Obama Doubles Down on Biden After Disastrous Debate Meltdown: ‘Bad Debates Happen’
Former President Barack Obama dismissed Democrats calling for Joe Biden to be replaced as their presidential nominee, claiming “bad debate nights happen” but Biden is still the best choice.
“Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself,” Obama wrote on X Friday.
Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the…
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) June 28, 2024
“Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November.”
Satan has spoken you are stuck with Joe pic.twitter.com/s1jnZQ77YP
— Karli Bonne’ ?? (@KarluskaP) June 28, 2024
Given that Obama is still seen as the de facto standard bearer of the Democrat Party, his remarks are meant to put to rest speculation among the base and media that Joe Biden will bow out before November.
Once the media starts to realize that they’re not going to get Biden out of the race, they’re all going to quickly retreat from the past 24 hours and get back on board.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 28, 2024
Obama is directing them to do that and giving them the script to use: https://t.co/ChMyZWf9jJ
But Biden’s performance was not just a “bad debate night” — it was an unmitigated disaster even by mainstream media standards.
CNN feels like Biden’s funeral
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) June 28, 2024
“It’s not just panic, it’s pain.” pic.twitter.com/h3MKtuiCcu
In fact, it was so shockingly terrible and so thoroughly humiliating that Obama’s reassurances risk appearing tone-deaf, even delusional to most Americans — almost as delusional as the Democrat Party’s post-debate victory lap on X.
The winner of tonight’s debate ?pic.twitter.com/3FZgZSQc3F
— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) June 28, 2024
Just last week, Obama was in the headlines after he was seen escorting Biden offstage at a California fundraiser, leading to growing concerns Biden is becoming blatantly feeble which prompted the White House and mainstream media to claim the scene was a “cheap fake” and “manipulated video.”
The matter of Biden’s viability is still not put to rest despite Obama’s endorsement: Biden’s official nomination as the Democrat presidential candidate must still be decided at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 19.
Draghi’s Globalist EU Speech Urges Concentration of Power
A quite-revealing speech about the future of the European Union was given in Brussels on April 16, 2024 by Mario Draghi, who at one time had been slated to become the next president of the EU Commission, replacing scandal-ridden Ursula von der Leyen, who recently was confirmed for another term. Draghi, the former Italian prime minister and former head of the European Central Bank, gave policy recommendations for the future directly to members of the EU Commission. In light of this year’s elections to the EU parliament, the content of this speech should be exposed because it epitomizes so much of what is wrong today with the political direction of the European Union.
The speech was called “Radical Change—Is What Is Needed,” an understandable title considering the dismal path the EU is currently on. It would indeed be a “radical change” in the current political environment to allow more freedom, less regulation, less redistribution, and less taxation in order to jump-start Europe economically. Not surprisingly, that is not at all what Draghi has in mind since he is a statist through and through. What he proposes is even more of the same interventionist diet.
Wrong Solutions to the Lack of Competitiveness
Draghi laments the difficulties the EU has had to manage competition, despite what he calls a “deliberate strategy of trying to lower wage costs relative to each other.” The results of this deliberate strategy are unconvincing since even EU statistics conclude that “within the euro area, hourly labour costs increased in all EU Member States.” It should be recalled that a free market (i.e., not the EU) tends to naturally erase wage and price differences over time through the flow of capital and labor; when government tries to force this process, it only leads to additional costs.
Draghi also complains about the dire situation of EU competitiveness in cutting-edge technologies. Yet it is clearly the suffocating regulatory and fiscal conditions in the EU that is stifling innovation. Draghi is also wrong to generalize; there are big regional differences within the EU for precisely these reasons. Areas with blooming start-up environments should be rewarded simply by letting them attract capital and talent according to free-market principles.
However, instead of linking innovation and investment with the free market, Draghi noted that
the EU has very high private savings, but they are mostly funneled into banks deposits and do not end up financing growth as much as they could in a larger capital market. This is why advancing the Capital Markets Union (CMU) is an indispensable part of the overall competitiveness strategy.
According to the EU, the capital markets union is an “initiative to create a truly single market for capital across the EU” that is to be used, according to former Italian PM Enrico Letta, “to pull trillions from the bloc’s collective couch cushions by offering savers an easier way to invest in stocks.”
