The Kids Were All Right
Thursday Night Revealed How Out-Of-Touch Biden AND the Mainstream Media Are
Biden and the media establishment were reeling Thursday night. He inspired pity and horror during the first Presidential debate in this election cycle. CNN moderator Jake Tapper’s nervous attempts to cut Biden off (fearing the babble would turn to bubbling drool) as well as fellow moderator Dana Bash’s clipped “thank you”s brought cackles of glee out of me as I watched the sputtering breakdown of the mainstream media apparatus. Biden was hard to watch, but Jake Tapper and Dana Bash’s nervous, embarrassed grandpa handling was delightful on an epic scale. At one point, Tapper deftly cut off Biden’s babbling monologue about “beating Medicare” with a quick thank you, throwing to Trump in an effort to deflect. Tapper’s save backfired as a set-up for Trump’s quip of the night, saying that Biden beat and killed Medicare. Trump threw Kendrick-level haymakers at Biden, making Biden yet another one of 2024’s stunning victims of humiliation, along with Drake and Cedric the Entertainer.
But let’s not focus on the Punch and Judy show. Let’s look behind the curtain. Take it away,
:Biden himself, as well as age, are primarily to be blamed for his poor showing as a candidate, but the debate fiasco was the culmination of years of willful blindness on the part of the media and the Democratic establishment
Blindness and gaslighting. Gaslighting Americans about how great the economy actually is. Gaslighting Americans about how he is the only alternative to Trump. Even now, the media is more focused on how his declining mental health will affect his campaign than his current fucking presidency.
This of course does not concern anyone because most people who do not suck at the teat of cable news know all too well that the President is a figurehead. A puppet for the military-industrial complex. The youth especially know this. All those worries about the youth vote, the lack of faith in electoral politics, how you have to vote blue no matter who because that was the mistake young Boomers made in 1968…
The news media on Thursday night was the not same news media it was on Wednesday or any moment since 1968. 1968 being the year Lyndon B. Johnson announced he was not going to run for another term. Back in November, I said that Biden was the new LBJ. I didn’t expect the major media outlets to heed my warning. But I did expect them to notice that the youth was disgusted with Biden. That the Muslim vote was not going to him. That a significant portion of the Jewish vote would not end up on his column. That the Black and Latino vote were not even guaranteed to him anymore. Many of them are even saying they will vote for Trump instead of sitting this one out.
I am not a Trump believer, but he said one thing that was absolutely dead-on during the debate. When Biden tried to wax poetic about how he was going to stay away from the presidential race, but Trump’s heavily criticized response to Charlottesville inspired him to throw his hat in the ring. Trump confronted him on this, saying he didn’t run because of Charlottesville; “he ran because it was his last chance.”
Joe Biden has not only been a lifelong hack, he has been an opportunist for as long as I can remember. He ran when I was 12, back in 1988. Someone born when he first ran is panicking about turning 40 in a few years. This also explains why he will not let go for the sake of his party or the country — he’s waited too damn long to be a two-term president.
So here we are, stuck with Sloppy Joe. Thursday night not only vindicated the youth for not stumping for Biden. Substack itself is looking a lot smarter than most major media establishments that feigned surprise that Biden’s mental health was slipping. I have seen many crazy things on the Substack Notes feed: communist poetry; race-realist science fiction; Latino gangster literary criticism. One thing I have never seen is someone make the case for Joe Biden. No love lost between our media and their media, incidentally. As
said recently in a Substack Note:I’m not surprised that most traditional media companies are instinctively rejecting Substack at this point, but I am a bit surprised that none of them has seized the obvious opportunity this presents to claim audience share within the Substack ecosystem.
Mainstream media’s anti-Substack bias backfired. If they only strayed outside their bubble, they could have seen how bad an idea holding on to Biden was and suggested course changes as far back as November. As
perfectly said, “I wonder if MSNBC are gonna be censored for spreading fake news, or does censorship only apply to the people who were four years ahead of them?”Gen Z and all of Substack are not the only ones who deserve a heartfelt apology from the Fourth Estate. Jon Stewart’s first episode back on The Daily Show drew fire from many hack pundits for questioning Biden’s mental health, most notably Mary Trump. What should have been a rousing welcome back became yet another irritating bump in The Discourse. Stewart rightfully blasted Biden post-debate, potentially making him the most trusted man in news again, perhaps the new Cronkite.
Meanwhile, anti-influencers like Blakely made sure to call out any bullshit corporate media bobbleheads who had the gall to ask “how did we get here?”
This TikTok from Bryanna Robinson is particularly interesting because she points out that as recently as last week, we all got criticized for bringing up the President’s mental health.
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Last week is a particularly interesting point in time because last week it was the mainstream media that was having its smug, smiling, fat-cat moment:
2: Rep. Jamaal Bowman had a humiliating loss of the 16th Congressional District.
Meanwhile, the alt-left was alienated and disillusioned because there was a noticeable decrease of pro-Pali content on TikTok and Instagram.
But now it is the mainstream media and the liberal establishment who are licking their wounds. This debate has been a humiliating loss for Microplastic America and anyone who would dare to ever suggest accepting the status quo again.
This year has been compared to 1968 by many, including myself. But perhaps, as I suggested here, this will be 1968 in reverse:
The popularity of country at this time has an interesting rhyme effect with 1968 actually. Disheartened hippies were all too happy to hear the soothing country harmonies of country rock acts like The Byrds and The Band. Now we are in a similar situation but in reverse. The integrationist country overtones of our two major pop stars bonding through country music feels like the last normal moment before pop music finally becomes as unhinged as our times.
It certainly seems to be 1968 in reverse from an electoral perspective. The narrative of 1968 was that LBJ stepped down, but that wasn’t enough for the bratty hippies, so the media then and now wagged their fingers at the hippies for wanting revolution instead of more practical means of change. Now, despite what the clickbait impresarios want you to believe, there is no way they are going to run anybody but Biden. They can’t. He has to resign first. So when Trump wins the pennant on November 5, the mainstream media and the liberal establishment will have no one to blame but themselves.
Or, in the words of a singer that many of the hippies who sat out November 5, 1968 admired:
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly aging
Words of advice to my media fixated American friends … You guys will never discover water because you are acting like fish! Zoom Out!
Well said.