Generation Biden and the War of Lies
Where were you when the Challenger space shuttle exploded, or when Biden went FZZT?
Before you start reading, I suggest you cue up a curated playlist of the best 1960s protest songs.
Some people will always remember where they were on the evening of June 27, 2024, when Joe Biden went FZZT! It happened on a warm evening in Atlanta. Afterward, brave firefighters concerned about The Party rushed in to smother the incoherent candidate while millions of people realized they’d been duped by the “Joe Biden is sharp as a tack” hoax but pledged to vote for him anyway.
Me? I was taking photographs in the small Napa Valley town of Geyserville, which got its name from intrepid bear-killer William Bell Elliott who thought hot springs were geysers.
I wasn’t ignoring the presidential debate. I just didn’t want to witness it.
My wife and I took the long way back to Sacramento the next day, and somewhere in the yellow tinder-box hills between Geyserville and Sonoma — ZING! — I was reminded of an idea that has been ricocheting inside my head for years: no one wins a war of lies.
Why is this important? Because the 2024 election is fundamentally about lies. The Mexican border can’t be “wide open” and “secure,” so someone is lying. Israel can’t be a “democracy” and a “Nazi” state, so who is lying about that? Who is lying about inflation, insurrection, climate change or urban “doom loops”?
There are lengthy lists of lies all over the interwebs, so I won’t provide one here. The Toronto Star famously claims to have a database of “every false claim Donald Trump made as U.S. president,” but — and I know this is highly unusual for journalists who value “accuracy, fairness and quality” — they don’t have one for Joe Biden. To ask why is to answer your own question.
Here’s an entertaining challenge. Before clicking the following links, guess how many results Google provides for two “news” searches: the phrase “false claims” that must also contain the word “trump,” and the same search that must contain the word “biden.” (I get five for Biden and about 300 for Trump. You may get slightly different results, but that’s how Google rolls. Update: edited typo from 3000 to 300 for Trump. One day later, my results are 3 for Biden and 300 for Trump, and sometimes the algorithm tells me there are ZERO for Trump.)
Could it be true that Trump lies 100 times more than Biden?! No, but lists of lies inevitably contain their own convenient lies, which no one bothers to correct because why would they? (In 2020, NBC said “Russian collusion was a made-up story” was one of Trump’s “most outrageous lies.” I suppose some people still believe that.)
And even though there is a qualitative difference between the types of “lies” told by Joe Biden (Trump is a Nazi sympathizer) and those told by Donald Trump (stay calm, COVID will go away), the only way normal Americans can win is not to play the game.
Lies are not the point of this essay, but the reason I’m starting with the lies should be obvious enough.
The idea for this essay was prompted by two old songs on the radio. First, Somebody to Love, 1967, by Jefferson Airplane.
“When the truth is found to be lies
And all the joy within you dies
Don’t you want somebody to love?”
And, a few minutes later, Crosby Stills & Nash crooned the familiar Wooden Ships from 1969.
“I can see by your coat, my friend
You’re from the other side
There’s just one thing I got to know
Can you tell me please, who won?”
You know the genre. Protest songs. There are hundreds of them, and in America 2024 the old sincerities play on the radio hundreds of times a day. You can often hear them in bougie wine bars or in the health and personal care aisle of your local grocery store.
There’s no doubt that the “Anti-War” generation raised on those songs changed society forever. But something happened to those people on the way to the forum. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but you gotta admit they were sincere about it.
So sincere was the Free Love generation that NBC reported on it in 2007. After “Bill had sex with John, and John had sex with Cindy,” the free love participants said: “Well, let’s just bring in a gallon of penicillin and inject everybody.”
Many of them now wield political power and they’re still in love with drugs and sex. Nowadays, however, they’re sincere about — ZZZZT! — mandatory untested vaccines, hormone injections for other people’s children, and sex change surgeries for minors paid for with Medicare fraud.
The elderly Flower Children who protested the Vietnam War have also — KABOOM! — found a strange new respect for the latest war to stop the endless Communist insurgency. I mean, why you don’t see girls handing flowers to Ukrainian soldiers or marching on the Pentagon? First, there’s the American defense jobs. And then President Biden said “Putin wants to, in fact, reestablish the former Soviet Union” … and if The Man says it, it must be true! (Mea culpa: I believed that for a few days, too, until I thought more deeply about it.)
Which is awfully weird because most of them also love the idea of communism and I haven’t seen Crimea Jane behind the lines in Mother Russia casting winsome glances at anti-Imperialist artillery units.
The unfortunate truth is that the Flower Power generation — “inspired by communist ideologies and embracing violence and crime as a way to protest the Vietnam War” — cheered the 1970’s bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the California Attorney General’s office, among others. Their stated intention was to “disrupt the empire ... to incapacitate it.”
In a word, insurrection. An armed insurrection with the stated intent of destroying the United States government.
