Who Will They Pick to Replace Biden?
Is any of this even real? (And does Alice Cooper have the answer?)
I didn’t watch last night’s debate. That was simply not going to happen, for a host of reasons…
First, as most of you know, I no longer believe that ‘democracy’ is a good thing. It has fundamental moral problems—ones that, contrary to our gauzy patriotism, are not solved in any sort of durable fashion by the constitutional republican system we have in the United States.
Democracy may have been a necessary stepping stone to move us away from monarchy. It might have been the best or even the only way to make that move. But now that we’ve made that move, it’s time to move again.
Second, I don’t believe Biden won the last time. As I said back in May,
“[T]here is no way that Biden won the 2020 election legitimately. The math does not work. He lost nearly all the bellwether counties that winners always win. He lost surprising numbers of counties that Obama won—that Democrats generally win—yet somehow exceeded Obama’s nationwide total by millions of votes. This is not possible. Anyone not addled by the narrative knows that Biden’s ‘victories’ in the needed states came from a small number of precincts whose totals flipped in the middle of the night under shady circumstances.
“Most normies have fallen for the propaganda that only a crazy person, or a ‘traitor,’ would question the integrity of the 2020 election. But that crap doesn’t work on me. I didn’t have to be a hardcore MAGA to know that, by whatever means, that election was stolen. I just needed basic logic and arithmetic skills.
“Many people know that 2020 was a farce. And they expect 2024 to be as well, despite whatever small improvements have been made in a couple of states’ vote-counting procedures.”
Even if I thought the system of voting for people to “represent” us was a fundamentally good thing, I would still have totally lost faith in our version of it after 2020. So why would I watch a debate? It’s tough to get excited about the “democratic process” when it all seems rather fraudulent and fixed.
Third, I do not plan to vote. Even if I did, there is not a chance in a trillion that I would vote for Biden (or any other Democrat), so I did not need the debate to help me make an “informed decision.”
The system under which we live functions by the morally impermissible initiation of coercive force, which means that voting is a morally impermissible initiation of coercive force. The only way that voting can be justified, in my view, is if you recognize (preferably aloud) that our system is morally impermissible and then openly state that you are only voting as a stopgap, to hold the line while we all work towards the next evolution.
But if you just plan to say, “This is the most important election of our lifetime” every two or four years, and never to move on from that, you are condemning our children’s children’s children to the same morally impermissible system we have now. And that is seriously not cool.
Fourth, watching that clown show did not strike me as a particularly pleasant use of my time. My wife and son wanted to see how much of a train wreck it would be, and I totally get that. I have no criticisms for anyone who chose to watch. (And I did hear my wife cackling hysterically at one point, so I am glad she was at least entertained.)
Fifth and finally, is any of this even real?
Do you remember the “Unaccompanied Minors Crisis” of 2014, when thousands of children were said to have walked the 2,000 miles from southern Central America to the United States largely unaccompanied by adults?
Something about that just seemed so fishy.
Have you ever planned a camping trip? Do you know what it takes to survive just for a couple of days? And we were supposed to believe that a giant mass of unaccompanied children somehow managed to walk from Nicaragua all the way to the U.S. border…without help? Something like that takes planning. It requires massive logistic support. It doesn’t just happen.
Yet this unprecedented child migration was cast to us by the media and government (but I repeat myself) as some spontaneous act of desperation, and most of us swallowed it—hook, line, and sinker. I remember thinking that it just felt so engineered—a carefully crafted and curated event, as opposed to something that was happening organically.
I have that same feeling now.
My wife told me that after the debate, the CNN hosts were freaking out. Apparently they were shocked—SHOCKED!—that Biden was so addled, and they earnestly insisted that he needs to be replaced.
Wait—they’re just figuring that out now? To quote Biden—C’mon, man.
We are seriously supposed to believe that they could not tell that he was suffering from dementia a month ago, a year ago, or even three years ago? That is absurd. This sounds a lot more like they are acting out a script…
INT. CABLE NEWSROOM —NIGHT
Debate ends. Camera pans across newscasters’ shocked faces.
Cue surprised reactions and calls for Biden to be replaced.
I do not know what is going to happen. I am not making any predictions. But this all just feels like kabuki to me.
Are they planning a switcheroo? Have they been planning it for a long time, and are now carefully curating the narrative that will lead to it?
Or are things even deeper than that? Is this a tails we win, heads you lose scenario for people who have an agenda that is happening far beyond the red–blue divide? Trump wins and they go scorched earth? Biden wins and it’s obvious that there was fraud, so MAGAs freak out, allowing our creepy overlords to crack down and expand the “insurrection” narrative they started on January 6th, 2020?
I really don’t know. And I am not sure I care.
Don’t get me wrong—I care about what happens to me and my family and friends, and in a broader sense to all the human beings who dwell between these shores. I am just not sure that last night’s debate, and the impacts it may have, are as organic as conventional analysis purports them to be. And if I am going to watch fiction, there are better shows on Netflix.
And in honor of all of this, here on #FreedomMusicFriday, here is Alice Cooper telling it like it is.
I think Biden is just a figurehead, a face to read some lines from a script. Just like every other president for several decades. In that sense, who gets picked is kind of irrelevant, the real question is who's doing the picking.
I didn't watch the whole thing, I watched clips and checked out some reactions from both sides of the aisle. My immediate and instinctual response upon seeing the panic from the left wing pundits was that it felt orchestrated - very much like they needed a narrative that would allow them to make a spectacular last minute switch and use the drama of that to boost the new candidate's profile and approval - it is all theatre.
Unfortunately, Alice Cooper does not have the answer, but it's still a classic track 😜