No free pass for the enablers in media (07-08-2024--Hour3)

[00:00:00] 07-08-2024 I received a message from Vicky whose subject line says, Biden's age. Have you not heard anything I have been saying? It's not his age. It's his cognitive function. It's not his age. Vicky says, quote, good grief. Give it a break. Please. He's old. We know.

[00:00:59] WBT has run it into the ground over and over and over. How about just one segment about the Epstein trial, Agenda 47, Project 2025? Anything? Crickets. So, Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation's very lengthy white paper.

[00:01:22] Yeah, they've got a whole bunch of recommendations on how they would like to revamp the executive branch. You can read it. It's on the website. They've been working on it for like two years.

[00:01:34] But now I'm going to shift back to the media's treatment of the biggest political story of our lifetime, which is that the president is in cognitive decline and the media has been covering it up.

[00:01:46] Just like it would have been the biggest story, and it still is, that the media covered up JFK, they covered up FDR, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson. That's why I call her Dr. Jilson. Right? Because Edith, she's playing the role of Edith.

[00:02:01] Maybe this isn't coming across, and maybe that's my fault because I am the professional communicator in this relationship here. So let me make it very, very clear. This is a constitutional crisis. That's why I'm focused. I can't speak for any other host.

[00:02:18] All I can do is just tell you my own perspective on it is that this is a constitutional crisis. You have people in the White House that are running the operation. That is clear. Another word might be insurrection or coup d'etat. I don't know.

[00:02:37] I don't know the extent. This is a very big problem. We have a president by proxy, a proxy president, Dr. Jilson. So I don't know why certain policies go through and others do not. I don't know who's calling the shots.

[00:02:57] And you've got an entire quote unquote establishment, deep state, administrative state, bureaucracy, the elites, whatever you want to call the people who populate these ranks in the institutions, in government, in media. They are all so content to allow this crisis to occur.

[00:03:24] And the only reason that they are now speaking about it is because they are worried. The cat is out of the bag. People got a good look at Joe Biden and everyone's like, oh, ah, what's that? And now they're like, oh, I totally didn't know anything.

[00:03:41] Here you go. This was I can't believe this actually occurred on a CNN program. I mean, it was a weekend program, but two different radio hosts got interviews with Joe Biden. And they asked the exact same questions. Two different hosts, two different stations, two different markets.

[00:04:06] And they both asked the same questions. How did that happen? Similarly here, you each were you asked four questions and maybe that's what you were allowed to ask by the campaign or the White House. But they were essentially the same questions, both interviews about accomplishments, progress

[00:04:22] in your respective state. What's at stake in the election? What do you have to say about his debate performance and what he would say to voters who think their vote doesn't matter or might sit this election out?

[00:04:32] Were those questions given to you by the White House or did you have or the campaign or did you have to submit questions ahead of this interview? The questions were sent to me for approval. I approved of them.

[00:04:47] OK, so the White House sent the questions to you ahead of the interview? Yes. OK, I got several questions, eight of them. And the four that were chosen were the ones that I approved. Oh, well, now you say it like that doesn't sound so bad right now.

[00:05:04] Now it doesn't sound like you're involved in propaganda at all. How many other stations are they doing this to? By the way, do you remember about WBTs news director Mark Garrison and his interview with the White House press secretary, Corinne Jean Pierre?

[00:05:26] Makes a little bit more sense now, right? She didn't seem prepared for the questions. I said that when the first time I heard that interview, I was like, I know she's bad at her job. I get that.

[00:05:37] But she seemed like she was scrambling to find note cards or some sort of, you know, bullet point way to answer the question. And now it makes sense. They are literally sending questions over to friendly media. Ed Morrissey, hot air dot com.

[00:05:56] He said, is this more evidence that the White House knows Joe Biden cannot think or express himself extemporaneously? Or is it as the White House claims, just business as usual? It's interesting, though, that The New York Times did the story and they're making an issue about it now.

[00:06:11] By the way, the host name there was Victor Blackwell, the host of First of All on CNN. And these two different radio interviewers, the woman you heard from there was Andrea Lawful Sanders. And she hosts a program called The Source on WURD in Philadelphia.