You won’t hear that from what I call Generation Biden — people of all ages who accept whatever generational lies the leftist regime tells them — because they don’t know about it. And even if they did know, most of them wouldn’t admit they actually believe the American system of government must be overthrown, or that they must be the ones to do it in the name of fairness, and anyone who gets in the way must go to prison.
But they do know, direct from the White House and amplified by the media, that “Not even during the Civil War did insurrectionists breach our Capitol, the citadel of our democracy. But six months ago today, insurrectionists did.”
It is just one of the Big Lies from Joe Biden: January 6 protesters didn’t bomb the Capitol like the American commies did, but that day was worse than the Civil War! If not stopped, those insurrectionists will use a “Big Lie” to destroy our democracy!
Note the President’s use of that phrase. It’s important.
Yeah, I know we’re all tired of Hitler references, but what we have here is a classic Big Lie that conforms directly to the propaganda technique described by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (see p. 312-313 of the unabridged 1939 Houghton Mifflin edition).
The lie first describes or warns of a national crisis. Hitler’s example was the collapse of Germany after World War I. President Joe Biden’s example is the “existential crisis” of the “insurrection” — “a test of whether our democracy could survive.”
Second, the lie attributes the crisis to a subgroup of citizens that society has been primed to hate. Hitler blamed the Jews. After decades of priming the country to hate people who benefit from “white privilege,” Joe Biden and his allies blame “white supremacists,” “semi-fascists,” and other “extremists.”
Third, and most important, is the claim that those dangerous members of society are employing the Big Lie themselves. Hitler said the Jews knew best how to employ the Big Lie, “for their entire existence is built on one single great lie.” Joe Biden directly accuses Trump and his supporters of employing a “Big Lie” to destroy the country.
If step three is successful, the stage is set to carry out extreme violence against the Big Liars who threaten the fabric of society. After all, when Nazi sympathizers are threatening our democracy, isn’t violence the only choice?
That is not hyperbole. We just don’t yet know if Biden succeeded with step three.
In a prime-time television address to the nation on Nov. 2, 2022, reported by The New York Times, Biden accused Trump of “lies of conspiracy and malice, lies repeated over and over to generate a cycle of anger, hate, vitriol and even violence … we have to confront those lies with the truth. The very future of our nation depends on it.”
“He has abused his power and put the loyalty to himself before loyalty to the Constitution,” continued the President, “and he’s made a Big Lie an article of faith for the MAGA Republicans, a minority of that party.”
It’s called a Big Lie because it is so big that no one can believe someone would have the audacity to tell it. As Hitler put it, “with the primitive simplicity of their minds they will more easily fall victim to a great lie than a small one … they will be unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impudence of the most infamous distortion in others.”
Not only that, but the bigger the lie, the more some people will doubt that it is false even after seeing proof of the lie.
Nevertheless, even when faced with evidence that Joe is employing the Big Lie, Generation Biden will vote for him because, “F--- you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.”
They will also vote for Biden even though they “feel duped” by the Imaginary Joe and the Real Joe is “stunningly worse than expected.”
The day after the debate, President Biden told his supporters in Raleigh, NC: “I know I’m not a young man. I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth!”
Ahhh. The truth. Even after the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, they still love Scranton Joe because he’s their best shot at a successful insurrection.
So we’ve finally arrived at the point of this essay. I hope it wasn’t too painful. The American truism that you can’t fight city hall is doubly true when city hall has embraced the Big Lie and won’t let go.
So instead of fighting the war of lies — which no one can win anyway — we should identify the goal of the propaganda and act on the truth.
The goal, I believe, is best expressed by combining ideas from Hannah Arendt and Theodore Dalrymple: The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not to persuade, but to humiliate and organize. To humiliate people by telling the biggest possible lies and gaslighting them into belief; then to translate the lies into a functioning reality; and finally to organize people to act and react to the rules of that fictitious world.
The society resulting from that kind of power is terrible, of course. We see evidence of that ourselves.
Government by unelected bureaucrats is called popular government
The complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation
Depriving people of information is called making it available
The repression of culture is called its development
The lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom
Farcical elections become the highest form of democracy
Banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views
The liars will tell you they’re “making real progress on reducing inequality, combating climate change, and making America more just.” But such regular reassurance is designed only to continue the regime’s existence, and the regime that defines this false reality must falsify everything: the past, the present, and the future.
They’ll even sing you a nice song about moral equivalence: “I can see by your coat, my friend you’re from the other side. There’s just one thing I got to know. Can you tell me please, who won?”
Luckily, there is just one ingredient humanity needs to defeat totalitarian propaganda, and it was identified by Vaclav Havel in 1978. The one thing the regime cannot endure is a person who says no.
As always, the truth is simple and difficult, but we can do it.
Be the person who says no. Others will follow.
Ay, caramba! That's why words matter and we should point that out every time and everywhere we have the opportunity to point out the lies of the liars!
As for the Challenger explosion, I was at lunch during my Freshman year of H.S. watching the launch. As for the Trump / Biden debate, I was in bed, fast asleep, because that's what you do when you're older and you just don't give a damn!!!!