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Good evening. It's June 11.
Tonight: In a federal courtroom earlier today in Delaware, a jury very quickly and unanimously returned guilty verdicts on all three felony charges brought against the president's son, Hunter Biden.
There are all sorts of points to note about this trial and today's conviction. First, it's worth recalling that DOJ prosecutors repeatedly tried hard to sweep the case under the rug through absurdly generous plea offers. IRS whistleblowers insisted that the investigation into Hunter Biden's crimes was far more passive and bizarrely limited than most Americans who face similar tax fraud investigations. The charges he was convicted of today are far less serious than many other charges he will face – or could face – especially for unregistered foreign lobbying. The White House will almost certainly try to exploit this conviction to refute Trump's claims that the Justice Department is being weaponized against him. After all, they will say, the president's own son was tried and convicted, proving the justice and blindness of our judicial system.
However, at least for me, one point stands out above all the rest. The prosecution of Hunter Biden relied overwhelmingly on the documents and other materials found on his laptop, the very same laptop that The New York Post used right before the 2020 election to report on a series of highly sketchy and ethically questionable business deals that the Biden family was pursuing in both Ukraine and China, with the very likely involvement of Joe Biden himself. Those are the same documents and laptop that CIA and Intelligence officials, the Democratic Party and the liberal wing of the corporate media united before the 2020 election to falsely brand as “Russian disinformation,” which had the multiple pro-Biden effects of encouraging Americans to ignore the documents as fabrications, to believe that Russia was yet again interfering in our election to help Trump win, this time with forged documents and Hunter Biden's name. It also provided a pretext for Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to actively censor this reporting about the Bidens from even being discussed, preventing millions of Americans from even hearing about it.
That the FBI and the DOJ were able to enter those laptop documents as evidence in this trial, by definition, meant that the court concluded the documents were authentic. Biden and his lawyers barely even tried to dispute their authenticity, and the jury's guilty verdicts prove that they also found the documents authentic and reliable. In other words, it's the final nail in the coffin of one of the most blatant and consequential acts of disinformation in the last decade, all done to ensure Joe Biden's victory before the 2020 election.
Then: As the 2024 election approaches and it appears that liberals' greatest hope to win, namely Trump's conviction in Manhattan, has little to no effect on the electorate, they, and especially their media, are getting increasingly shrill, desperate, unhinged and shockingly deranged in their blind and spastic efforts to find some way to defeat Donald Trump. Over the past 24 hours, both Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow have earnestly announced that they fear that Trump will imprison those two dangerous and brave dissidents in the domestic concentration camps that Trump intends to build. That very sober announcement followed the on-the-brink-of-tears warning – really a plea – from former Bush/Cheney spokeswoman and current MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, who said that a Trump victory might mean that Trump would cancel her show – ban her from being on the air.
The irony of all of this – that it is exactly these people who have been drooling for years over the prospect of imprisoning Trump – never seems to occur to them. But it is nonetheless worth looking at to see the level of hysteria, paranoia and emotional instability that is forming much of our political and media discourse.
Plus: after that, many Democrats spent the last two years genuinely believing and explicitly claiming that convicting Donald Trump on various crimes is their salvation to winning the 2024 election. Over and over, they said openly that if we can get Donald Trump into prison or at least convicted in a court of law before the election, that is our real chance to win. They got a conviction in Manhattan and yet polling data after that conviction shows that, at least for now, the electorate seems to care very little about that issue and it is very, very, very far from their top concerns when deciding for whom they will vote. More disturbing for Democrats, a FiveThirtyEight polling survey finds that Joe Biden has reached his all-time low in presidential approval ratings just five months before the election.
Think about what all this says about, among other things, the corporate media, how simultaneously out-of-touch they are with voters believing that the guilty verdict will determine how they vote, not the economy or inflation or immigration or anything else. Yet it also shows how obviously and rapidly declining their influence over American voters is since they've been telling them for two years that Joe Biden is the salvation, the only way to protect American democracy. Obviously, they're speaking only to like-minded people, and therefore the people don't believe and are not in any way affected by anything that they're saying.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It is not all that difficult, it might even be tempting, to make the argument that the behavior, even the criminal conduct of the president's son, Hunter Biden, is not all that relevant to our public discourse after all. So goes this rationale: Hunter Biden has never run for political office; he's not running for political office in 2024; Parents can't be held responsible for the conduct of their adult children, any more than those adult children can’t be held responsible for the conduct of their parents. The fact that Hunter Biden is – or at least was, I guess, the claim goes – a serious drug addict is something that is very well known and it is often the case that people who get addicted to very serious narcotics, or who become alcoholics because of those addictions, are likely to engage in very morally questionable or unethical and often criminal behavior.
