See the end of this post for an advisory about “If Different Perverts Got There First,” the essay I published on June 27.
Special thanks to my friend
, whose Substack you should be reading, for a discussion that was helpful in clarifying my thoughts.The Elephant in the Room
As an idiom, “the elephant in the room” has always amused me. There are plenty of people who manage to truly miss something large, glaring, and seemingly not ignorable.
As a mathematician and data scientist, I work in fields where autistic men congregate, and yet it’s something that is often missed, even by loving parents. I’ve personally diagnosed two of them. “Dude, you are autistic. You need to go get yourself officially diagnosed. You will start to learn things that will help you function better as soon as you do.” They both came back to me later, having learned about their neurodivergence, and laughed at how they could possibly not have known.
I met someone once who only recognized his drinking problem after 47 alcohol-related arrests.
One of my girlfriends almost married a man who was obviously and unmistakably gay. Gayer than a Golden Girls marathon weekend wearing rainbow unicorn onesies, sipping Cosmopolitans and farting glitter. It took a full-on intervention from all of her friends to help her understand he wasn’t waiting for the wedding night out of some deep religious conviction.
Most hilariously of all, it took my therapist a couple of years to help me realize that I am, in fact, a very angry girl.
So yeah, people are often extremely capable of ignoring elephants in the room, even as they tapdance around the piles of elephant shit.
President Biden’s obvious cognitive decline has been such an elephant for years now.
I wrote about the lessons inherent in the Democratic party bigshots, media figures, influencers, and others who either missed it entirely and didn’t know or, almost as bad, pretended not to know, in a recent post: “The Smell Was Elephant S*** All Along.”
That post also covered my thoughts on the fact that we’re watching a coup in plain sight, as Biden is clearly not capable of being POTUS and yet power has not been transferred to the VP; how Trump Derangement Syndrome leads to the inability to understand reality; and how to spot an actually principled commentator.
When the Elephant Stampeded
The debate gave overwhelming evidence that Biden is suffering from a moderate degree of dementia.
The post-debate reaction among journalists and Democratic party power brokers (but I repeat myself) was cataclysmic.
The number of people on the left side of the aisle who had been lying about Biden’s mental acuity is massive, but here are just a few examples.
The press secretary lies about this regularly, of course. After special counsel Robert Hur declined to prosecute Biden because he’s “an elderly man with a failing memory,” Vice President Harris called that report “clearly politically motivated.” Leftie influencers pretend that obvious signs of age-related decline are nothing to worry about and also pretend that they honestly believe the Wall Street Journal’s recent story on Biden’s mental problems was a hit job.
The New York Times ran interference for Biden as recently as last week.
The morning after the debate, everything had changed.
Even MSNBC personalities like former Obama administration official Ben Rhodes had to admit the truth because the gaslighting just wasn’t going to work anymore.
Now the overwhelming topic of the discourse is whether Biden can or will be replaced as the candidate.
What Was The Plan?
Many people have assumed that the debate happened so early because the Democratic party power brokers wanted Biden’s decline to be made obvious, in order to force him out. Any plan to force him out must consider that the VP polls worse than Biden does against Trump, and the possibility of asking her to resign — or to accept a new person coming in over her on the ticket (which may not even be possible; I’ve read many conflicting opinions on this) — is politically fraught, to say the least.
I do not believe this “it was the plan all along” assumption can be true, at least not in a straightforward way. It is already too late to replace Biden on the ballot in Nevada and Wisconsin. There are other deadlines rapidly approaching, as well: the Georgia deadline is September 5 and the Texas deadline is August 23. (Source: Daily Mail.) The South Dakota deadline is August 6. And there are states where death is the only way to change a ballot, or where candidate changes for political reasons are never permitted.
Is it possible that they’ll ignore/break/change laws in all of them? Yes, it’s possible. And the chaos of dealing with the varying regulations and laws in 50 states would provide a great deal of cover for efforts at cheating. But that would be one hell of a risk to take. Just one loud public official in one of these places going viral for refusing to cooperate, standing on principle, and the effort is highly likely to fail.