[00:06:35] Morrissey says, let's first off, let's just marvel at Biden's poor performance in light of knowing which questions would come to him. Right. Because it was in one of these interviews where they sent the questions ahead of time

[00:06:50] that he garbled his interview, he garbled the answer, and he said that he was the first black woman to serve with a black president. That's what he said to her. So they got the question. They sent the questions to the radio station.

[00:07:02] The station then picked four of the eight. They then asked the president for these eight questions. And he knew the questions. He knew what the answers were going to be. And he still said that he is the first black woman to serve with a black president.

[00:07:17] Biden also called Trump a colleague. And then he and then he aborted the story involving Trump and then claimed to be the first president elected statewide in Delaware. I don't even know what that part means. And all that was with preparation.

[00:07:36] A spokesman for Team Biden shrugged it off, calling the practice, quote, not uncommon and that the interviewers were not required to use the questions. Now, Morrissey outlines that because I've been doing this a long time and I can confirm Morrissey's experience is similar to my own.

[00:07:55] I have had questions given to me, but they are always with a book. You will get a book and you'll get a list of questions. And that is a recognition that you get the book.

[00:08:09] It's a brand new book and they want you to interview the guy, but they know you're not going to have time to read the whole book because you get lots of books in the mail. And so here's a list of questions.

[00:08:18] And you're just talking about the one book. Now, I just like Morrissey, like you get the publicity kit, but I try to read the book. That's why you'll notice I don't do a lot of author interviews because I got to read the book first.

[00:08:31] And you'll usually encounter some author who will say something like, oh, wow, you really have read the book. And that's what that means is that they're used to just getting interviewed by people who get the list of questions. But that's for authors. Politicians, no. No.

[00:08:49] I will say, hey, here's a topic. Here are two topics. Here are five topics, whatever. I'll say, I want to interview you about crime. Hey, I'd like to interview you about this bill. So they have an idea of what the topic is. But it goes anywhere.

[00:09:06] You're in the conversation, as Mel Watts might call it, a free flow and discussion. That is not a common practice. And if and I have had politicians, well, I've had campaigns. Usually it's a staffer and they're like, hey, can you tell me what are the questions?

[00:09:25] No, I cannot tell you the questions. Like frankly, I haven't even written them out yet, so I don't know. No, I'm not going to tell you the questions. Two weeks ago, the New York Times was gaslighting its readers by amplifying the cheap fakes propaganda from the White House.

[00:09:41] And now they're essentially claiming that the White House is setting up cheap fake interviews for Biden. In an attempt to keep the cover up over his senility in place. It's another indicator of a media preference cascade that is growing by the day.

[00:09:55] I've talked about the preference cascade slowly at first and then very quickly. Right. Then all at once. That's how preference cascades work. That's what we're watching right now for people who may not be aware. Like I don't know what's going to happen if I did.

[00:10:10] I would have long played the winning lottery numbers and have retired to a privately owned island. Now, I don't know what's going to happen, but this week could be the end of the Biden presidency.

[00:10:21] Now, if you want to be ignorant about all of these developments as history is unfolding right before our eyes, that's fine. That's totally fine. I don't begrudge you for that. But media plays a huge role in this story, even though now they're claiming that they

[00:10:42] didn't even realize what was happening. They were just looking at it the wrong way or oh, we couldn't even talk to Joe for a lot of the time. Should we join it in progress? Coringe Jean-Pierre. For America's seniors, lowering the Latino uninsured rate. All right, I'm out.

[00:11:00] She's still just running through her her binder full of bullet points. Not sure if she I mean, I'm sure she's going to take some questions, but she was running through all of the scheduling that Joe Biden is going to be doing all the events. Oh, wait, no.

[00:11:16] They got Kirby out there. Oh, man, things are tough. Things are tough because they brought in Kirby. All right, let's see what he's talking about. The national security things to get through.

[00:11:29] So I ask you to bear with me as a crane mentioned presidents looking forward to hosting NATO leaders from 38 different. All right. All right. So he's going to talk about foreign affairs. OK. Let me tell you about Damon Towell or Towell. He's a lawyer in Brooklyn.

