HOW WE LOST JOE BIDEN

Cross-post from The Daily

Joe Biden Was Finally Able To Show Who He Really Is

President Joe Biden sat down with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell for an unedited conversation that lasted almost the entire length of O’Donnell’s show. The interview was revealing because all O’Donnell did was ask intelligent questions with depth and here is the key. He gave Joe Biden room to answer.

Watch the full interview:

The disconnect between the media’s portrayal of Biden as they worked with Democratic elites and Republicans to force Biden out of the race and the person who spent an hour talking to Lawrence O’Donnell is jarring.

However, Biden had a terrible debate against Trump.

Two things can be true.

Incumbent presidents traditionally have terrible first debates. That being said, Joe Biden looked and sounded sick and disinterested until later in the debate when he seemed to realize how it must be looking and tried to turn it around, but the first 20 minutes of that debate were dreadful.

However, Democrats freaked out, the corporate media, which seemed to never want Biden in the White House in the first place, pounced, and Republicans threw gasoline on the fire.

Was the debate an accurate representation of Biden’s abilities?

Absolutely not, but the media went out of its way to mislead voters about Biden in a way that provided invaluable assistance to Donald Trump.

The question is, why did the corporate press mislead voters about Joe Biden?

The Shivving Of Joe Biden Was The Shivving Of America

Years ago before the Washington Post picked Will Lewis, a literal British former tabloid journalist who stands accused in court of covering up illegal news gathering tactics, to run their entire paper, I did a podcast comparing the British tabloid media machine against Meghan Markle to US media coverage of presidential politics.

That topic is all the more relevant today, because both media machines create narratives they sell to the public in the furtherance of the protection of the very powerful.

Maybe you’re wondering why First Lady Jill Biden has been treated with snide contempt and written about from what reads like a middle school perspective or why the media spent a presidential election year telling the unsupported story that President Joe Biden had neurological decline or why a New York Times financial reporter claimed it wasn’t their job to inform people of the President’s financial policies (that helped them).

But now, it’s coming into focus as we see media outlets kissing Trump’s ring, changing their coverage preemptively, and as Oliver Darcy reported in his newsletter Status, potentially burying one of their best talent, Jim Acosta, at midnight. Acosta famously clashed with the incoming serial liar during his first term.

We saw last night an incredible UNEDITED interview of President Biden by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell that absolutely destroyed the media narrative that the President had some kind of cognitive decline. Biden spent nearly an hour with deep, nuanced dives into his presidency.

This is the man we could have had as president again, but the media destroyed him with rumors and lies, cemented in one evening by his “bad debate” against a Gish galloping convicted felon. Yes, by the standards our media uses, Trump “won” that debate. But that’s exactly the problem.

The media standards, such as they are, have been unmasked as propping Trump up via tabloid-style coverage of serious issues. The gossip and drama do a lot to hide in plain sight the bizarre choices made by legacy media and the often nasty, cynical, sarcastic nature of the presentation which is supposed to let the reader know that they too shouldn’t trust what this President and his wife say or do.

But if you look for public evidence to support this attitude under the pretense of protecting “democracy”, it doesn’t exist.

At least one journalist, who then worked for New York Magazine, had a seemingly personal beef with Biden after his team denied her an interview. Later, she would go on record to declare in a gossipy 2024 summer piece that many unnamed Democratic donors and other sources had concerns about his age.

And much later, it would be revealed she (Olivia Nuzzi) was having some kind of sexual/personal relationship with RFK, Jr. — a political opponent of the President’s who used to be a Democrat but was then and is now full MAGA who identifies as “Independent,” but is Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

This relationship seemingly began prior to the point in time during which she claimed she was being told by various Democrats that they had concerns about Biden.

No doubt she was able to gather “concerned” Democrats, after all, the coalition that came for Biden shared many interests, but one stands out: Big tech. From California Democrats to the pundit class to former Democratic Party leaders (we all know who they are, but just in case one is a beloved former President and one was a highly regarded, once-in-a-generation Speaker), they all shared a closeness with tech bros, tech culture.

Many of these same people wanted Biden to fire his FTC Chair, Lina Khan. At the time, big money donors pressured the new Democratic presidential nominee VP Kamala Harris to fire her.

Khan was empowered to actually take action against big businesses and oligarchs, including media conglomerates, big pharma and…. most importantly, Big Tech. Big Tech was so threatened by her that Apple reportedly blocked a podcast host from having her on the show, according to Jon Stewart’s telling below.

When Khan did finally speak with Stewart, he asked her why Big Tech was trying to silence her, why they were so afraid to have these conversations out in the public sphere. She replied that it showed the “dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making in a smaller number of companies.”

Khan also said we needed antitrust and anti-monopoly laws to safeguard against a concentration of economic power because “you don’t want an autocrat of trade in the same way you don’t want a monarch.”

Watch below:

Khan said her job was to protect American public from being “bullied, coerced or tricked” in the marketplace.

Khan said her job was to protect American public from being “bullied, coerced or tricked” in the marketplace.

Sarah covered several Biden Administration policy calls with Khan, one of which was about getting rid of junk fees and forcing companies to make it as easy to unsubscribe as it is to subscribe. Khan came after Chat GTP, she came after alleged anti-trust moves by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Jeff Bezo’s (owner of the Washington Post) Amazon. Both men have met with Trump and made changes at their businesses that accommodate the wishes of Trump.

Khan threatened greedy, powerful corporate powers that are exploiting working people:

And this is the only thing that explains the shivving of Joe Biden, which turned out to be the shivving of America.

President Joe Biden and his administration did their jobs with a level of competency not often witnessed. He even went after plutocrats and oligarchs. The media narrative against him never made sense, even with his stutter and his presentation of faded exhaustion at times, it was clear he was doing the work. The actual work. The hard work. And by all appearances, he relished the job of working for the People.

Understanding the powers behind the misleading narratives about Biden matter because if we are ever to get big money out of politics, we need to understand when we are being manipulated. The machine crafting the narratives has all of the power right now, they’ve even taken social media and traditional media. They’ve taken over the Internet and Google searches. They are crafting a narrative that is beneficial to their interests, which is often detrimental to the People’s interest.

As we prepare to say goodbye to the Biden presidency, let us remember it accurately as the presidency that not only remade American manufacturing and built a strong international alliance against autocracy, but also the presidency that dared to take on Big Business. And for that, he was destroyed by the media and even some in his own party.