Response to Biden's Sept. 1 Speech

Comments are turned on for paid subscribers; if you aren’t one, please see the announcement in the Announcement & Housekeeping section at the bottom of this post.

Life After Twitter Is Better

My personal experience on the evening of September 1, 2022, strikes me as serious affirmation of my thesis that Twitter is detrimental to having a good life, one with authentic connections to other human beings.

When Biden gave his speech on Thursday night, I was out to dinner with a friend. I left Twitter voluntarily; he was banned for telling the truth. He is fabulous company, charming and hilarious. We talk about anything and everything, and it’s fun even when we disagree. Hanging out with him in person is edifying on the deepest level, in part because he can follow all my math talk without being a trained mathematician himself. He is, as we say here in New England, wicked smaht.

If I have the timing right, when Biden took the stage we were discussing the applicability of Bayes’ theorem for contextual analysis of public figures and policy, and when Biden left the stage we were hugging goodbye in the parking lot. This was shortly after he gave me his take on how the film version of Carrie compares to the book.

It was a fun, happy, edifying way to spend an evening.

If I were still on Twitter, I’d have spent last night live-tweeting Biden’s speech, responding from the emotion of the moment without any real reflection, and managing the dopamine flow of reading and reacting to other people’s interactions with my live tweeting.

Twitter really does make everything worse.

Five people emailed and asked me to write about the speech last night, as well as my predictions for the midterms. Here goes.

President Biden’s September 1, 2022 Address to the Nation

Biden gave a speech with optics so horrifyingly bad that it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t done on purpose. The harsh red lighting, the in-your-face inappropriateness of having Marines present at a campaign event, the dystopian aura created by both—it was both shocking and alarming. The impression he gave was that his political enemies are enemies of the state, backed up by military force.

The speech itself was full of outrage bait, starting with the declaration that it was being given on sacred ground.

I stopped to see Independence Hall in Philadelphia when I moved from the South to New England. I wanted to visit the birthplace of American government. I don’t know if this is still the case, but at the time (summer of 2014) the area with the historic sites, near the Liberty Bell if I recall correctly, had a designated “free speech zone.” It made me weep. The dystopian horror of a “free speech zone” there broke my heart.

The only “free speech zone” I agree to respect is the one between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.

That sounds a bit beside the point, but it isn’t.

Biden’s speech was demagogic, declaring that half the country are enemies of democracy, committed to “fear and darkness” over “hope, unity, and optimism.” He referred repeatedly to political violence, to the false dichotomy he claims “MAGA Republicans” believe in—that they won or else someone cheated—and claimed that these people only love their country when they win.

The overall imagery, with the dark red and sinister lighting, was quasi-demonic. I do not mean that to be hyperbolic. Growing up in fundamentalist Christianity, I was part of many theatrical productions as a child, ones meant to scare people into accepting Jesus as their personal savior. Dark, harsh, red lighting is what we used to represent Satan and hell, as well as the Antichrist in any production that used those characters. It reminded me of those plays and the Saturdays I spent painting theatrical backdrops red for this purpose.

The demonization of his political enemies was propaganda meant to be red meat for his base, it seemed to me—to motivate turnout in November. It was a hate-gasm for the Enemy and the Other.

Two things jumped out at me above all others—his repeated use of the word democracy, and his repeated references to political violence. More on those in a moment.

I watched the speech twice, but I encourage you not to trust my take on it. Make up your own mind. I read it first, and then watched, because he mumbles and my hearing is an issue.

It is a different experience to watch vs read it. The New York Times has a transcript here.

The Low-Hanging Fruit That I Want to Ignore

Pointing out hypocrisy is easy. It’s so easy that it borders on being cheap. But the entire speech was so full of hypocritical projection that it’s the only thing of any substance upon which to comment.

“Democracy” was invoked over and over. It’s hard to know if he’s unaware of the fact that we are not a democracy, or if he was deliberately trying to muddy the water. (Probably the latter, but he’s not in the best cognitive shape of his life, so I’m not confident the agenda is his, anyway.)

Democracy is mob rule, the will of the majority being forced on everyone else.

A constitutional republic is what the Founders gave us.

This is not splitting hairs, and it matters. In a democracy, the role of government eventually ends up being simply to impose the will of the majority on the minority.

In a constitutional republic, the role of government is to protect the rights of the individual, allowing each person to maximize her own pursuit of happiness with the least possible interference and barriers from the state.

He asserted that “MAGA Republicans” do not respect the constitution or the rule of law. This from a guy who sees the Constitution as a barrier to prevent him from doing what he wants — witness last week’s student loan insanity — and who chose as his VP someone who raised funds to get rioters out of jail so they could burn more buildings and loot some more.

What is Violence, Joe?

Over and over again, he asserted that political violence is wrong and must be condemned. But what is violence? Is it words? Is it the “stochastic terrorism” of showing videos on Twitter voluntarily filmed by doctors to advertise their services? Is it the “malinformation” of telling the truth, but in a way that causes people to distrust the government? Is violence misgendering? Is it a parent who hesitates to let their confused child take puberty blockers or have her healthy breasts removed?

Condemnations of political violence, from the leader of the party that has re-defined violence to mean “words we don’t like” or even “words we do like but said at the wrong time and in the wrong way,” are profoundly terrifying, because the likelihood isn’t that he means “don’t do physical harm to other human beings or property.” The likelihood is that he means “don’t express disagreement with us.”

Love of Country

“You can’t love your country only when you win. It’s fundamental.”

This line from the speech made me laugh out loud. The audacity that the party of “systemic racism is so bad, so crippling and overwhelming, that we must bail protestors and rioters out of jail so they can keep up the mass gathering during a respiratory pandemic” would dare to invoke love of country — that’s a farce.