The problem is that Hunter Biden was charged with federal crimes and was convicted in a federal courtroom. That means that the prosecutors who decided his fate work directly for Biden’s Justice Department and answer to Joe Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland. Besides that, there has been a lot going on in this case with a very significant impact on many matters that are clearly in the public interest. I've never thought that Hunter Biden's personal life - his sex life and his drug usage - were of any relevance to anything. That's his private life with presumably all adult, consensual partners and no one has claimed otherwise. The question, though, is how has this case been handled and what does it say about both the fairness of our justice system and the behavior of the American media.
So just to give you the background on the charges for which he was convicted, we’ll use The New York Times report from today:
He could face up to 25 years in prison, but first-time offenders who did not use their weapons to commit a violent crime typically receive no jail time. No sentencing date was set.
In September, Mr. Biden is scheduled to go on trial in Los Angeles for charges that he evaded a tax assessment, failed to file and pay taxes, and filed a false or fraudulent tax return. It is considered the more serious case against him.
The guilty verdict in his gun case on Tuesday raises the possibility that he would receive a stiffer sentence if a jury convicts him in the tax case because federal guidelines take into account previous convictions. (The New York Times, June 11, 2024)
So, he has another and more serious case, with more serious charges, that is imminent and will likely be in September before the election. And then, of course, he would no longer be a first-time offender.
One of the things that I think is very interesting is that the court charge that they brought against Hunter Biden here is that he purchased a weapon but, under federal law, if you are an active drug addict or drug user, you are not permitted to purchase a firearm. He had to fill out a form in which he attested to the fact that he was not an active drug user. And the basic charge against him that brought this trial was that he submitted a false statement to obtain a firearm. Technically, that is a crime. I wouldn't call it a very serious crime, especially since, as the article noted, he can use a firearm against anybody. But certainly, it was the case that you could say the same thing about Donald Trump, namely that altering your internal bookkeeping to cover up hush payments to a porn star may be technically illegal. I wouldn't suggest it as a misdemeanor, but it's the kind of thing that would almost never be brought against anyone not named Donald Trump.
Interestingly, I saw a lot of conservatives and a lot of Trump supporters today, on principle, objecting to the conviction of Hunter Biden by arguing that Americans have the constitutional right to carry firearms, there's no drug addict or drug use exception to that constitutional right, and that essentially the idea that you can't purchase a firearm without proving that you're not a drug addict is a violation of the Second Amendment. Seeing a lot of conservatives, on principle, objecting to Hunter Biden's conviction in this case, something I have to say, I did not see or can't recall seeing a single liberal doing – invoking a principle about criminal justice or how courts work to make a similar defense about Donald Trump – that's something I find very interesting.
The other aspect of this is that the real questions about Hunter Biden, criminally speaking, have never been in this case, they have never been about his attempt to purchase a gun while being a drug addict. The real issue is the corruption Hunter Biden engaged in in places like Ukraine and China. That was what The New York Post was trying to report in 2020, when the entire media united against them to disparage that reporting falsely as the byproduct of Russian disinformation, reporting that Big Tech then tried to censor. The real question surrounding Hunter Biden's criminality is what he was doing in Ukraine, a country where his father as vice president was basically running.
Remember, Joe Biden has often boasted about the orders he gave to the Ukrainian government to remove certain prosecutors that he disliked, the threats that he made to the Ukrainians to withhold $1 billion in aid unless they followed his command to remove a prosecutor. Joe Biden was running Ukraine as kind of an imperial overlord, micromanaging all sorts of things at the same time that Hunter Biden was being paid $50,000 a month by a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, despite no experience in that industry, no knowledge of it at all. There is all kinds of evidence that Burisma tried and succeeded through Hunter Biden in gaining access to Joe Biden. And then on top of that, you have all sorts of very strange deals that Hunter Biden and President Biden's brother were pursuing together in China.
