Biden vs. Trump: a reality check

Check your premises.

Let’s examine the issues methodically, focusing on something simple, verifiable and straightforward, then considering the ramifications.
I’m an outsider, living in Europe, and I believe looking at things from a distance may help.

Scene from the last Presidential Debate:
Biden shouts confidently: “I never said I oppose fracking.”
Trump complains and says that’s on tape.
Biden challenges him to show the alleged tape.

After the debate, of course the Trump campaign obliges.

Case closed, right?

This reminds me of what David Wood says about Muslim apologists: they make up stuff that sounds ludicrous to anyone in the know, but their astounding confidence is the only thing that matters, because 99% of their audience are ignorant, swayed by the attitude, and won’t ever check the sources, so that 1% that finds out the truth could be silenced or bullied into submission.

 

First step: recognizing lies.

I’ve seen “fact-checkers” declare it’s actually Trump that was “lying”, because Biden wasn’t talking about an outright ban of fracking, rather he was -and is- suggesting that’s gonna be phased out gradually, through a sort of compromise.
In practice supposedly non-partisan journalists/experts were trying to fight Trump by defending the words Biden ought to have uttered: their sanitized version should be treated as the actual content of his declarations.
Ah, the subtleties of wordplay. If you attack a lie from the unapproved side, you are the liar somehow. But I digress.

Now, many people, including the insufferable pack of blue checkmark Twitter minions inserting snide comments under Trump’s tweet (also thanks to the visibility that Twitter gives them through various forms of prioritization), seem to be willing to discuss this incident as if it had to be about fracking, fossil fuels and future renewable energy development policies.
Of course energy is a very important subject matter, but focusing on that aspect totally misses the point.

Here’s the main takeaway: Biden here is showing his true colors. A consummated politician, he knows he has to appear convincing when delivering a line. The truthfulness of the statement itself doesn’t even come into play.

This is how this episode is significant: the beauty of it is that you rarely get such a clear-cut case, put in front and center. It’s been recorded, that’s him, the assertion is easily verifiable… what else do you want?
This short clip isn’t at all about energy policy. It’s about seeing with your eyes what a professional liar looks like.

If you think about it, the best line of defense the Democrats/media could come up with is that of saying that he “misspoke”… basically he’s not a liar, he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The electorate should take for granted that the actual authoritative version of his speeches is the one that those working behind the scene will patiently illustrate, correct and explain afterwards.
In other words: vote for him and trust his handlers to decide the best course of action, taking into account their ideological objectives and the political calculations on what promises could be palatable for the average undecided voter at a given time.
He will be there, partly cynical, partly oblivious, delivering ever-shifting prepared one-liners, shamelessly denying he’s ever contradicted himself. A public face, an empty suit.
The media will provide cover.

Could you possibly find an alternative scenario where the opening video clip could be explained differently?

Of course you can find other clips where he promises something different, including phasing out fracking, implicitly excluding an outright ban. That’s part of the problem: his promises are empty, tailored to the situation, but he’s uncannily skilled at playing the part of a man of his word: supposedly preoccupied with saying nothing but the truth, with the passion of a saint being martyred.

 

Second step. Become aware of the bigger picture: Hunter Biden’s millions

Now, once you’ve realized that by just looking at Biden vigorously defending his position you genuinely cannot say if he’s lying through his teeth, or if he’s stating the truth, or if he’s just being his old goofy self or even becoming senile…

Would you be willing to reconsider the “already debunked” Hunter Biden story? The one that the media circus, when forced to discuss it, just labels as “Russian disinformation” (with no basis to back this claim), so that it’s quickly dismissed without even beginning to discuss the evidence?

I’m ideally talking to undecided people that got most of their information through the usual media channels.

Are you willing to entertain the thought that a consummate liar takes advantage of the fact that normal, decent people won’t be able to put themselves in his shoes, therefore they will always give him at least some credit, since they themselves couldn’t assert something so vigorously if it weren’t at least partially true?
That’s one skill that is immensely helpful if you pursue a career in politics.