Love of country? Who could possibly love a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist hellpit where only wealthy heterosexual white male Christians have a shot at success or happiness?

Or could it be possible that those narratives—the ones they are feeding daily to kids in K-12 and that I am still paying off college debt for having learned—are bullshit, and they know it?

Which is it? Is the United States of America the worst oppressor of all, or should we love it at all times?

False Dichotomies

“Democracy cannot survive on one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: Either they win or they were cheated. And that’s where the MAGA Republicans are today.”

There are absolutely people on the right who believe this about elections, and it’s a problem. I know hundreds of people on the right, from having grown up in Alabama and Mississippi, and have several thousand Substack readers, many of whom are on the right and send me email, and the paid ones sometimes comment. That’s a lot of people on the right, and at least three, perhaps four, of them have this view. It is definitely A Thing. (None of those people have the power to do anything more than post on the internet, thank goodness.)

Personally, I am a lot more afraid of the people who have the cultural and legal power to “fortify” elections and have their own false dichotomy — either they win or it’s an asteroid headed to earth, a once-in-a-lifetime moral emergency for which conspiracies are warranted (or at least justifiable).

The Deeper Meaning of Biden’s Speech

This was propagandistic hypocrisy, and nothing more.

Predictions

Will this speech affect the midterms? If so, how?

My analysis, prior to this speech, was this: the Democrats have been picking up momentum as the midterms approach. Ben Shapiro, on his podcast, recently attributed this to several factors, including the overturning of Roe vs Wade. I believe this particular factor to be very important.

I am personally not voting in November 2022 as a consequence of the Republican response to the overturning of Roe vs Wade. Red states have passed draconian laws with no rape exceptions, laws whose effect (regardless of intent) is allowing evil men to choose who will become the mother of his offspring, against her will and without her consent, fully confident that the law will mandate his choice by forcing his victim(s) to give birth—even if he chooses a fourth or fifth grade girl.

Laws like the one in Alabama, which allows abortion only to save the mother’s life, mean that women are faced with denial of care in some tragic and horrifying situations. I won’t go into detail because I don’t have permission to share it online, but I personally know of a situation in Alabama where a woman desperately needed care for an inevitable stillbirth, but she couldn’t get it unless/until the situation got so bad that her life was in imminent danger. She suffered terribly for weeks, walking around as a graveyard for her dead child, because inducing labor of a stillborn before an arbitrary point on a calendar would count as an “abortion” under the law, in the best judgment of her physicians and their attorneys. It was a violation of her human rights and an assault on her physical and mental health for which the lawmakers should never be forgiven.

I don’t care if that wasn’t the lawmakers’ intention. I hold the left responsible for the unintended consequences of their governmental overreach, and the same standard applies to the right—they have to own these cases.

The Republicans have pendulum-swung into extremism on the abortion issue in many states. If they’d done something reasonable and sane, like first trimester limits with exceptions for rape, life and health of the mother, and medical catastrophes, they probably would have still lost a little momentum, I’m guessing, but they wouldn’t have lost much. They wouldn’t have lost me.

Issues related to the abuse of children matter the most to me, and nothing else even comes close.

I won’t vote for the party that is trying to mandate puberty blockers for confused children, double mastectomies for little girls in the midst of a social contagion, unfair competition for female athletes, and obliterating the legal recognition of the fact that humans are a sexually dimorphic species. I won’t vote for the party that still — STILL — has toddlers in Head Start programs being forcibly masked, that let teacher unions shut down schools, cutting off the primary way that child abuse gets reported and children get helped: through teacher reports.

I also won’t vote for the party that requires raped fourth graders growing up in families like the one I grew up in to give birth to half- or step-siblings—that wants as many children as possible born regardless of how trauma-filled, desperate, and full of suffering their lives will be.

I suspect that I am a fairly extreme case — that most voters who’ve drifted away from the Republicans and towards the Democrats as a result of abortion don’t care nearly as much as I do (or else they’d be non-voters, not leaning Democrat again).

If I force myself to adopt the mental framework of someone who cares a lot less about the plight of raped little girls—someone who lacks the personal experience I have—and puts abortion rights on the same level as many other important issues, then this speech hits me as disgusting, scary, and appallingly obvious propaganda. It makes me trust the Democrats less.

Does it make me, in this hypothetical, actually swing all the way back and lean towards voting Republican again?

I don’t know.

If I HAD to bet real money on the outcome, I would bet on a mixed outcome. Democrats and Republicans will each lose some seats and gain some seats, and whether or not the control of Congress flips will be too close to call. If pressed and I had to specifically say, I’d guess Republicans take over Congress, but not by much—not by a majority that gives them real power. By a slim majority that means constant bargaining and deal-making, and thus keeps much of anything from being accomplished.

That’s not a very satisfying answer, I realize. But it’s an honest one. That is my best guess.

Thank you to the folks who requested this post; I took today off to extend the holiday weekend, so the timing worked out well.

Announcement & Housekeeping

Comments are turned on for paid subscribers. Email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com if you would like to participate but can’t afford a paid subscription. A couple of you wrote to me after my most recent post and offered to sponsor paid subscriptions for people who can’t afford them, as a way of supporting my decision not to apply for student loan forgiveness, on principle.

If you would like to sponsor a paid subscription, my CashApp is $HollyMathNerd. By the time Substack and Stripe get their cuts, an annual subscription nets about $53. If you’ve hesitated to ask for a free one, I hope knowing that several have been sponsored will nudge you to go ahead!

If you are enjoying reading my Substack, passing the link around is helpful and appreciated. Thank you!