It may seem like ages ago, but only ten days have passed since President Joe Biden decided to use Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to declare war on half the country. Mr. Unity is dead—never having any chance to bring together a nation with an agenda that only favors the ‘woke,’ educated, and wealthy. In other words, people who live on the coasts and in cities. The other side is that he could never articulate his intentions since he’s dementia ridden. When Biden can enunciate with the help of drugs, it consistently demonizes people who didn’t vote for him. That reached a boiling point with this September 3 address. I thought it had a throwback feeling to a Nuremberg rally c. 1938. Former Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi said it reminded him of a Rammstein concert.
Taibbi focused on a critical portion of the address, where Biden spoke about how MAGA Republicans threaten the republic and what he plans to do. Will there be consequences for merely voting differently than the Democratic Party because it sure seems that way with a second reading of the address? Taibbi used this speech to blame both parties for going off the rails regarding threat assessment. Some it is well-founded, while other aspects you might find disagreeable. The former Rolling Stone writer said that Trump’s 2016 speech was pervasively negative and “a pure horror movie” when the then-Republican nominee spoke of lawlessness and disorder in America. Fast-forward to the summer of 2020, and Trump was right—thanks to Democrats’ penchant for soft-on-crime policies.
Yet, Taibbi decided the blame was a bipartisan issue. Biden’s speech, in Taibbi’s opinion, is a continuation of a failed American foreign policy effort that the Delaware liberal stupidly turned into a domestic action item. The liberal writer refers to George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, where he outlined the global war on terror, aptly known as the ‘long war’ at the Pentagon, and divided the world into two camps, pro-freedom and pro-terrorist. This speech was also the unveiling of America’s crusade against the “axis of evil,” which became the fuel from which the fire of endless wars could be started. Evil must be rooted out everywhere, and American troops will do the heavy lifting while exporting liberal democratic principles into these regions to ensure no such pernicious forces can thrive again.
What Biden did on the steps of Independence Hall was to take that neoconservative-based threat assessment—arguably boneheaded now—and apply that to people who vote Republican. Taibbi admits that Trump’s 2016 speech at the Republican National Convention is a carbon copy of Biden’s anti-MAGA screed in Philly, just substitute “illegal immigrants” with MAGA supporters. There’s a whole host of words for which you could replace MAGA Republicans, and you’ll find disturbing results in this little game of Mad Libs: political edition.
The words that Taibbi focused on regarding the domestication of the “axis of evil” logic is the words Biden used to draw a line in the sand with MAGA Republicans (via Taibbi Substack):
A key theme was preventive action. Bush wouldn’t wait for disaster, but would step in, Minority Report-style, to stop it before it began. He read off this pledge like a religious incantation, using a Dr. Seuss-like rhythm: “I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer.” (He did not like Green Eggs and Ham. He did not like them, Sam I Am!). He repeated over and over that Our Enemies were steeped in evil, people who “embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed,” while we stand for “freedom and the dignity of every life.” He demanded unity, noting that in this binary world, none may be neutral…
Biden’s speech was an exact domestic analog. Like Bush’s sweeping description of enemies wedded Satanically to tyranny and death, Biden’s MAGA Republicans “embrace anger,” “thrive on chaos,” and live “not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.” He repeated almost verbatim Bush’s theory of preventive action, saying it is too dangerous to allow “MAGA Republicans” to run for office. He said “they” are working “as I speak” in “state after state” to pack vote-counting bureaucracies with “partisans and cronies,” with the express purpose of “thwarting the will of the people.”
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This is a word-for-word lift from Bush, who said “I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer,” and backed up his talk with pre-emptive military action. Will Biden also act? Assume for argument that he’s right, that Trump allies are running for office with the purpose of stealing elections. Still, what does “I will not stand by and watch it” mean? Biden hinted that courses of action are available, but was unnervingly vague about what those are. “We are not powerless in the face of these threats,” he said. “We are not bystanders… it’s within our power… to stop the assault on… democracy.”
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Modern Republicans bear a lot of responsibility for the fact, and I’d hope at least a few of the party’s officials are smarting from the irony now, but in the War on Terror age, the words presidents choose to describe antagonists unfortunately mean a lot. 21st century presidents can spy, kill, and imprison just by invoking that magic word, “threat,” and this is obvious and important subtext to Biden’s remarks.
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This is why it matters when Biden describes “MAGA Republicans” as a “threat… to the very soul of this country,” or as “extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” representing “dangers around us we cannot allow to prevail.” It’s hard to see how these terms are substantively different from War on Terror constructions like the “continued and imminent threat to U.S. interests” or a “serious and continuing threat to the American people.” Biden sounded like a man preparing followers for an enforcement response to Trumpism itself, and even if that wasn’t what he was doing, it’s clear many Trump supporters heard things that way.
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Seventy-four million people voted for Trump in 2020. It’s beyond delusional to think they are all violent extremists. A smart politician would recognize the overwhelming majority are just people who pay taxes, work crap jobs, raise kids, obey the law, and give at most a tiny share of attention to politics. The University of Virginia did a study arguing that as many as 8 million previously voted for Obama, so there’s that. I’d bet more than half would pick a screening of Thor: Love and Thunder over a Trump speech. The only sure way to radicalize the lot is to call them one big terror cell, or have the president go on TV to describe them as an existential threat to national security.
Having done that, Biden now has a bigger problem than ever. What a mess, but how perfectly in character for our leaders!
“I will not stand by” is used three times in the passage highlighted from Biden's speech:
I will not stand by and watch — I will not — the will of the American people be overturned by wild conspiracy theories and baseless evidence-free claims of fraud. I will not stand by and watch elections in this country stolen by people who simply refuse to accept that they lost. I will not stand by and watch the most fundamental freedom in this country, the freedom to vote… be taken from you.
Joe Biden hates that his approvals are worse than Donald Trump’s at this point in his presidency. He reportedly is frustrated that no one takes him seriously, especially regarding his re-election plans, and is beside himself when his staff sends multiple press releases to clean up the word salad the president serves on a near daily basis. They must—we’d be edging closer to World War III. Remember, in Ukraine, Biden alluded to regime change in Moscow as one of the events that could end the conflict. Now, Biden is Bush, as evidenced by his anti-MAGA speech, which Taibbi noted is lifted word-for-word from the 43rd president’s doctrine of preventive action, which was “wedded Satanically to tyranny and death.”
Unlike the liberal media pundits that saturate the news networks, Taibbi knows that the 74 million people who voted for Trump aren’t domestic terrorists. Trump clinched almost 30 percent of the LGBT vote and increased his share of nonwhite voters. Meanwhile, Biden won essentially because college-educated whites turned out to vote. They’re now guiding the party on a path that isn’t representative of America nor beneficial to a vast swath of this country’s voters.
The irony is that Democrats, who have loathed Bush for years, did two things to cement his legacy in American politics. They made the vast majority of his long-vilified tax cuts permanent in 2013. And they decided to use the language of preventive war to set the stage for a possible domestic anti-terror initiative against people with whom they share political disagreements. The FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago on August 8 might have been the first salvo, with law enforcement institutions now run by liberals being dispatched to threaten the political enemies of the Democratic Party from running for president in 2024. Biden didn’t need to make another mess. He has plenty on his plate, but he decided to orchestrate a self-inflicted Exxon Valdez spill with this speech.
The lingering question is, what will the consequences be with the “I will not stand by” portions? Are we all going to the camps because we didn’t vote for Biden? It sounds like some executive action could arise if the president feels the imaginary “threat” of MAGA Republicans hasn’t subsided by the end of his presidency, right?