This proposal is not surprising as the current high-spending and money-printing European institutions are shamelessly looking, even publicly, for ways to access personal savings across the EU. As if on cue, the fully EU-aligned French president Emmanuel Macron’s office declared that “household savings should be enabled to fund more directly the massive investments we need to boost our competitiveness.” Also, as one EU-friendly think-tank put it: “The European Union is sitting on €33.5 trillion in household savings, or one quarter of its collective GDP, yet much of this money is stuck in banks because households prefer cash over market investments.” The loaded words “sitting on” and “stuck” tell of institutions that not only want to eventually get rid of cash for increased control, but that first want, shockingly, to use household savings to compensate for failed and rigid EU policies that have been stifling investment and competitiveness for decades.
Even the Financial Times recognized that “competitiveness and capital markets union—are the well-worn boilerplate of EU communiqués. The emphasis on competitiveness is a reflex of the daunting geoeconomic environment. Promising capital markets union sidesteps the question of common EU borrowing.”
Draghi is clearly just preaching to the converted to ingratiate himself with the EU Commission that he might soon head. Because of his political agenda in favor of concentrating power in Brussels, he disregards the fact that, as Ludwig von Mises noted, “money is never idle.” Deposits not only reflect individuals’ natural and varying inclinations to save, but as Mises explained in Human Action, “If the individual saver employs his additional savings for increasing his cash holding because this is in his eyes the most advantageous mode of using them, he brings about a tendency toward a fall in commodity prices and a rise in the monetary unit’s purchasing power.” Thus, in a free society (i.e., not the European Union), savings fulfill an important and naturally calibrating role that should be not incumbent upon any government institutions to create or destroy.
Blaming the Geopolitical World
These political proposals to improve competitiveness were framed by Draghi in the context of a great three-party power struggle between the United States, the EU, and China. Yet such a geopolitical competition cannot be in the interest of European consumers, who would then see further restrictions on free trade with companies from these two nations. The only natural competition is economic—not political—and exists between enterprises and individuals in the free market. Is the goal of the EU to enter into a great power rivalry with the US and China, or is it to allow Europeans to thrive in peace? It seems clear that for Draghi and the EU Commission, it is the former.
The state of the increasingly moribund European project is thus implicitly blamed by Draghi on outside forces—on China, in particular, but more and more also on the United States. Yet it is first and foremost the rampant statist interventionism in almost all areas of economic and social life in the EU that is at the root of the problems. Draghi states that “other regions are no longer playing by the rules and are actively devising policies to enhance their competitive position.” This is just the pot calling the kettle black as government support for national industries has been a preferred policy tool of Western governments for many decades, not to mention that the EU is hardly innocent of undermining “rules.”
The Goal Is Concentrating Political Power
The underlying globalist agenda of the European Union, constantly underpinned by the Hegelian idea of the “homogeneous universal state,” is glaringly obvious in Draghi’s speech. Signs of this agenda are all over it as when he urges for “the standardization of the EU patients’ data” or “to agree to a common approach” in energy, or when he pushes the “joint borrowing capacity of the EU.” His proposals all tend toward the centralization of power in the EU and the further weakening of the sovereignty of the member states. This is clear when he talks about the need of “enabling scale” and when he complains about “lack of scale” and that “fragmentation is holding us back.” These proposals and others are used by Draghi to justify concentrating more power into the hands of elected bureaucrats in Brussels.
The success of Europe does not depend on such policies. On the contrary, they will only drive state spending and administration but do little for the real entrepreneurs that are the backbone of the European economies. There is indeed a need for more competitiveness in Europe, but this can only be achieved if the EU and national states start loosening their stranglehold on the European economy.
It is obvious that the EU has gone beyond its original goal of securing the four freedoms across European nations. Today, after the arguably undemocratic ratifications of the Maastricht treaty of 1992 and the Lisbon treaty of 2008, Draghi confirms that the EU is pushing ahead with its agenda of globalist control. This is really what the EU parliamentary election of June 2024 should be about.
The EU project and the European governments that have supported it have wreaked havoc on the entire European civilization through decades of coercive policies. If Europe is to rise again economically, scientifically, and culturally, the political weights that are holding its economy down must first be removed.
Auron MacIntyre On How To Oppose The New Religion Of Secular Progressive Humanism
Post-Debate Hangover? Biden Makes Bizarre Faces At North Carolina Rally
Sleepy Joe Biden is not done being roasted by the internet following his disastrous debate performance on Thursday night, as he’s now being called out for making strange faces during a Friday rally in North Carolina.
