in the liberal media, were not going to allow anything, not even the truth, to dent this administration they supported. And so they covered up reality. Worse, they slandered anyone who spoke of this reality as fakers and haters. These people love to criticise Trump for his ‘alternative facts’ and yet they were masters of the ‘alternative fact’. First they foisted on us the ‘alternative fact’ of Biden being perfectly healthy, now they hawk the ‘alternative fact’ that he has heroically withdrawn from the race when we all know what really happened: they forced him out after realising that their ‘alternative facts’ had been rumbled and their political power was waning.

If the manner of Biden’s removal speaks to the elites’ disregard for truth, their anointing of Kamala Harris as his replacement candidate speaks to their disregard for democracy. Biden has given her his full backing. Celebs and the activist class are rallying behind her. Do none of them care that she was not democratically chosen by the Democratic base to be the candidate? And that Biden was? Some are calling for a ‘mini primary’ to subject Harris’s candidacy to party democracy, but others seem shockingly content to put her on the ticket despite her not winning a single member’s vote to run for the White House. We’ve gone from ‘alternative facts’ to ‘alternative democracy’.

Harris’s ascent to the candidacy is a chilling sign of the times. She is a new kind of politician, one who owes her power more to the ideology of DEI than to the workings of democracy. She was largely selected to be Biden’s VP because, as he said in 2019, he wanted a person of colour or a woman to be his running mate – in Harris he got both. And now she’s on the ticket for the White House not out of merit, far less out of democratic enthusiasm, but because the president is unwell. It is the politics of identity and elite favour that has elevated this spectacularly unimpressive politician to such giddy political heights.

And yet, very few questions are being asked in the liberal media about the monarchical selection of Harris to be the Dems’ candidate. They’re too busy gushing over her identity. CNN is excited that she could be ‘the first black woman and Asian American to lead a major party ticket’. Skin colour trumps democracy in the hyper-racial worldview of the woke. We can only hope that in whatever kind of confirmation process the Dems organise for Harris’s candidacy – whether it’s a cynical internal exercise in rubber-stamping or the more open nominations process that some are calling for – that Harris will have more to recommend her than the accident of her heritage.

Biden’s fall tells us so much about the crisis of the republic under wokeness. Primarily it tells us that a technocratic elite that lacks any true connection to the people will do anything to hold on to power. Including lying, back-stabbing and dodging democratic accountability. The sickness we need to worry about is not Biden’s mental malaise, which of course cannot be helped, but the moral malaise of an elite that seems allergic to truth and iffy about democracy. These people won’t ‘save democracy’ – they’ll wreck it.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy