The revelation of a “Biden oligarchy” behind the scenes doesn’t mean Biden won’t run
It’s hardly news that the mainstream media lies, is it?
But what’s more striking than the lies themselves are the contradictions, those moments when the mainstream media simply flips the narrative and says precisely the opposite of what it was saying five minutes ago.
This is done openly, brazenly and totally without shame.
It isn’t done just to save face, or even to lord it over the ignorant plebs who are too stupid to see what’s going on in front of their eyes. Maybe not all the time, anyway.
Sometimes, these contradictions serve a deeper purpose.
For four years, we were told by the mainstream media that Trump was a paranoid egomaniac dreaming up shadowy enemies—the “deep state” especially—to rationalise and justify his failures as a president. Nobody was secretly conspiring against Trump. Not the FBI, not the CIA, not the Justice Department. Not Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Trump was just a big orange baby, crying and scattering his toys across the floor because he’d made himself look stupid again.
For four years that was the narrative. It was replayed in the aftermath of the 2020 election, until the events of Jan. 6th made it unnecessary to say anything more on the subject.
And then, once Trump was finally out of the White House, Time just came out and said it: In the days and weeks after the election, there really was “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes.” This conspiracy ensured that Trump was unable to rally support to challenge the election result. To stop the steal. Former supporters—powerful supporters, especially in business—simply deserted him. Trump had known something strange was happening—Time even said he knew and commented publicly on it—but he was powerless to do anything about it.
It went much deeper than that. In fact, that conspiracy hadn’t just been taking place in the days and weeks after the election. As Time admitted, secret negotiations and preparations about the 2020 election had been taking place for months, even a year or longer.
Time called this, without even a blush of shame, “The Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”
There’s a remarkable paragraph early on in the piece that deserves repeating in full, because it lays out just how coordinated this shadow campaign was, and how it justified itself.
“The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election—an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.”
The article then lists the myriad things this “coalition” did to ensure “calamity” was averted.
“They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.”
Like I said, Time printed this without a blush of shame, just a month after Trump left office. Donald Trump’s “lies” were repurposed into a feelgood story, a heartwarming tale about the triumph of American democracy through its own subversion.
The message was clear: voting is no longer enough. For American democracy to survive in its darkest hour, it must be managed from the shadows.
You won’t know who these people are or what they’re doing. You haven’t elected them and you can’t monitor them. But don’t worry: they’ll make sure the result goes the right way.
Over the weekend, another narrative flip took place, and I think it tells us a similar story about where American democracy is heading.
Axios admitted, in the most casual manner, that a “Biden oligarchy” really is running the Biden presidency. It’s this oligarchy that will decide whether the President will continue his campaign for 2024, or whether he’ll bow out and be replaced by someone who still remembers how to tie his laces and what he had for breakfast.
“The only way President Biden steps aside, despite his debate debacle, is if the same small group of lifelong loyalists who enabled his run suddenly — and shockingly — decides it’s time for him to call it quits,” the Axios article stated.
The group of “lifelong loyalists” includes the President’s wife, Dr Jill Biden, his sister, his advisor Ted Kaufman and “a small band of White House advisers.”
“This decades-long kitchen cabinet operates as an extended family, council of elders and governing oligarchy. These allies alone hold sway over decisions big and small in Biden’s life and presidency.”
Before Thursday night’s abysmal debate, nobody in the mainstream media would ever have admitted this. The mere suggestion that Biden wasn’t fully in charge of his administration was dismissed as a “deranged conspiracy theory.” Those were New York magazine’s actual words, in 2023:
“The Trump version of this attack [Biden isn’t in charge] is a characteristically deranged conspiracy theory, in which some other person, either Barack Obama or Kamala Harris, is actually running the presidency while decrepit Joe Biden is being spooned mouthfuls of apple sauce.”
We can see this volte-face as an admission that Biden is actually going to be replaced. After all, nobody elected Dr Jill Biden and Biden’s sister to the office of president. How can Biden continue?
But I don’t think that’s why we’ve been told about this “governing oligarchy” now.
Biden isn’t just going to step aside—the Axios piece makes this clear. Biden and his closest intimates have been firm on this point, publicly. They returned from “crunch talks” at Camp David on Sunday and reaffirmed their determination not to drop out, but to soldier on.
The President also maintains the support of the Obamas, including, presumably, Michelle Obama, who is being touted, by some, to replace Biden.
On Friday morning, while talking heads were losing theirs, Barack Obama appeared, to do his “cool, calm, collected” thing on Twitter and reassure people that, although Biden obviously thinks it’s still 1988, he’s the only man to beat Donald Trump in November.
“Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself,” Obama wrote on Twitter.
“Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November.”
2020 was an election for managed democracy—it’s just that the American people didn’t know it until after they’d cast their votes and Time told them so. Now, however, with the revelation of the existence of the Biden oligarchy, nobody can claim that a vote for Biden in November is a vote for Biden, for an executive function as it has existed since the founding of the nation. It isn’t. It’s a knowing vote for a frontman, for managed democracy instead of Trump. Axios have already told you so.
This November, the secret custodians of American democracy will ask the American people to put the seal on their silent coup. Mark my words: Biden will run.