 

What about the concept of politicians enriching themselves through favors to lobbyists: isn’t this necessarily corrupting the whole process? Maybe the Washington Swamp is really as bad as those deplorables insist it is. See here for instance: “on average, for every dollar spent on influencing politics, the nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government”.

Since the 90s, ALL the laws are essentially written directly by lobbyists, that then pay politicians to pass them. The bribe occurs in a form that is perfectly legal, because the money didn’t go directly from the company to the representative voting in favor of the company! Have you any idea what kind of animals decades of this system breed? Are you surprised that many politicians are then often willing to get money from foreign companies and governments, even when that’s incredibly harmful to American interest, not to mention illegal?

 

Could you tentatively concede that people like me, observing American politics from the outside, could be right in describing the whole Russian Interference / Mueller Investigation saga as a slow motion coup that failed?
When one of the leaders of the Democratic Party, the creepy Senator Chuck Schumer, openly threatens the President on TV by saying that the intelligence community has “six way to Sunday” to get back at him, don’t you see how dysfunctional this is? Counting on professional information manipulators that work in secret to destroy your political opponent, even if he’s the President, and even proudly announcing that in public, in front of a sympathetic news anchor…

Since the beginning of Russiagate, not knowing any details then, I had nonetheless quite clear in my mind what was happening, in broad terms: a pretend external threat to the elections not only represented a good, scary story to tell to the public to tarnish the non-establishment candidate and voices, but it gave the deep state the opportunity to use extensive powers to spy, influence, threaten, collect data, muddy the waters with fabricated stories. As always, intelligence agencies are mostly (only) effective when used internally against citizens, which in theory wouldn’t even be allowed in a democracy.
For three long years the media pounded relentlessly beating this dead horse, even after details began (and continued) to emerge of how the Obama administration (and their FBI and CIA allies) were involved in the fabrications, in the targeting of people around Trump for judicial abuse, in the leaks to the press.
Nothing came out of it eventually and the Mueller Investigation was a no-show, but think of it: they were able to cover their tracks, block Trump’s people in many ways, defuse an investigation on Hillary Clinton.
And since they felt they absolutely had to stage an impeachment show, they even concocted a last minute, alternative impeachable offense with the Ukraine story: where the crimes that are glossed over in order to accuse Trump of trying to uncover them (!) weren’t Clinton’s anymore, but Biden’s!
You really can’t make this stuff up. Historians will be baffled.

 

Do you realize the intrinsic danger of a majority of Americans being in a deep state of denial, basically saying “This cannot possibly be true” and ignoring the disturbing symptoms of a societal and political decay?
I was right in predicting Trump’s victory more than 15 months in advance. I was right in assessing the nature of Russiagate. Maybe, as an old saying goes, the husband is the last person to know he’s been cheated on by his wife?

 

Do you recognize the fundamental asymmetry in the way the media treats conservatives and progressives? You cannot possibly believe that the thought of being protected from public scrutiny doesn’t favor a gradual increase of the levels of corruption and overreach in the Democrats and their allies.

It’s a remarkable disconnect: there were so many scandals, one after another, during the Obama era, competing for that minuscule sliver of airtime and visibility, and being solemnly and hurriedly dismissed by the mainstream media chorus of reporters and pundits, that Barack Obama sounded genuinely credible in declaring his tenure “scandal-free!”

 

Down the rabbit hole

When you see Joe Biden boasting about strong-arming the Ukrainian President and having a prosecutor fired, isn’t this a clear indication of the fact he was not only engaged with his family in a vast influence-peddling scheme (although less sophisticated than the Clintons’), but he’s reckless and shameless since he “knew” nobody would ever dare incriminate him for that?
I mean, “come on, man!” Did we really need some extra corroborating evidence? His good-for-nothing, drug-addicted son, Hunter, lacking any knowledge of pertinent foreign languages or the oil industry, was appointed to the board of directors of the Ukrainian oil company Burisma. The only defense of this kind of deal that the Democrat-Media Complex could come up with is that of changing the subject.

