The Smell Was Elephant S*** All Along
what the debate debacle reveals about media commentators
See the end of this post for an advisory about “If Different Perverts Got There First,” the essay I published on June 27.
On the evening of June 27, 2024, former President Trump and President Biden had a debate. While watching it, I experienced a powerful sense memory of an indelible childhood experience, one that filled me with adrenaline and anticipatory horror for how closely it resembled what we were all seeing on that stage.
When I was six years old, the children’s pastor arranged a field trip to a nursing home. He had been teaching us to evangelize, and he wanted us to practice our skills in telling people about Jesus. We sang some songs and did some little skits we had practiced. The audience was made up of residents who had no other visitors on that Sunday, and most were in wheelchairs.
I noticed one old man in particular. He stood out to me for two reasons: partly because most of the audience was female, and partly because my grandfather, who he resembled, had died not long before. I watched him and felt very confused.
I missed my grandpa, but I was glad he hadn’t ended up in a wheelchair in a place like this—a thought I recognized as something pretty close to being glad that my grandpa was dead. That thought left me both fearful and perplexed. I felt both very sad and very guilty, which compounded my nervousness.
The double burden of negative emotion also complicated my desire to please the children’s pastor by doing a good job remembering my lines in the skit. It’s hard to perform for adult approval when you’re preoccupied with wondering if everyone can tell that you’re a very bad girl.
The old man watched us all carefully, but his facial expressions made it obvious that he wasn’t really tracking what was going on. He enjoyed our singing, nodding his head and smiling a bit, but the skits were beyond his ability to follow. He kept fading in and out, the look on his face turning slack and lifeless for minutes at a time.
During our final song, he perked up again. Then a female aide came to get him and started to wheel him out of the room, probably to take him away for bathing or medication.
As if a switch had been flipped, he was instantly furious. In a panic of rage and the perceived need for self-protection, he started hitting the aide. Hard. Even diminished, elderly men can sometimes maintain enough of their male upper body strength to be dangerous, and she had to call for help.
I was reminded of him over and over on Thursday night, as President Biden, through facial expressions, eye movements, and body language, evidenced that same fading-in-and-out, failure-to-track throughout the debate. Then, the first time that former President Trump mentioned President Biden’s son, I was reminded of that old man most powerfully. I saw that same switch-flip effect resulting in instant fury, and the taste of metal filled my mouth—symptomatic of an intense adrenaline spike.
My heart rate increased noticeably as I thought: “Holy shit! He’s gonna hit Trump and Trump will hit him back. Then what?!? What happens if two dudes who are both under Secret Service protection start having a fistfight while broadcasting live?”
The Lesson for People Who Were Surprised
Here is my analysis of what the possibilities are going forward, especially about possibly replacing Biden, and what I predict will occur.
This post is not about those issues. Nor is it about elder abuse, which I believe Jill Biden, Kamala Harris, and a great deal of the White House staff to be guilty of.
It’s about how crucial this moment is for another reason. This moment presents a priceless opportunity for we the people to recognize that nearly all of our influencers and commentators are either liars or not up to the job of obvious pattern recognition—often, both.
So many people were surprised by what happened. Why? Many were so relieved that the Bad Orange Man was gone that they never really bothered to assess what had replaced him. Others simply accepted the media’s curated, brief snippets of Biden here and there without ever thinking about the possibility that Biden may not be up to the job.
But 90 minutes of flying solo made it abundantly clear that the sitting President needs a memory care unit, not a high-stress job. The people who were first realizing that this wasn’t “cheap fakes” or “Russian disinformation” as they watched then got the additional, stunning surprise of watching the media landscape change in real time. Part 2 of my debate analysis into great depth about this, but for just one example: the New York Times ran interference for Biden as recently as last week.
The morning after the debate, everything had changed.
This Is A Binary Choice
There are only two possibilities. Either the entire media apparatus—everyone from the NYT editorial board to the CNN and MSNBC commentators who held virtual eulogies during the post-debate analysis to the podcasters and Twitterati—knew all along that Biden was non compos mentis and were lying to us, or they failed in their job of pattern recognition and thus didn’t know.
The former is an inexcusable act of treason.
The latter is an unforgivable level of incompetence.
There is no other possibility.
Perhaps you think I’m being too harsh and lacking grace. You may be right. Giving grace outside of the tiny group of people I love, trust, and have broken bread with is not one of my stronger virtues. But in this case, I think grace would, itself, be the vice. This is not a situation that calls for grace.
Consider the danger in having a President who cannot track a conversation making nuclear decisions. A President who cannot understand the potential for deepfakes and other AI-created deception could, at any moment, be given just minutes to decide whether to trust a report that this or that enemy of the United States has launched missiles—and whether to retaliate.
Glenn Beck has a segment about the terrifying crisis it is to have a non compos mentis man in charge of the nuclear weapons.
And Former President Obama, Former Secretary Clinton, the Vice President, First Lady, Chief of Staff, Press Secretary, the Cabinet, the White House press corps, and the Democratic party leaders—all of them either didn’t know, or they knew and didn’t care, that we were in this kind of danger.
Biden’s Decline Was Obvious All Along
Biden has evidenced the kind of aggression and inappropriate affect that is highly characteristic of dementia for years. In March 2020, while campaigning, he started yelling at a Detroit worker that the guy was “full of shit.” This WXYZ-TV (the local Detroit news station) video shows him yelling into the guy’s face and making a direct threat to hit him. Here’s a Stephen Colbert segment describing the interaction as “almost leading to fisticuffs.” This was, and is, staggering behavior for a candidate for any office, much less the office of POTUS. It suggests, at the very least, serious difficulty maintaining either emotional control when challenged or an understanding of appropriate behavior.
There are many possibilities for what’s wrong with Biden, but all of them have some level of dementia involved. The aggression and inability to maintain appropriate behavior with emotional control—to reiterate, he literally threatened to physically assault a voter, inches away from the voter’s face, while on camera campaigning for President of the United States—all point to moderately progressed dementia, and that was four years ago.
Another data point suggesting dementia is his improved appearance during a rally in North Carolina the day after the debate, during which the “cold” we were told accounted for his voice and some of his slowness, had magically disappeared. Sundowning affects people with many types of dementia, and it causes them to be at their cognitive worst from late afternoon into evening. Biden’s described “good” hours fit the sundown pattern perfectly.
In this Twitter thread, a doctor and former member of Congress carefully (while clarifying that she is not diagnosing) discusses some of the possibilities of what may be going on with Biden, including Parkinson’s or Lewy Body disease. The thread fills up with people who saw family members diagnosed with these illnesses commenting on the similarities and how eerie it is to see the POTUS behaving like their loved ones while everyone pretends the elephant in the room isn’t there. I empathize with their experiences, as I experienced a very minor version of that while watching the debate and remembering the old man at the nursing home.
To be sure, there were some who had the courage to call it out all along. Bret Weinstein started talking about Biden’s decline as soon as he got into the 2020 race, well before it was within the Overton window to do so. Here is just one example from 2020, where he tweeted in part, “I take zero pleasure in broadcasting evidence of the obvious cognitive decline of an old man. But the DNC is hiding--or failing to fully hide--a fact of staggering national significance.”
A Coup in Plain Sight
The debate proves something that many of us have believed to be happening all along: Joe Biden is not actually serving as President of the United States. He may be signing what his wife and various staffers tell him to sign, but he is not making decisions. The man’s cognitive decline precludes him being the one who is actually in charge.
We cannot find out who is responsible for opening the border, deciding to grant Iran a $10 billion sanctions waiver, or committing any of the other grievous errors of the last four years. We cannot subpoena them to testify before Congress or otherwise hold them to account. All we know for sure is that it’s not Joe Biden.
DOJ special counsel Robert Hur declined to prosecute Biden because he’s “an elderly man with a failing memory” and rather than release the tapes, thus proving their constant assertion that in private Biden is as sharp as a tack, the Biden administration put the tapes behind executive privilege.
That incident alone, in and of itself, should have caused our commentators to start talking about a national emergency.
This has left those of us who saw it, but couldn’t prove it—because unlike the cabinet, VP, press secretary, White House press corps and other Democratic party power brokers, we had no access directly to the man—in an awkard position. We must pay lip service to the horrible truth but go on with life as if Biden were the actual President, using disclaimers of the sort that I did in my recent essay: “I think Biden has severe cognitive dysfunction, but for the sake of this essay and contrast let’s assume he’s in conscious control of his words.”
A coup has occurred in plain sight.
And it has been going on for years now, something that many of the loudest voices declaring January 6, 2021 an attempted coup have either lied about or failed to recognize.
Even accepting the most dramatic interpretation of January 6—that it was a failed coup attempt—at face value, everyone claiming to vote for Biden because of January 6 is voting to continue an ongoing coup out of anger at a past coup attempt.
Who is actually in charge? I don’t know and wouldn’t presume to guess, but I would be willing to bet that I know who, at the very least, does know.
That would be the woman in this video who speaks to the President of the United States exactly the way I spoke to my three-year-old charge when I was a nanny.
“Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question!”
Only a proferred reward, carefully calibrated to let the child choose between two acceptable-to-the-adult possibilities, was missing.
“Do you want to choose an Elmo video to watch or a Berenstein Bears book to read before your nap?”
The Role of Trump Derangement Syndrome
I think “Trump Derangement Syndrome” gets overused and overdiagnosed—badly. I was recently accused of it myself, many times by many different Trump supporters, because in the essay I wrote giving a model for how to think about Trump, I said this:
I think he has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, of the sort that makes a person so desperate for praise and approval that it’s fairly pathetic. That’s why it’s so easy to manipulate him by praising him. He was a millionaire by age 8, from what I’ve read. Rich people, especially people who grow up rich, often never have real relationships. They don’t face real challenge and disappointment, as people are often too afraid to displease them—for fear of losing access to the money and power. He’s a blustery, womanizing bullshitter. I would rather be alone and celibate until I die than ever be with a man who is remotely like him in character, mannerisms, interests, curiosity, or myriad other factors. I am repulsed by almost everything about him, except many (not all) of his policies.
I was accused of TDS for that paragraph, which was one part of an essay concluding that despite Trump’s many flaws, people who are—unlike me—going to vote at all, should vote for Trump. It got over ten thousand readers, but it didn’t praise Trump, and that was enough to get me diagnosed with TDS by his sycophants.
So yes, TDS is a meme and like most of the good ones, it’s badly overused.
But also like most of the good memes, it has an element of truth. In this case, a large element of truth.
The two commentators with TDS who I once took very seriously—because both of them were powerfully positive influences on me when I first escaped the terrible circumstances of my childhood—are Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan.
I recently re-listened to the October 2020 edition of Sam’s podcast wherein they made the case that people should vote for Biden.
Not only did they make no reference to Biden’s cognitive decline—meaning they either missed it entirely or saw it and lied by omission in not bringing it up—they evidence a freakish example of why “derangement” is the correct word for it.
Sullivan and Harris attribute mental illness to Trump, not Biden, citing Trump’s unusually high level of physical stamina as being, in and of itself, evidence for mental illness.
Time stamp: 28:50.
Sam: “He's got he's got one dial that's not tuned to the worst possible position. I envy him his energy. That's just the way he has always campaigned. I mean, that is there's something quite amazing.
Andrew: “There is something there is something about mental illness that can provide that kind of energy. That's why it's inexhaustible, because it's built upon a real psychosis within. It's real desperate need never to sit still. I mean, the man has clearly never spent a moment in reflection, never spent a moment in silence, I doubt. You get no impression this man has an interior life. It's entirely outer-directed. It's an empty void within that is constantly seeking affirmation and in that desperation has a kind of unbelievable energy that also in the past defeated his creditors, defeated anyone, anybody rival of his in the real estate….”
The closest they get to expressing a hint of fear, or even just recognizing, Biden’s mental state is in this statement from Sullivan (time stamp 1:15:52):
“And in my darker moments, I think Biden is just out of it and will cave and will will bring in so many crazy ass Wokeys into the situation that it will all become terrible.”
Trump Derangement Syndrome—by which I mean not a profound dislike for the man, which I share, but rather the kind of intensely personal, deeply affecting revulsion to a politician that makes you get a clinical depression because he won an election (Sullivan) or, despite having two children, speculate about how suicide would be preferable to becoming anything like Trump (Harris)—prevents people from seeing the plainly obvious.
It also prevents people from thinking clearly, and therefore speaking honestly, about where we are. In his response piece to the debate, Sam Harris wrote:
If half of what Democrats fear from a second Trump term were real, how could the Democratic Party have allowed our democracy to slide this close to the precipice? The prevailing feeling among those inside the Biden campaign should be shame; outside it, fury.
He’s so, so close to getting it. So close. Maybe, just as Biden desperately needs the people closest to him to have an honest talk with him, someone close to Sam could do the same. If there is anyone in his circle who’s allowed to really challenge him, perhaps that person will point out to him that running Biden presents massive evidence that no, as a matter of fact, half of what Democrats fear from a second Trump term is not real.
Sam should ask himself what else the media has lied about, either directly or by omission. What else that they pretend to believe is an existential threat do they tacitly admit is nothing of the kind? What other media narratives is he just accepting, and on what topics, because he desperately wants to live in a world where the insitutions are still trustworthy?
