by Victor Davis Hanson
After last Thursday’s debate, Biden single-handedly put an end to the Democrats’ lie that he is mighty and in control of his abilities. In reality, he showed the nation that he is a melancholy, unreliable octogenarian who could not do any job in America except the seemingly basic task of president of the United States and commander in chief responsible for our nuclear codes.
In 2019, Democratic primary candidates frequently attacked rival Joe Biden for his apparent senior moments and incoherence. During the 2020 campaign, Biden often became bizarrely animated and mean (“you’re not black”/“fat”/“lying dog-faced pony soldier”/“drug addict”).
His “corn pop” stories were grotesque and had the senile accents of his earlier “super-predator” and “clean” black riffs. As president, his mental decline was geometric, in the sense that every three months Biden became much, much worse than he had been in the previous 90 days. His handlers long ago recognized that masking his weaknesses at the expense of the nation’s safety and security was a tiny price to pay to maintain power.
What followed was the greatest fraud in presidential history, analogous to the claim that a tender and dying FDR in 1944 was doing fine as the November election approached, or that Woodrow Wilson was governing the country perfectly while he lay bedridden and near-coma.
Anyone who questioned Biden’s energetic narrative was criticized as “ageist.” Special counsel Robert Hur was called a “bungler” for accurately describing Biden as so amnesiac that he could win an acquittal by overturning a conviction from a sympathetic jury.
A series of court sycophants have periodically given interviews claiming that the burly Biden is smarter and more sensible than ever. His press secretary, Karin Jean-Pierre, helped coin a modern term, “cheap knockoff,” for anyone who has collected video and audio clips showing Biden to be demonstrably insane. Would she say the same thing today, after CNN’s panelists did a 180-degree turn and reviewed Biden’s serial debate blunders to support their now-imminent support for his not seeking reelection? Would she want to be a passenger in a car driven by Biden?
In brief, the farce of the “dynamic Biden” was finally put to rest by debate, but not before it had served the left’s original Faustian bargain: Under the guise of COVID, a weakened and immobile Biden outsourced his entire 2020 campaign to sycophantic journalists and surrogate politicians.
His job was to pose from his basement as a unifier, “good old Joe from Scranton,” serving as a pseudo-moderate front for the most far-left agenda in recent memory. In return, Joe and Jill enjoyed the perks of power and status while handing over the presidency to a series of former Obama underlings and the far left of what was left of the venerable Democratic Party.
The useful lie continued throughout his presidency, intensifying in direct proportion to Joe’s increasing stumbles, brain freezes, gibberish, and incomprehensible speeches. When our president said something outrageous or incomprehensible, the public was supposed to assume that attributing his failures to venerable age was immoderate.
So the nation got used to reading about 60 percent of what he said and dismissing the rest in favor of his disability, which was never allowed to be discussed. It was a cognitive clasp to the ruse that FDR was able to stand and walk — though a much worse one, because being in a wheelchair is not a limitation for a president, while a cognitive disability on Biden’s scale certainly is.
The Biden lie was the crown jewel of many other leftist/media falsehoods. The more they spread, the more absurd they seemed, and the more they were debunked—so the more others took their place, and their proponents never apologized, but simply moved on to the next. The common denominator was that all the lies, while they existed, were useful to the progressive project.
The Russia collusion scam helped Trump lose the popular vote in 2016. Its revival during his presidency consumed 22 months of his administration during special counsel Robert Mueller’s farce.
October’s startling disinformation lie about a laptop may have cost Trump the 2020 election. But it was concocted so Joe Biden could stare into the debate camera and swear to the American people that Trump was a liar, citing “51 intelligence authorities” who insisted that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a likely hallmark of Russian disinformation.
We were led to believe that clever Russian disinformants had fabricated all of impoverished Hunter’s diseased photos and selfies, knew the intimate tensions and fault lines of the Biden family as evidenced by texts and emails from the computer, and were able to package and hand the computer over to either a Russian agent posing as a computer repairman or to deliver it to a supposedly useful idiot. The truth was that the FBI had the laptop at the debate and had long since verified its authenticity — and thus remained still while its intelligence apparatchik brothers lied to the nation.
What the untruth didn’t fully reveal was that Biden’s foreign policy guru, Anthony Blinken (now secretary of state), had masterminded the whole ruse: He recruited former CIA Director Mike Morell, who then rounded up the self-confessed duo of John Brennan and James Clapper, who in turn recruited more crooks, including the once-respected Leon Panetta.
And the lie worked perfectly, as imagined, far better than even the Russian “collusion.” The nation was fooled into believing that “asset” Trump had been brought back into cahoots with Putin to enlist his former KGB men to smear the forthright Biden family and thereby distort the next election.
Notice that all these lies have never been recanted. No one ever apologizes. No one is ever punished, even when the lie is sworn. No one ever regrets. And no one ever hesitates to lie again, considering the usefulness of the previous untruth.
The fraudulent Alejandro Mayorkas told us the border was “secure” because he deliberately destroyed it and welcomed more than 10 million illegal immigrants. That lie survived even the absurdity of years of late-night news clips (“cheap fakes?”) of thousands of people swarming across an open border. And it died only as the 2024 election approached and the Biden administration read polls showing that a huge majority wanted to close the border and deport illegal immigrants. Suddenly, the lie that the border was secure morphed into the backup lie that “Republicans will not help us close the now insecure border.” In Orwellian terms, the border that 10 million people have crossed has always been secure, but it could be even more secure if Republicans joined with Democrats to secure what was already “secure.”
We live in an age of lies. Sometimes they are purely political, like the “both sides” story from Charlottesville. And sometimes they change history, like the fabrications that bats and pangolins, not a communist Chinese virology lab in Wuhan, gave rise to the COVID-19 virus, or Anthony Fauci’s evasion that his office did not fund and aid, secretly and in a way that circumvented U.S. law, in deadly gain-of-function virology research in communist China.
Another lie has been institutionalized: the January 6 riots were a full-fledged, carefully planned armed uprising to overthrow the government. By contrast, the four months in 2020 that left more than 35 people dead, 1,500 law enforcement officers injured, $2 billion in damages, and a federal courthouse, police station, and historic church burned down were the “heartcry” of the oppressed and persecuted.
These untruths ensured that hundreds of mostly naive protesters who showed up at the Capitol soon became convicted felons and served long sentences, while 14,000 people arrested for rioting in 2020 were released as overzealous but otherwise sympathetic activists.
These lies changed the course of the nation. They were born from the incestuous marriage of Washington-New York political culture and a corrupt media.
The suppliers are Juvenal, “who will supervise the police.” They are administrative supervisors in the FBI, CIA, DOJ and various cabinets and agencies. They believe they are immune from any consequences for the harm they cause, considering that in their daily work they act as judge, jury and executioner.
Finally, while all governments lie, the left is much more adept at it because, true to its “by any means necessary/the end justifies the means” credo, it spreads supposedly good “lies” that stop Hitler’s Trump, castrate the disgusting, the pitiable/the unredeemed/the suckers/the nitpickers, or protect good people from anti-vaxxer MAGAs and assorted buffoons.
Will the lies continue?
Indeed, they will thrive until the people purge the government of its unaccountable and unelected “experts”; until they prosecute future figures like Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, John Brennan and their brethren who lie under oath or to federal investigators; until they ostracize and completely discredit figures like Mayorkas, Fauci and Biden whose frauds have taken the entire nation hostage; and until they shut down the bankrupt media, the power line of the entire Pravda enterprise.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness and a Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is an American military historian, columnist, former professor of classics, and scholar of antique warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004.