Burisma was under investigation in Ukraine. Biden got the prosecutor fired. The new prosecutor had no credibility nor qualification. The investigations fizzled out and they were exonerated. Supposedly that’s just a coincidence!
The official defense of Biden, as expounded by the mainstream media, is that somehow the intent of the then-Vice President was that of weeding out corruption abroad (!), as a one-time event in the history of the United States: dabbling with the micromanagement of foreign countries, but only in one instance, where (oops!) the newly appointed figure was by far more suspect of being corrupted!
(I understand a tribunal would need to apply different standards, but in a healthy political environment, exploits like this should guarantee that your political career is over.)
Put yourself in the shoes of a scrupulous public servant that ends up in the cross-hair of such partisan media machine: you do your best to defend justice, but you’re fired and replaced by a corrupt friend of president Poroshenko, plus somehow in the official truth served to the world the roles are reversed, and even a Wikipedia page on the Biden-Burisma scandal (that is locked from modifications) treats you as the bad guy… Yes, of course: according to Wikipedia, what the credible media say is the truth. That scandal is just a fantasy, a conspiracy theory that only Trump fans could obsess about.

Well, we got the extra evidence anyway, in the form of a laptop computer that to this day nobody disputed was Hunter Biden’s, containing lots of compromising information, mostly in the form of email messages. That’s data that has been corroborated by many different sources, including an ex business associate of the Bidens, Tony Bobulinski, that came out explaining how he had encountered twice Joe Biden in person, to discuss the business deals that supposedly the then-Vice President kept strictly out of and knew nothing about.
Both Bobulinski and the laptop confirm that the Biden family had questionable business deals in many countries across the world, including China, and had nothing to offer to their partners besides the fact that Joe Biden was a powerful politician that could favor them.

If you read anything about this story, you may have noticed that it wasn’t covered by the mainstream media (and it was proactively suppressed by social media like Facebook and Twitter), although you could find media entities in the same approved circle that issued exculpatory articles, effectively acting as part of the Biden campaign.
The whole story has been labeled a Russian interference operation, with absolutely no evidence. The only corroboration: people in the intelligence community (i.e. those that are suspect of participating in operations against Trump) said that’s very likely the case.
This is quite convenient because it summarily dismisses the entire story without having to discuss anything of substance. Bonus points: the official line of defense of the Biden campaign, which is the most vague and indignant possible, gets an indirect validation through media and experts’ mimicry. If everybody that matters says so!

Hostile leftist Twitter commentators seemed obsessed with insignificant details like the fact that the computer repairman that allegedly was given the laptop is supposedly “legally blind”, as if that somehow meant the story isn’t plausible: of course someone who’s tasked with running a shop and replacing tiny, delicate parts isn’t really blind (but could possibly be unable to identify a person from a distance).
While it is reasonable to say that the story of the Hunter Biden computer left at the repair shop could be at least partially not true, this doesn’t invalidate the authenticity and importance of the material! Who chooses, honestly, to focus on a side issue when there’s ample evidence of a major scandal in front of them?

But think about it: if, as it’s now painfully obvious, the entire FBI is for the most part hostile to Trump (see the utterances of that sociopath called Peter Strzok as a prime example), how could a foreign spy, or someone from the Trump camp, create a fake story where the repairman gave the laptop to the FBI and waited for months, expecting them to follow through, if this weren’t absolutely true?
In fact, in the case of a fabrication, the FBI could officially deny that such an exchange ever happened. The whole story would have been sunk! Which means the FBI did in fact receive the PC as evidence.

To put things in perspective: it has been now revealed that the Biden family has been under investigation by the FBI for money laundering since 2019!

Now, the fact that they chose to sit on that material is particularly damning, considering nobody said a peep while the Democratic primaries were steered towards Joe Biden’s nomination, nor during the impeachment charade where Pelosi&Co. were at least formally trying to remove from office Trump for… asking a foreign leader to investigate in the dealings of a corrupt politician…

This is the new normal: trying to find evidence of corruption, when an opponent is quite obviously corrupt, and if he wins could then ruin the future of the country irreparably, somehow is to be treated as the real crime, because it’s all about you trying to prevail over him. Meanwhile his wrongdoings should get a pass!