[00:11:46] He's a contributor at Reason Magazine, Reason Dotcom, libertarian publication. And he was on Twitter over the weekend and wrote a lengthy post about what we're seeing with the media and the audience of a lot of these outlets and their response to what's been going on after the debate.

[00:12:13] And now the this building preference cascade against Joe Biden to get out and the Biden camp is pushing back, obviously, there they're going to they're not he's not dropping out. They're not going to go for it all there. They're not on board. Right.

[00:12:28] So here's what Damon Towell wrote. Right wingers are fully aware of what non right wing media outlets say. I've been saying that for years. Libs often have absolutely no idea what goes on in right wing media. They have no understanding of what right wingers actually think.

[00:12:50] This is part of why it's so shocking to them now that anybody would question Joe Biden's competence. They haven't seen a million videos of Biden mumbling or trailing off, lumbering around, looking lost. They didn't know that he gets fed questions in advance.

[00:13:06] Two weeks ago, liberals would have called it all fake news and cheap fakes. But right wingers have known this stuff for years, despite positioning themselves as the educated ones in the room. Libs so often have absolutely horrendous media literacy. That's true. That's not a traffic report.

[00:13:29] OK, that's true. This is also why every two months you get the we're canceling our New York Times subscription freak outs. And we're seeing this happen to journos, journalists and news outlets on a nuclear scale right

[00:13:43] now, because anything uncomfortable is seen as traitorous and must be immediately rejected. Like say what you want about right wing media. There was a greater debate with Donald Trump around Donald Trump inside the right. You actually had factions inside the right.

[00:14:04] What the never Trumpers write, the always Trumpers, whatever. Like there was actually debate on these websites. They're not used to bad news, he says. The type of bad news that makes them feel bad about themselves instead of the other guy being a bad person.

[00:14:21] And they have no idea how to navigate this. So keep that in mind. There was a piece New York Magazine by Olivia Newsy. Nuzzy? Newsy? Well, with her profession, I'll call her Newsy because it just sounds right. And she said, look, look, look on Twitter.

[00:14:42] She said reporting takes time. And in this case, took six months for her to tell us about her personal experience up close with Joe Biden, where she was very concerned. It took her six months to report on that. Because journalism takes time. Even when you are the witness.

[00:15:00] I got a message here from Donnell, who says the way the press treated Ronald Reagan and even Nancy Reagan, Sam Donaldson et al. As much fun as people make of her Just Say No drug campaign, she showed grace and dignity

[00:15:13] and her absolute devotion to her Ronnie and protected him during his final years. Jill and Hunter seem fine with presenting Joe like a circus act. Yeah, it is kind of the 180 from the Reagan experience, right? For those of us who remember, I remember the end of his administration.

[00:15:35] I mean, I was in elementary school, but yeah, I mean, just the lampooning of him. But now, no, no, no. I'm not really sure what I'm looking at. Olivia Newsy talks about in a tent on the backyard patio of a private home in suburban

[00:15:49] New Jersey, the president was eye to eye with a small group of powerful Democrats and rich campaign donors trying to reassure them that he was not about to drop dead or drop out of the presidential race.

[00:15:58] The content of his speech would matter less than his perceived capacity to speak coherently at all, though much of what he would say would not be entirely decipherable. His words, as always, had a habit of sliding into a rhetorical pileup, an affliction that

[00:16:14] had worsened in the four years since he began running for president for the third time in 2020. He might begin a sentence loud and clear and then midway through sound as if he's trying to recite two or three lines all at once, his individual words and syllables dissolving

[00:16:29] into an incoherent gurgle. This was in January, she said. She began hearing stories from Democrat officials, activists and donors, all people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office following encounters with the president.

[00:16:45] They had arrived at the same concern. Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to election day? By the way, this is a very, very lengthy piece. It'll take you like half an hour to read it. I'm just giving you the highlights.

[00:16:58] When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified, but they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it, though not on the record. They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy.

[00:17:13] Things were bad and they knew things were bad and they knew others must also know things were bad. And yet they would need to pretend outwardly that things were fine. That my friends is called a cover up, by the way.

[00:17:26] She goes on to say the president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country. And well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that. Right? It's the end of the democracy.

