Biden’s Withdrawal and the Limits of Gaslighting
President Biden's withdrawal from the election is the culmination of months of gaslighting by the Democratic Party and allies in the mainstream media.
Sociopaths often use gaslighting to make victims question their own sanity.
Gaslighting is more than trying to pass off a lie. It is a systematic effort to feed victims so much false information that they begin to question facts that they know to be true and ultimately begin to doubt all of their perceptions of the world. By sowing self-doubt, the sociopath can weaken his victims by destroying their self-confidence. However, there are important limits that the sociopath must keep in mind. Gaslighting can be successfully used only in cases where the lie is at least somewhat plausible. If you repeatedly tell someone that elephants can fly or that the sun is purple, they will regard you as a raving lunatic.
Politicians of both major political parties are masters of gaslighting and are often able to lie with impunity about complex issues. This is because the state of American education, particularly civics, is so abysmal that a large segment of the population can often be fooled. However, the issue must be sufficiently complex and at least somewhat opaque for this technique to work. When you lie to the American people about something that parallels the personal experience of tens of millions of citizens, the lie lacks credibility and no amount of repetition will change this reality.
Over the past several months, Democratic Party politicians and the majority of the mainstream media attempted to gaslight the American people regarding the mental decline of the President of the United States, ignoring or attempting to explain away obvious lapses that so many of us have seen mirrored in our own elderly relatives. This attempt at gaslighting completely collapsed during the fateful debate on June 27. Within a few minutes, tens of millions of Americans were cringing because the obvious mental decline they saw in President Biden was all too similar to what we have seen in our own families. It was excruciatingly difficult to watch at a human level. The President of the United States was utterly humiliated on national television. Even worse, all of America’s enemies saw exactly what we saw.
The trust deficit in our society has grown into a gaping chasm that we may never recover from. For months, the Democratic Party not only denied the President’s decline but used the power of their offices to demonize anyone who dared to bring up the question. The mainstream media was fully complicit in this attempted deception. This was a conspiracy to deceive the American people and it all fell apart on June 27. This was followed by over three weeks of agonizing navel gazing within the Democratic Party, but there were no apologies for the deception. Instead, politicians claimed to be surprised by the President’s decline.
After weeks of pressure from increasingly high-ranking party members, President Biden withdrew his re-election bid on July 21. Perhaps it is fitting that the mainstream media did not “break” this news. Instead, the President chose to post a brief memo on X/Twitter. It is remarkable that a decision of this magnitude was announced to the American people in this manner rather than in a prime-time address to the nation.
There are no mistakes or oversights with communications of this magnitude, so it is clear that the President’s failure to mention Vice President Kamala Harris in his initial X/Twitter post was not an accident. But twenty-seven minutes later, he posted an endorsement of her candidacy. This endorsement is now expected to result in the Vice President facing few, if any, high profile challenges on her path to the Democratic Party nomination.
The bottom line is that numerous people within President Biden’s inner circle and certainly within his family knew of his condition for months, if not years, before his withdrawal from the race. The decision to launch a re-election bid resulted in the usual advantage that any incumbent president has in securing the nomination of his party. The President faced only token challenges and coasted to win a majority of delegates. Members of the Democratic Party were deprived a choice in the matter. The question of who will win the nomination is now in the hands of delegates pledged to President Biden, not in the hands of ordinary Democratic primary voters. It is impossible to conclude that this was not by design or to observe the irony of the Democratic Party purposely disenfranchising its own voters.
The American people are now asked to support Vice President Harris in her bid for the highest office in the land. The obvious problem is that one of the two following statements must be true:
Vice President Harris was in President Biden’s inner circle and had to have observed his decline over the past several months, if not the past several years. If so, she is fully complicit in the effort to gaslight the American people and should be disqualified from consideration.
Vice President Harris was far from President Biden’s inner circle and she can claim to be unaware of his cognitive issues and is genuinely surprised that the situation deteriorated to the point where he could barely put a coherent thought together at the debate. If so, her claims to being a consequential member of the Administration go up in smoke along with any plausible rationale for her candidacy.
Of course, plenty of voters will cast ballots purely along party lines. Other voters will cast ballots based on party platform issues knowing that Vice President Harris is likely to support policy objectives that they agree with. However, those of us who require a minimum level of trust in politicians will have a harder time justifying such a vote. There should be no reward for gaslighting the American people.
If the Democratic Party is smart, they will find a credible candidate who is outside the Washington establishment and can deliver key swing states needed for an electoral college majority. A candidate such as Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, can claim to be “outside the loop” when it comes to the President’s decline and would give the Democrats a chance in a state that they cannot afford to lose. This is just one example, but in my view a credible candidate must come from outside Washington given the severity of the conspiracy that has taken place. The Democratic candidate should also forcefully criticize the actions of the party and level with the American people.
In the aftermath of Watergate, Jimmy Carter ran for President in 1976 pledging that “I will never lie to you.” In retrospect, President Carter was far more honest than recent occupants of the office even though his Presidency ended in failure. The Democratic Party would do well to reflect on the fruits of lying to the American people and pick a nominee who can credibly claim to at least care about basic honesty.
I have long believed that both political parties are corrupt and the Republicans are hardly above lying to the American people. President Trump routinely spins lies and tall tales, and I have been critical of his antics since well before he was inaugurated. He continues to engage in deceit to this day and is equally guilty of gaslighting the American people on numerous occasions. Many Republicans, including J.D. Vance, the party’s candidate for Vice President, initially opposed his behavior but have since fallen into line.
On November 5, I will cast my ninth vote for President of the United States. The options are grim. I can either vote for a very flawed candidate based on which party is more aligned with my policy objectives or refuse to vote for either major party candidate and cast a “protest vote.” A vote for Kamala Harris is out of the question given the conspiracy to hide President Biden’s condition from the American people, not to mention the fact that I disagree with nearly all of her policy positions. A vote for Donald Trump is unpalatable even though I agree with many of his policy positions. A vote for a third party is a way to avoid a distasteful vote for Mr. Trump, but could be an abdication of my duty as a citizen to make a difficult decision.
America had an opportunity to break the corrupt two-party system in 1992 when Ross Perot won nearly twenty million votes. If Mr. Perot had not aborted his run for President in the summer of 1992 and then resumed his candidacy in October, he may well have won the election. In retrospect, I wish he had won if only because his Reform Party might have become a viable third party in the long run. As things stand today, America is as captured by the corrupt two party system as it ever has been.
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