The weight of Truth.

…But even so, Biden and the others have to thread lightly now, because nobody wants to be caught declaring something specific and factually false. That’s why the vague “Oh, it’s a Russian conspiracy, no further comment” line comes in handy.
Let’s say someone in Biden camp were for instance to declare that a certain damning email message is a forgery, but then forensic experts could authenticate the message independently. As a consequence Biden’s credibility would be officially ruined, plus they couldn’t subsequently use a different line of defense, for instance trying to explain away its content as a misunderstanding.
You don’t want to discuss the authenticity of documents that you don’t control anymore and are already out.
Unless… Well, if they were a forgery, of course you would say so! If you’re innocent you trust the truth to defend itself.
(Fake documents have flaws that will eventually emerge.)

Which means the content of the messages is authentic!
Which means Joe Biden is shamelessly lying.
Here we get back to my original point: when he’s so direct and adamant in his denying he knew anything about his family business, and pretending this story is just Russian propaganda, he’s again the prime example of a professional liar that we discussed before.

 

Even if you weren’t seeing any value to this story of corruption; even if you didn’t care for his inclination to favor China’s interests over those of his and your country… and even if you didn’t consider how such an incompetent front-man is vulnerable to blackmail, the perfect puppet in that regard…
Would you seriously consider voting for someone who’s so blatantly trampling over the truth, a guy whose words could never be deciphered, to get at least a sense of what really lies behind?

 

Still not convinced? On one side you have a Biden/Harris campaign that had the gall to choose the slogan “Truth over lies” (!)…
On the other side you get for instance Glenn Greenwald. Here’s the self-published compelling article he wrote on the case, focusing on how the media failed their role and became a propaganda machine for the Dems.

This article is remarkable because:

° Greenwald is a man of the Left!
° His magazine demanded that he modified said article to remove any criticism of Biden before greenlighting it.
° He committed career suicide by resigning from his publication over this censorship attempt!
° He was a co-founder (!) of The Intercept, the independent magazine in question: imagine what it means to leave your creation in the hands of those that morphed it into the opposite of what it was meant to be.

A respected and well-known investigative journalist practically self-implodes in the name of keeping his professional integrity no-matter-what, discussing hard-to-refute evidence, while a circus of lackeys feasts and celebrates, counting on ignorance and the herd effect.
Maybe he was a Russian plant too?

 

If Biden is corrupt, as it seems quite clear now, that’s the one key factor that helped him advance and become the Democrat nominee. Assuming you wanted to believe he’s basically innocent, why on Earth choose him? Were Democrats so short on candidates? Could you name one reason why this happened that doesn’t involve his being a convenient pawn, at the mercy of his handlers and special interest groups?

A Machiavellian plan. If elected he could prove useful, at least for a while, as a docile conduit for the ideological agenda and power grab. Then he could be easily convinced, with the thinly veiled threat of an impeachment for one of his skeletons in the closet, to step back, citing old age and health issues as an official reason, to leave way to the insufferable and cynical Kamala Harris, his “running mate”.

 

Step three. But what about that other guy? Isn’t Trump the liar?

 

Once you realize the magnitude of the problem, you may pause for a moment and ask yourself what’s happening. Is the situation in Washington and in the media really so bad?

But then you might come back with: “Wait! I know that Trump is a liar, how come then the roles are being reversed here? This election should be mostly about Trump, right?”

In other words: since I, Alessandro, support Trump, surely the fact I’m focusing only on the flaws of his opponent should tell us something about how indefensible Trump is, right?

Not so fast. Who told you Trump is the liar? What do you really, positively know about Trump that wasn’t channeled at one point through the mainstream media?

Oh, sure, he’s often imprecise in his citations and figures, or sloppy in differentiating some finer points. He’s boastful; he embellishes and exaggerates. With utterances like “Nobody did more than me for XYZ…” you already know there’s little “fact-checking” to do, beyond recognizing the salesman technique.
He can be nasty, abrasive, unpleasant when confronting adversaries. He’s also a womanizer. Plenty of defects.