[00:17:42] So you have to cover this up or the orange man wins. And then we get Hitler like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney and John McCain and Ronald Reagan and all of the other Republicans too. Those who encountered the president in social settings sometimes left their interactions disturbed.

[00:18:02] Longtime friends of the Biden family. Longtime friends of the Biden family were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names. At a White House event last year, one guest recalled with horror, realizing that the president

[00:18:21] would not be able to stay for the reception because it was clear he would not be able to make it through the reception. The guest wasn't sure they could vote for Biden since the guest was now open to an idea

[00:18:30] that they had previously dismissed as simply right wing propaganda, that the president may not really be the acting president after all. People knew. People knew. Cocooned within Biden, she's saying, was cocooned within mounting layers of bureaucracy

[00:18:50] spoken for more than he was speak than he was speaking or spoken to saying hello to one Democrat mega donor and family friend at the White House. Recently, the president stared blankly and nodded his head.

[00:19:04] The first lady intervened to whisper into her husband's ear, telling him to say hello to the donor by name. Say hello to Jim and thank him for his recent generosity. And the president repeated the words that his wife had fed to him.

[00:19:18] It hasn't been good for a long time, but it's gotten so, so much worse. One witness to the exchange told me. So who's actually in charge? Nobody knew. Surely somebody is in charge. Surely there must be a plan. And surely this situation could not endure.

[00:19:37] I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts, but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation's most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former

[00:19:54] President Trump, resistance or QAnon. They shared a grand theory of America in 2024 that there has to be a secret group of high level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democrat presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense.

[00:20:14] They were in full agreement with each other. And she says, what I saw myself confirmed something was amiss. This April. So what is that? Three months ago? She's at a reception before the White House Correspondents' Dinner and she joined a sea

[00:20:33] of people waiting for a photo with the president and first lady in the basement of the Washington Hilton Hotel. It's a photo line. In the basement, I smiled. I said hello. Dr. Jilson looks back at me with a confused and panicked expression.

[00:20:50] It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of family emergency. Uh, hi, she said, and then glanced over to her right. Oh, I had not seen the president up close in some time.

[00:21:06] I followed the first lady's gaze and found the president. And now I understood her panicked expression up close. The president does not look quite plausible. It's not that he's old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old.

[00:21:24] Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth. Now, this was true even in 2020. His face had an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call low trust. If only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial

[00:21:45] harmony into the realm of the improbable. What is she saying there? She's talking about he's getting work done. They're injecting him with stuff. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one was pulled tightly over

[00:22:01] his cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume under artificial light and in the sunshine. He took on an unnatural gleam. Remember them complaining about the CNN makeup artists? He looked inflated. His eyes were half shut or opened really, really wide.

[00:22:22] They appeared darker than they once had. His pupils dilated. He didn't blink at regular intervals. The White House often did not engage when questioned about the president's stare, which sometimes raised alarm on social media when documented in official videos produced by the White House itself.

[00:22:41] And she concludes, my heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile.

[00:22:58] It made me sad in a way I can't fully convey. I always thought, and I wrote, that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I have covered.

[00:23:11] He took my hand in his and I was startled by how it felt, not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black tie affair. I said hello. His sweet smile stayed frozen.

[00:23:26] He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice he said, quote, and what's your name? He knew her. Exiting the room, a group of reporters with me, not instigated by me, she says, made guesses about how dead he appeared to be percentage-wise.

[00:23:49] And they arrived at about 40 percent. These were reporters. Once again, White House Correspondents Association. They knew. They have known. And the only reason that they're now embarrassingly saying, oh, yeah, we can kind of tell things aren't going right. Well, so the debate performance, that was really it.

[00:24:08] That's what this is all about. No, no, no. You guys have known. But now you're afraid he's going to cost Democrats the election. Matthew Iglesias, one of the founders of Vox.com, he is a liberal, he's a Democrat, proudly so he says.

[00:24:25] He says, I was wrong about Biden is a very, very lengthy piece that is substack newsletter called Slow Boring Dotcom, which I think I think he's talking about drilling, but also kind of boring sometimes. Anyway, he says, I really don't enjoy being wrong.

[00:24:41] But looking back on Biden's disastrous debate with the benefit of some time away, I got to admit I was wrong between the March 7th State of the Union and the June 27th presidential debate. I misread the situation.

