Journalism, or press-led mass hysteria? Probing the 'Biden panic'

The "Satanic Panic." That's what the sudden-onset panic about Joe Biden's health most reminds me of. I can't say whether Biden is in good health or is manifesting signs of dementia because I am over here, and Biden is over there, and it's not my damn place to speculate on what's been going on during the 99% of the time that Biden is doing the job of president but it isn't being televised for national consumption. It's an impossible question to answer.

But I've been extremely dubious about the supposed "evidence" that Biden is now allegedly unfit for office, because literally every news story we've seen consists not of anybody actually asserting it to be true, but with somebody's rampant speculations about what could be true, based on what other people might have said, or didn't. Entire frontpages are filled with stories based on the speculation presented in other stories, and all of it is based on looking at a debate performance that focus groups and new public polls found considerably less objectionable than the supposed Poseidon Adventure-level crisis many of the rest of us announced it to be.

I have no power to decide whether Biden bows out. What's clear at this point is that it will have very little to do with his actual health, but instead will be based on whether the Democratic donor class and power brokers make his bid untenable by withholding money, leaking "concerns" to the press, and citing extremely dodgy internal polls showing a supposed Biden collapse in the polling that none of the public polling can support. Nobody's calling him unfit, they're simply saying that too many people are calling him unfit and that's the reason he's got to go.

So that's why I'm so very skeptical about this entire "news" cycle. We've seen events like this before, over and over and over, where the press latches on to some sensational, hyperbolic supposed story and drives it into the public consciousness to the point where it produces a new mass hysteria. People think that suddenly sharks are ravaging U.S. beaches, chowing down on people left and right. People are certain that there is a national cabal of "Satanic" preschool owners doing "Satanic" things. In an episode of mass hysteria, everyone becomes quite convinced they see evidence of The Thing all around them. Every shadow becomes supposed evidence of The Thing.

And then it's only much later on that we learn that the whole story was largely manufactured by news outlets who took some tiny snippets of fact, stuffed them inside a mountain of speculative theories and claims that nobody bothered to actually check up on, and turned them into the new hot reason that you absolutely had to buy their paper or turn on their news programs. Two sharks bite two people and the public becomes convinced that sharks are attacking beachgoers everywhere. A handful of fragmentary facts becomes evidence for an invisible societal conspiracy targeting Our Children.

Here's what we know for certain about Joe Biden. He had a truly terrible debate, one marked by hoarseness and stammering that rendered him nowhere near as incoherent as Donald Trump is even on his most lucid days, but still shocked audiences who were familiar with his usual speech patterns and didn't recognize the Biden they saw that night. Before and since the debate, we've seen that the hoarseness in his voice has been fairly consistent, and that he does indeed occasionally flub words.

That's it. That's all we know. You may think you know more than that, you and me and the twenty best and worst national pundits you can name, but you don't. Those are the only facts we know.

We also know that Biden had a severe stutter as a child and that even now it pops up from time to time. We also know that Biden just got diagnosed with a case of Covid-19, which is a reminder of just how much cross-country, glad-handing campaigning tends to ravage the immune systems of anyone who does it.

We know that flubbing words and phrases does not necessarily mean a person has dementia. We know that such flubs are common in stutterers, and when you're tired, and when you've got a fever or are otherwise under the weather. So "had a real bad time getting words out during one debate" is not, by itself, evidence of mental unfitness. If that were the criteria, the press would have already put Donald Trump in a retirement home, one that assigned him his own nurse to spoon pudding into his mouth under the assumption he could no longer do it on his own.

The entire rest of the news cycle is based on those facts and only those facts; everything else is speculative chum spread into public waters by The New York Times and other egregiously biased outlets stuffing their own frontpages with as many sensationalistic "what if?" stories as will possibly fit. Everything else.

So, who are the most important readers of The New York Times in this scenario?

Democratic donors. Democratic leadership. Anyone at all with influence in Washington, D.C., or with the Democratic Party, or with the Republican Party.

And hey look, after frontpage after frontpage filled with sourceless, factless stories speculating that maybe Joe Biden has mental problems that nobody ever brought up until the debate happened, a lot of important people in the Democratic Party who backed Biden before and who themselves don't have a lot of contact with him these days are themselves quite convinced that he's been eating tourists at the be—sorry, that his health has completely collapsed.

Do they know that? Does Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, or Adam Schiff or Chuck Schumer know that for real, or do they know that because People Are Saying So? And if they knew it for real, why the hell didn't any of them pipe up about it until after it became the new press summer obsession?

The longer the news cycle dragged on, the more dodgy the evidence became—which is the opposite of what you'd see if the press genuinely had a scoop. Biden sometimes gets tired during meetings? I'll zone out after the first ten minutes. Biden sometimes misspeaks in private? You and me both, pal. A Parkinson's specialist visited the White House multiple times during a period when the administration was working on Parkinson's-related policy? Yeah, I think a Parkinson's specialist shops at the same Costco I do, but I promise you I don't need to be put in a home because of it.

Wait, do you mean to tell me that Joe Biden gets noticeably tired after 4pm? Wow, that describes just about every person in America who has to Do Their Job! Oh, and if you want to meet with me to discuss anything after 4pm, it'd better be because something in your office is currently on fire.

Either we all have dementia now and just didn't know it, or the press has been seizing on countless irrelevant scraps to build out news stories that would otherwise consist of blank space.

So all of this smells fishy. We don't know the truth either way; as of right now, we can't. In his appearances before and since that one allegedly disastrous debate, Biden doesn't appear to be having more trouble getting words out than he did four years ago. He's embarrassed his staff throughout his entire career with his off-the-cuff verbal flubs; we can't pretend now that he wasn't known to be one of the most gaffe-prone of Democratic speakers.

Leaving the recent weakness of his voice aside, is Biden really a worse public speaker than he was a year ago or four? Or are people, including panicking Democratic Party donors and leaders who are themselves both human and notorious in their ineptness when facing new and negative media narratives, now so primed to see "unfit" that they see shadows of it everywhere?

I really can't say, I just can't. And we've now reached the stage of the story where it doesn't matter. Democrats are pressuring Biden to leave the race not because he is unfit for office, but because "other people" think he's unfit for office, which will lead to a "collapse" in the polls that at the moment is evinced only by one extremely dodgy pollster with likely motives of his own, which is all so great a risk that abandoning Biden, foregoing the usual party processes and launching into a public spasm of disarray that will likely cause several dozen political reporters to orgasm themselves to death, is seen as the better option.

I just do not know about this. The die may already be cast, and you and I fighting about it won't have the slightest impact on anything that happens. But if Biden bows out and in six months is not an obviously impaired shell who couldn't possibly have done the duties of his office, we'll have to seriously consider whether all of this, this whole damn rotten performative skeevy-journalism New-York-Times-led mess, was yet another moment in which the press intentionally manufactured a brand-new mass hysteria—all for the sake of getting their precious damn clicks.