But once you’ve come to terms with the fact that the media is proactively hiding the truth and distorting records… could you at least tentatively concede they may have gaslighted you about Trump too?

 

Trump is a racist? Really? How do you know? Have you considered how independent voices could easily debunk the Potemkin Village media construct, by simply reporting the facts (in the provided link, the idea that Trump could really have intended to defend Neonazis in Charlottesville)?
I myself tangentially covered this baseless accusation in the past (see “The racism smear” paragraph here).

Do you remember how they insisted he was a threat to the entire planet with the nuclear codes in his hands, yet he’s the only US President in a long time that didn’t initiate a single war? And in fact he helped some significant peace deals to progress in the Middle East, also defusing the North Korea escalation?

Beyond the obvious case of the years spent discussing imaginary Russian agents coordinating with Trump, how many more media predictions proved to be wrong since his 2016 election?

If Trump is the fascist, how come Antifa and BLM are the ones attacking, threatening, looting and killing? While the simple wearing a MAGA hat exposed many Americans to violent beatings or worse! That approach would have made Mussolini’s Camicie Nere thugs quite proud, I assure you.
How come some American cities spent months at the mercy of the violence perpetrated by those groups? Can you picture the scene of, again, future historians describing a 21-st Century American society where substituting the rule of law with street riots, anarchy, vandalized shops and burned cars became normal?
If Trump is the fascist, how come he didn’t seize the opportunity of the riots to declare martial law, govern with an iron fist, change the rules and accrue his power? Instead he’s been attacked from all sides by forces that control almost all the centers of power.
A strange dictator indeed!

 

Enough with the nonsense. Trump is a blunt instrument, yes. Imperfect. Coarse.
A reaction to the establishment.
A middle finger flipped to the new aristocracy in Washington.

A literal Hail Mary attempt at salvaging the Republic at the last possible moment before capitulating (under the pressure of immigration, the school system, Hollywood and others), to give the successful American societal experiment a fighting chance before it’s too late.

Therefore yes, Joe Biden does represent the kind of power and corruption that people wanted to fight by electing Trump in the first place.
Discussing how astonishingly indefensible Biden is sheds new light on the core issue. It couldn’t be more relevant!

That’s why everybody agrees this is a historical election.

But, you may object, shouldn’t we care about specific policies? Isn’t politics, after all, at least ideally, about what we decide to do? Many voters could -in good conscience- decide they’re going to put up with the corruption, in order to defend certain ideological principles. They’re misguided.

Well, of course we may (wildly!) differ in how we assess the best line of action on a number of issues, but please observe how the Democratic Party is increasingly the party of the Europification (is that a term?) of the USA, so to speak: trying to impose on a still partly functional, otherwise spectacularly successful American society, all the kinds of policy mistakes that sent the Old Continent on a collision course with the metaphorical mountain.
Believe me, I know what it means to live in Europe and sense the fundamental liberties shrinking day by day. Compelled speech and tight controls on the minutiae of one’s life are gradually coming. It’s a ugly, dystopian scenario. And it’s damn real.
(In a way, it was comforting to think that America was still there, as the free place where one could escape to, at least ideally.)

I beg you to notice this fact: there’s a deep connection between the Progressive policy choices, based on the idea of controlling and micromanaging the lives of all citizens for their own good, and the corruption of a political élite that seeks absolute power, and enjoy the cozy feeling of being the benevolent rulers. that are good by definition and therefore above the law.

Civilization is on the balance. Don’t fail us.

One Comment:

  1. Alessandro Grasso

    Here’s a rare sight: a Princeton professor (!) who dares declare he chose Trump, despite how harmful this article could be for his career in the conformist world of Academia.
    He’s quite effective in discussing the disconnect between our reality and the media talking points against the President.
    https://www.newsweek.com/why-i-will-vote-trump-opinion-1543803

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