What would make this possibility make the most sense? If they were all shaking in their boots in fear of retribution for the political prosecutions they’ve been engaging in — Trump, yes, but others as well. If they were terrified to the point that they would do anything to stay in power, this makes sense.
Is that a reasonable fear? I don’t think so. Trump’s first term showed that he was capable of far more talk than action. (Locking her up, building a wall and making Mexico pay for it, etc.) But then, I recognize that Trump speaks in narcissistic hyperbole and should be taken seriously, not literally—something the many TDS sufferers in our chattering class still don’t seem to grasp.
On the other hand, four of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices are over the age of 70, so the next President will likely get to replace at least two of them, possibly three or four.
Given how insanely easy it is to hack voting machines, this strategy seems unlikely at best. Way too much risk and effort when there are much easier ways to cheat.
But, maybe.
In no particular order, here are some other possible answers to the question, “What was the plan?” None are fully discrete from the others, of course. And for the record, as I wrote in part 1 of my debate reaction, I agree with Bret Weinstein and the argument he made in April 2022 that Kamala Harris should become POTUS immediately. It is too dangerous.
Perhaps there are some moral, patriotic people inside the White House who recognize the emergency of having the nuclear power vested in a dementia patient. Perhaps they have tried approaching the First Lady, the Vice President, the Chief of Staff, or others about the reality of the situation and gotten nowhere. They pushed for the early debate in the hopes of a groundswell calling for the 25th Amendment and the ascension of the Vice President. This would make sense if the entire press corps was worthless AF, since any such people would have tried going to individual members of the press first.
The entire White House apparatus is in on it, cynically caring only about power and considering themselves above such petty concerns as not carrying out a coup in plain sight. They decided to get the debate out of the way before Biden’s decline proceeds even further, perhaps hoping that Trump’s legal issues would preclude future debates. This way, they could check the box of having Biden have debated and then return to the 2020 strategy of hiding him while waiting for November to get here. This would make sense if Biden, like many patients with moderate dementia, still responds to some medication some of the time. This option would mean that they just got unlucky in Biden having a bad, the-meds-didn’t-help-much day.
The Chevron decision, which was predictable in much the same way that Roe being overturned was predictable, gutted the power of the administrative state. They are so desperate to restore it that they’ll do anything at all to make sure the next President chooses Supreme Court justices who will restore that power—including forcing a candidate replacement in a way that will help facilitate cheating, despite the lower-risk-higher-payoff strategy of just hacking the voting machines.
(Dan’s got a piece in progress on the ramifications of the Chevron decision which I will cross-post, one that will be going into much more depth.)
Some coalition from within the Democratic party, representing one of the possible replacement candidates, orchestrated the debate to facilitate the replacement, a kind of intra-party coup pursued for political power without concern for what the fact that a dementia patient has the nuclear codes actually means.
Some foreign power has spies in the White House and they orchestrated this public display of American weakness to create chaos and open the door for aggressive moves against us or our allies.
Will Biden Be Replaced?
Probably not. It’s really up to him, absent the 25th Amendment being invoked.
I doubt that he has the cognitive capacity to rationally evaluate the decision, and if the people who are actually running the show were capable of evaluating the decision soberly and persuading him to do the right thing, he’d have resigned already.
Further, Kamala Harris would be slaughtered in a race against Trump, and having her step aside would be shooting identity politics in the head forevermore.
Some of us would welcome that. I certainly would. But even people as bad at predicting consequences as lefties tend to be can see this one coming.
Have the first woman Vice President — especially one who isn’t white — step down, especially in favor of a white man? (Gavin Newsom is the name that is being bandied about most.) All Democratic party lip service to being anti-racist, anti-sexist, and the rest would be mocked, deservedly.