[00:24:53] I almost thought I saw Biden upping the pace of his public events, doing rallies, fundraisers and interviews. He goes on to say later, the campaign itself is now characterizing it as a bad debate, which it was.

[00:25:06] But they're missing that the bad debate calls into question the entire interpretation of the previous month's events offered by Biden's side. My side, I was wrong and I feel awful for having been wrong.

[00:25:16] I take my job seriously and I try to provide accurate information and insights on the issues I cover. I've felt sick to my stomach since the debate. And I get why decision makers don't want to admit they were also wrong.

[00:25:28] It's a lot more fun to feel embattled than embarrassed by your own errors. What makes this all so hard, he says, is that a lot of the relevant facts here are like the rabbit duck illusion.

[00:25:40] He's got a picture of it, these like hand drawn sketches of a and when you look at it, you can see a rabbit and you can also see a duck. But people will generally see one first.

[00:25:51] He says, so after the debate, I'm seeing the duck he's using like before it was all just rabbit, rabbit, rabbit. Biden isn't doing press conferences. He's using teleprompters at fundraisers. He's avoiding hostile interviews. He isn't even doing friendly but substantive shows with journalists.

[00:26:07] The seemingly inexplicable decision to skip the Super Bowl interview is perfectly explicit, explicable once you see the duck. He's been seeing the rabbit and now he sees the duck. And now it makes sense, he says.

[00:26:25] The biggest data point that I blew off was a recent and totally unambiguous one. Five days before the debate, somebody who had seen Biden recently at a fundraiser told me that he looked and sounded dramatically worse than the previous time they had seen

[00:26:38] him as recently as six months prior. And they were now convinced Biden wouldn't be able to make it through a second term. I blew that warning off and assumed things would be fine at the debate.

[00:26:51] Now that Biden apologists like me are discredited in the eyes of the public, most people will probably just decide that he's been unfit this whole time. Per my fundraiser source and people I know who were deeply involved in IRA work, like investment guys, I don't think that's true.

[00:27:10] My guess is that the rigors of the campaign schedule combined with the linear progression of time and the trauma of Hunter's legal problems made things much worse. But nobody's going to care or believe anything that this White House says now.

[00:27:24] A point I make frequently is that everybody should aim to be more rational and less emotional in their politics. Hear, hear, Matt Iglesias. I feel personally hurt and embarrassed about how this played out. I think Biden made me look foolish and I don't like it.

[00:27:42] But it is true that most people were not fooled and will not necessarily react in the same way. A post-debate Axios story by Alex Thompson suggested there are two Bidens, one from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and that guy does fine.

[00:27:59] But outside of those six hours or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued. If that story had come out two weeks ago, I would have made fun of it. Biden gets tired at night? Oh, he suffers from jet lag?

[00:28:13] I mean, he is a human being after all. When I first came to town, I was scandalized by the rumors of off-label prescription drug use on Air Force One during George W. Bush's presidency. But it turns out every administration is like that.

[00:28:31] Not just for POTUS, but for senior staff as well because it's the only way to do the job. There it is, people. I was right. I knew it. I knew it. There's no way these people could keep these schedules. They're on all the drugs.

[00:28:47] Before the debate, I thought the whole Biden is too old crowd was making a classic conspiracy theorist error of assuming a secret could be kept. After the debate, well, the leaks started coming from both inside the White House and from foreign governments.

[00:29:06] As far as I can tell, Biden is currently taking counsel primarily from his family. That is, on its own terms, a bad sign, he says. Biden's narrative about the 2016 and 2020 primaries that nobody believed in him but himself and his inner circle.

[00:29:22] So he's not going to stop listening to them now. He says, I think it's clear Biden cannot run a real campaign. So the message has to change. It's still better as a private message than a public one.

[00:29:32] But it's not clear to me that the president is even having a private conversation with the people he needs to be talking to about this. He says, I'm still a Democrat today. I'm going to vote for Biden over Trump any day of the week.

[00:29:46] I'll just say the best way for the president to preserve his legacy as the man who beat Trump is to let somebody else do it this time around. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.

[00:29:57] I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to theptcalendarshow.com.

[00:30:09] Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.