The senile puppet politician stood oddly and made awkward faces while his wife Jill addressed the crowd.
JUST IN: Joe stands awkwardly and looks completely lost behind his wife at a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina after his disastrous debate performance.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) June 28, 2024
Who is the real president here?
According to a new debate poll conducted by YouGov, 43% of people thought that… pic.twitter.com/kkeT1D8W9U
Totally contrasting his monotone debate appearance, Biden unleashed his angry “Dark Brandon” persona during the Friday rally.
Apparently President Joe Biden’s meds are working today because he is shouting at the top of his lungs, reminiscent of his State of the Union, as he lies in North Carolina. pic.twitter.com/8SIw48triv
— Carmine Sabia (@CarmineSabia) June 28, 2024
Biden speaks in North Carolina, and one can’t help but wonder where this guy was last night. pic.twitter.com/CMBGbakyoL
— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) June 28, 2024
In an X post, Biden was forced to admit he lost the debate with Trump, writing, “Folks, I might not walk as easily or talk as smoothly as I used to. I might not debate as well as I used to. But what I do know is how to tell the truth.”
Of course, we all know Biden is a habitual liar and that even his claiming to “know how to tell the truth” is a lie in itself.
Folks, I might not walk as easily or talk as smoothly as I used to.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 28, 2024
I might not debate as well as I used to.
But what I do know is how to tell the truth.pic.twitter.com/ep5D0EhT5P
CNN Anchor Suggests Joe Biden Had Advanced Knowledge Of Debate Questions
CNN anchor Erin Burnett told viewers watching Thursday night’s post-debate coverage of the Donald Trump and Joe Biden faceoff that Sleepy Joe knew every question he was going to be asked.
While the CNN panel basically slammed Biden’s pisspoor performance, Burnett noted Biden went through more than a week of preparation for the debate and still flopped.
NEW: CNN’s Erin Burnett says Biden knew “every one of these questions is coming” leading many to suggest that Biden was fed debate questions beforehand.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) June 28, 2024
CNN, you have some explaining to do.
Burnett: “He goes through six days of preparation, a camp day, more than that. And they… pic.twitter.com/cPdOmgAXx4
Continuing to vent about the Biden campaign’s debate debacle, Burnett said, “They knew the rules. He practices with the mics. He knows every one of these questions is coming and yet he couldn’t fill the time.”
The video clip is going viral online with many internet users questioning whether Biden was given the debate questions ahead of time, similar to the 2016 scandal where former Democratic National Committee interim chair Donna Brazile gave CNN Town Hall questions to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Biden failed miserably despite the entire establishment trying to stack the deck in his favor and now the entire nation is talking about replacing the senile puppet.
The Court Green-Lights Censorship
In 1919, the Supreme Court used the pretext of crisis to overhaul the First Amendment as it jailed critics of the Great War. Over a century later, the Court has again fallen victim to the Beltway’s prevailing zeitgeist in today’s regrettable decision in Murthy v. Missouri.
The Court’s opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, rejects the lower court’s injunction against many government agencies to stop leaning on social media companies to curate content, and does so on grounds that the plaintiffs lack standing.
The opinion rests on omitted facts, skewed perceptions, and absurd conclusory statements. The dissent, issued by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, masterfully recounts the facts of the case and the inconsistency of the majority.
Justice Barrett’s opinion completely ignored the Court’s decision last week in National Rifle Association v. Vullo. In that case, the Court held that New York officials violated the NRA’s First Amendment rights by launching a campaign to coerce private actors to “punish or suppress the NRA’s gun-promotion activities.”
Justice Sotomayor issued the opinion for a unanimous Court, writing, “Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.”
In Murthy,the majority did not even attempt to differentiate the case from its clear precedent in Vullo. Justice Alito, however, explained the ominous message the Court sent through the two opinions.
What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by.
Further, the majority opinion is bereft of references to the perpetrators, their “high positions,” or their statements of coercion. Justice Barrett does not mention Rob Flaherty or Andy Slavitt – the two main henchmen behind the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts – a single time in her holding. The dissent, however, devotes pages to recounting the White House’s ongoing censorship campaign.