“Suuuuuure they see women and POC as equals. Until they want to win something. Then they tell you to pack your handbag and get out while they bring in a white man to get it done.” The fallout would be almost as bad if Harris were replaced by a white woman. My experience suggests that a noticeable percentage of white women are performatively Woke as a self-defense mechanism. (The “Karen” meme, which has been hurled at me in my cobalt-blue area for sins like asking politely to get all of my change from a merchant, is the tip of that iceberg.)
I’ve read the argument that the Democrats own the single white women vote, mostly because of abortion, and therefore aren’t afraid of pissing them off by having Kamala Harris step down.
I’m not convinced of this. First, Roe is gone. Second, there is really one primary reason why single white women like me—women who are career-oriented and pursuing upward mobility—find ourselves attracted to center-left politics (or once did; I am center-right now, more because the political spectrum has shifted than because I have). That reason is that it offers a path to autonomy that isn’t contingent on being a wife and mother. I have enormous respect for marriage and parenting. They simply aren’t for me, and there are many women for whom they will not be part of the picture, either by choice or by happenstance.
By the way, this often matters to mothers, too. Motherhood consumes a woman’s identity by necessity when kids are young, but kids aren’t young forever. And many mothers prefer to define themselves as more than one thing, and consider other things nearly as important as that role.
Yes, abortion is part of it. Every woman (literally 100%) with whom I have ever had a close enough friendship to know secrets and trauma histories has either been raped, had a near-miss where she was almost raped, or has helped a friend get through the aftermath of rape. (Usually, more than one of the three.) Draconian abortion restrictions quickly get very real and very scary for most women—even women who pay lip service to what their church wants them to say to pollsters. But there are pills now, and many states have codified abortion rights in such a way that a weekend trip to visit a friend is an option. So the idea of losing access to that procedure if needed is a lot less salient, at least for career women, than it used to be.
What do career-oriented women want? I want equal pay for equal work and to be protected from discrimination in the workplace on the basis of my sex and my disability, and to otherwise be left alone to compete on merit. And the left still does a far, far, far better job of articulating that these desires don’t make me weird, deranged, unfeminine, damaged, etc., than the right does.
I am not a Christian, but I find the following tweet to be accurate for me and for the women like me who I know (non-Woke, mostly centrists who don’t vote).
Having Kamala Harris step down, particularly to be replaced by a man, would put the lie to everything the left has claimed to believe about the capabilities and ambitions of women.
I think it would backfire spectacularly, and I think they know that.
What If They Manage It?
Here are my thoughts on the possible replacements if they manage to get Biden and/or Harris to step down.
Newsom: California resident Michael Shellenberger has a good Twitter thread here on why Newsom would be a bad candidate. He’s smarmy AF, a hypocrite who kept schools closed for nearly two years while violating stay-at-home orders himself. He has made kidnapping for the purpose of gender transitioning kids legal, and the drug addiction, homelessness, and normalized shoplifting troubles in California — to say nothing of its tax rates — mean that the ads write themselves. He has also helped facilitate a digital ID system in California that brings the book of Revelation to mind, which would mobilize the Christians.
Whitmer: not viable. She was a serious authoritarian on COVID, and who has presided over a major strengthening of radical Islamists in her state.
Hillary: I find it hard to believe that she wants to lose to Donald Trump twice, and I doubt she’s being seriously considered. I know this is the ultimate right-wing horror show, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. In the early days of the Trump administration, there were so many ridiculous speculations about how to get her into office. Get her elected Speaker of the House, then impeach Trump and Pence both, and voila! This is more a right-wing fantasy than a realistic possibility.
Oprah: I see no reason to think she wants to give up an easy, productive life of freedom and leisure to take a job that would get her burned in effigy, put her in danger, limit her choices forever, and make her age rapidly.