To his credit, Andrew Sullivan had been calling for Biden to withdraw already, but he too is missing the obvious. In his response piece, he writes:
That the Democrats would offer him as the only alternative to what they regard as the end of liberal democracy under Trump is proof that they are either lying about what they claim are the stakes or are utterly delusional. If Trump is that dangerous, why on earth are you putting forward a man clearly in the early stages of dementia against him? Have you decided to let Trump win by default because you’re too scared to tell an elderly man the truth?
And if they have not told him the truth on this, what else are they afraid to tell him?
Again, he’s very close to getting it. The correct question to ask is not, “What else are they afraid to tell him?”
The correct question to ask now is: “What other pieces of reality are they either lying about or failing to recognize?”
I hope I’m wrong, but I predict that in October of this year, even if Biden is the nominee, Sam and Andrew will do what they did in October 2016 and October 2020. They will have a two-hour conversation about how morality itself demands voting for Biden. They will choose to vote for the continuation of a coup in plain sight, citing, in part, anger at January 6, which they perceive as a past failed coup attempt.
They will miss the irony entirely.
Or pretend to.
How To Spot An Honest, Principled Commentator
This section mentions Bret Weinstein extensively, with receipts for my case that he’s the model of the kind of commentator that the debate shows we desperately need right now. Yes, he is a personal friend. Bias acknowledged. Readers must decide for themselves if respect, admiration, and affection for my friend has made me interpret the record falsely.
The key to recognizing a good scientific hypothesis is whether or not it has predictive power. And the key to recognizing a good scientist is whether he or she can own how much predictive power his or her hypotheses have. A good scientist must objectively look at his or her hypotheses and accurately recognize both what a hypothesis predicts well and where it shows the need for refinement.
When it comes to politics, I see an honest, principled commentator as someone willing to do two things. One, he or she must describe reality, even when it goes against the narratives that are within the Overton Window of what we are supposed to admit we see when we look at reality. Two, he or she must be willing to advocate for an outcome contrary to his or her desires if that is necessary in the service of principles.
In 2020, Bret and his co-host and wife, Heather Heying, regularly called out Biden’s cognitive decline on their podcast, but I want to focus on how long Bret, in particular, has been calling out the national emergency of having Biden making nuclear decisions.
I spent several days of the spring of 2022 with “Kamala Harris 2022” ringing in my ears, thanks to Bret.
On April 29, 2022, I wrote three pages in my journal. Here is page one:
The day before I wrote that, episode 124 of the DarkHorse podcast livestream aired. Here’s a link, queued to the part I was reacting to in my journal, and a quote:
“We have allowed maniacs to mismanage our system so badly that the only rational course of action is for Kamala Harris to ascend to the Presidency. Let’s put it this way. You don’t know on what day the generals are going to wake up the President and say ‘look, let me explain to you what the situation is. We have 15 minutes to figure out what to do next.’ We don’t know when that’s going to happen. We can’t afford any nights in which the President is going to be awoken to answer a question as serious as ‘Do we launch the nuclear weapons?’ and have it be Joe Biden in his current condition.” —Bret Weinstein, April 28, 2022.
We Are In Trouble
America’s enemies are going to be making decisions based on the newly revealed weakness of having a POTUS suffering from obvious dementia. They know that the POTUS alone is authorized to make the decisions about nuclear war—and many other issues that are nearly as important. And they know that the current POTUS being woken up in the middle of the night and asked to think—hell, to dress himself and tie his own shoes—is an invitation to chaos, a cross between the set-up for a B-movie and a medical emergency.
That is an emergency, for the sakes of our men and women in uniform as well as for the rest of us, who count on them to secure our freedom.
Megyn Kelly interviewed Steve Bannon on this topic, which is worth watching.
The political fallout from the debate is potentially massive, but first all of us should be thinking about our media diets.
I am not advocating a policy of information silo. I personally both read and listen to podcasts from across the political spectrum, because I want to understand what people are saying, thinking, and talking about from all sides.
But it’s important to reflect on these choices, to evaluate them critically.
No time is better than the present, as the revelation of Biden’s dementia is seen clearly by so many people for the first time, for that kind of reflection.
We are barraged with information from all sides, and the voices we choose to listen to really matter.
Who do we listen to? Who do we respect? Why?
Did that person see this coming? Why or why not?
Has this person been calling out Biden’s cognitive decline all along? Why or why not?
Give those questions some thought, and talk to your kids about them.
Democracy depends on many things, including voters having the common sense to learn from our mistakes.
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.
Said this in another Substack comment section like two weeks ago but.....
The best indicator of dementia and or evil in a human being may be the denial or lack of recognition of Joe Biden's dementia.
I also had a visceral feeling that Biden might walk in attack mode towards Trump…