Justice Alito used the framework outlined in Vullo (which the majority likewise ignored), which analyzed four factors in determining whether government communications violate the First Amendment: “(1) word choice and tone; (2) the existence of regulatory authority; (3) whether the speech was perceived as a threat; and, perhaps most importantly, (4) whether the speech refers to adverse consequences.”
Last week, Brownstone addressed how those four factors clearly demonstrate that the Government violated the First Amendment in Murthy. Today’s dissent used the same framework and similar arguments.
Alito cited how “the White House’s emails were phrased virtually as orders and the officials’ frequent follow-ups ensured that they were understood as such.” Justice Barrett’s majority opinion relied on the presumption that social media companies already support censorship, so she could not find that the government’s speech was the cause of the injury. This, however, deliberately strayed from the precedent that the Court set just last week in Vullo.
Second, Alito explained that social media companies are “far more vulnerable to Government pressure than other news sources.” He wrote: “If a President dislikes a particular newspaper, he (fortunately) lacks the ability to put the paper out of business. But for Facebook and many other social media platforms, the situation is fundamentally different. They are critically dependent on the protection provided by §230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, 47 U. S. C. §230, which shields them from civil liability for content they spread.”
He then cited Mark Zuckerberg, who said the threat of antitrust lawsuits was an “existential” threat to his company.
This creates an all-encompassing regulatory authority that demands subservience from social media companies. The majority, however, only mentions this “existential” threat in passing, noting that Jen Psaki “spoke generally about §230 and antitrust reform” in July 2021 amid White House pressure to promote vaccine censorship. But evidently, Barrett and the rest of the majority did not feel inclined to address the issues that Justice Alito raised in dissent.
Justice Alito, citing the facts that the majority ignored, explained:
For these and other reasons, internet platforms have a powerful incentive to please important federal officials, and the record in this case shows that high-ranking officials skillfully exploited Facebook’s vulnerability. When Facebook did not heed their requests as quickly or as fully as the officials wanted, the platform was publicly accused of “killing people” and subtly threatened with retaliation.
Third, Alito noted that executives’ responses “to persistent inquiries, criticisms, and threats show that the platform perceived the statements as something more than mere recommendations.” Like Brownstone’s analysis from last week, Justice Alito cited reports from the House Judiciary Committee that reveal that Facebook officials kowtowed to Flaherty and Slavitt within hours of their demands.
Perhaps most absurdly, the Court ruled that there was no “substantial risk of future injury” because the Government has winded down its “frequent, intense communications” with the platforms. The majority wrote that there “is no more than conjecture” that plaintiffs will be subject to censorship in the future.
But as we enter another election year, can Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Barrett, or Justice Kavanaugh honestly think that these agencies – like CISA, the CIA, the FBI, and DHS – will temper their censorship efforts now that the Court has absolved them?
Will they allow dissent to flourish over the conflict in Ukraine, vaccine mandates, the rise of bird flu, or corruption allegations after they successfully stifled dissidents in the last cycle?
The glorious achievement of the Internet was to give everyone a voice. Social media made that operational. As time has gone on, government found a way in, via direct intimidation and third-party services plus revolving doors with agencies. The majority opinion here has found a way to codify this new form of censorship that threatens the whole idea of free speech itself.
The case now returns to the lower court for further examination, which will lead to more discovery and more evidence of government control of speech. Meanwhile, the range of views available to influence the public mind will grow ever more narrow over time, and the First Amendment could become a dead letter.
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“There’s Time For That” Biden Tells Anti-Trump Crowd Chanting “Lock Him Up”
During his post-debate rally in North Carolina Friday, Sleepy Joe Biden’s crowd chanted, “Lock him up,” in reference to Donald Trump.
“Well, there’s time for that,” Biden responded to the pleas to put the leading presidential candidate in prison.
BREAKING: BIDEN JUST CONFIRMED HE WANTS TRUMP LOCKED UP
— Jack Poso ?? (@JackPosobiec) June 28, 2024
“THERE’S TIME FOR THAT!”
pic.twitter.com/bgRUntGUw2
Continuing his divisive rhetoric, Biden posted to X on Friday, writing, “Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation. He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for.”
Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation.
He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for.— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 28, 2024
The Democrat Party’s main 2024 election narrative is that Trump is a “threat to democracy” who will seek revenge against his political opponents, yet the Biden administration is openly doing just that.
Voters can see right through the establishment propaganda being shoved down their throats, which is why Trump is making strides with young voters, black voters and other demographics.