Buttigieg: not viable. He’s made an ass of himself on TV many times, and while America is far less homophobic than it used to be, a married gay couple in the White House is outside of the comfort zone of many. Further, even people (like me) who are fully accepting of gays and of marriage equality still feel queasy about buying babies from a surrogate. If he and his husband had adopted kids out of foster care, I would be in full support. That would be an unequivocal improvement in their lives, upgrading them to a two-parent home, even a same-sex one. But I have a real problem with creating children with the conscious intention of depriving them of a foundational relationship. Combine that with some of the very real issues with transportation infrastructure in this country, that have gotten worse on his watch, and….yeah.
Warnock: I don’t know what to think. His religiousness is a plus, but he isn’t widely known figure. I don’t see how he’d raise enough money in time, and he also adds nothing for the Democrats, who have black voters pretty much sewn up. (Trump does better than Republicans typically do with black voters, but that’s not saying much.)
Warren: I could see a situation where she sells herself as moderate enough to win over voters who are nervous about a return to four years of constant drama and having to pay attention to things like what the President is tweeting, but only if she has a record that lets her credibly sell herself as unlikely to get us into war.
Obama: Everything I’ve ever seen, heard, or read indicates that Michelle Obama would not run for President for any reason short of having a gun put to her head. Her children are finally out of the spotlight, for the most part, and are at ages—26 and 23—where it’s at least conceivable that they might get married, or perhaps even make her a grandmother, in the next eight years. Why would she do that to her kids and potential grandkids?
My Prediction
I predict that Biden will stay on the ticket. Whoever is actually running the show wants to keep running it.
The coup in plain sight—which is what it is, when the POTUS is non compos mentis but power has not been transferred to the Vice President—is serving someone’s interest, and they want it to continue.
If Trump has the sense to refuse another debate and simply run ads from this one, he will probably win decisively. He should release a statement referring to the Axios report in which Biden staffers describe Biden as only cognizant from 10am to 4pm and stating simply: “President Trump’s commitment to fair play precludes him from debating President Biden after sundown. If President Biden’s team would like to schedule a daytime debate to permit him to participate during his hours of best cognizance, we are amenable to that.” It would have the predictable seismic effect without risking any need to actually have a second debate.
Too many Americans have been through the sad decline of their own parents and grandparents. They understand age-related decline all too well. They understand how hard it is to get Grandpa to hand over the car keys, much less the nuclear codes.
Between a bombastic blowhard with terrible character who understands what a deepfake is—and has already proven he has no desire to get us into war—and a dementia patient whose unelected wife and advisors will make all the decisions that matter, behind closed doors and without any accountability?
It won’t even be close.
Special Advisory: Reactions to A Recent Essay
I recently published an essay, “If Different Perverts Got There First,” which makes the case that men with autogynephilia, the paraphilia of being aroused by thinking of themselves as women, are behind much of the movement to subvert our schools and turn them into gender ideology indoctrination factories. It uses a fictional scene to propose a counterfactual wherein people committed to the normalization of a different paraphilia — specifically, BDSM — were the ones who got to our schools first. The counterfactual is disturbing and several readers reported that they couldn’t get through it without nausea, tears, or both. If that’s your experience, I totally get it. No judgment here! But please know that you can scroll down to the divider with the heading “Something Real and Even More Disturbing,” which ends the counterfactual and begins the analysis, and read the rest of it if you wish.
You’re on an excellent roll. Thanks for this.
Great piece. One observation to add about this section:
"In no particular order, here are some other possible answers to the question, “What was the plan?” None are fully discrete from the others, of course. "
Another option is that they believed that this would be a repeat of the 2020 debate where Biden was widely perceived as having won. I.e. Trump would be out of control and self destruct.
I don't think this debate was orchestrated to demonstrate Joe Biden was unsuitable as a candidate. If I recall correctly, the Biden team asked for it as a way to reset the narrative that he wasn't up to it mentally. It just backfired spectacularly on them because they were so caught up in their own BS. See this recent piece from the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/30/how-biden-debate-prep-led-to-damaging-event/
As an aside, based on her performance on Bill Maher this past Friday, I think Trump would be well served to pick Tulsi Gabbard as his running mate.