One of the memos The New York Post found from the laptop, which the media falsely said was a fabrication, shows that Joe Biden had potential profit participation in one of those deals. There is all kinds of sketchy behavior and potential criminality on the part of not only Hunter Biden but other members of his family, which, in many ways, this trial over these relatively trivial charges seems intended to conceal or to distract from.
The other aspect of it, of course, and we reported on this last week when the charges were first brought, was that an FBI agent testified at length about how much they relied on the documents that came from Hunter Biden's laptop, the laptop that the entire media, the CIA and Big Tech united before the election to deliberately lie about and call it Russian disinformation, even though there was never an iota of support to make that claim. We now know that claim was an absolute lie – actually, I knew it before the 2020 election. Media outlets admitted that shortly after Biden was elected. We've had all kinds of evidence since then that proves the authenticity of these documents. But the fact that Hunter Biden was just convicted based on the admissibility of evidence that they took from his laptop, the same one that we were told was Russian disinformation and couldn't be proven. As you know, I was prevented by my own media outlet from reporting on the contents of those documents based on the Intercept’s claim that they got from the CIA that there was doubt about the authenticity of those documents. This was something that the media did, and very well may have swung the election, given that people were already concerned about Democrats and the kind of corruption in which they engaged, but were simply barred from hearing about this story because the media instead focused on pronouncing it to be Russian disinformation. When Trump raised it in debate, Biden immediately said, you're doing the Kremlin's work. And of course, the worst thing of all was that Big Tech censored Twitter for several days, Facebook said they were algorithmically suppressing the story, and they wouldn’t answer questions about how long that lasted. Presumably, it lasted through the end of the election, something far more consequential than what Twitter did. Yet, this trial now proves this.
From NBC News on June 5.
The witness, FBI agent Erika Jensen, testified about the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop, which has been the subject of rumors and speculation online for years. Jensen said the laptop contained evidence of Hunter Biden's drug and gun purchase. (NBC News, June 5, 2024)
The FBI agent explained exactly how they confirmed the authenticity of that email, namely subpoenaing Apple and saying that the contents and the serial number were exactly the same.
One of the things that should not be forgotten about all this, because we did end up with a conviction here, is how much was done by prosecutors and other agencies in the executive branch that answer to Joe Biden to cover up and conceal and prevent any of this from ever seeing the light of day. One of the most remarkable things was that the prosecutors working for the special counsel negotiated an extraordinary plea deal with Hunter Biden. They said: if you plead guilty, just to these gun charges, we will give you full immunity on every other conceivable criminal charge that you might face, even unrelated to these issues – including the ones I mentioned, such as the possibility of lobbying on behalf of foreign governments without registering it, a crime that they convicted many Trump officials, such as Paul Manafort, of having engaged in. It was a deal unlike the ones you ever get for an ordinary citizen. And they did it in the back room, on the phone with Hunter Biden and his lawyers.
There was a lot of speculation, a lot of concerns raised by people in Congress and by others that this deal seemed very overly generous, that it was designed not only to end this case with no jail time but also to prevent any of the other future charges, the ones that are far more serious, from ever seeing the light of day. And that plea deal completely fell apart the minute that it was brought into the public light.
Here's The New York Times article from July of 2023:
In other words, instead of just accepting the plea deal, she kind of just began questioning in public what this plea deal actually entailed.
Judge Maryellen Noreika has delayed a decision on whether to accept the plea agreement between federal prosecutors and Hunter Biden — demanding that the two sides make changes in the deal clarifying her role and insert language that limits the broad immunity from prosecution offered to Biden on his business dealings.
From the start, the judge seemed highly skeptical of the unusual deal — which offered Hunter Biden broad immunity from prosecution in perpetuity, questioning why it had been filed under a provision that gave her no legal authority to reject it. When she asked Leo Wise, a prosecutor, if there was any precedent for the kind of deal being proposed, he replied, “No, your honor.” (NYT, July 26, 2023)
And what happened was that, in secret, the prosecutor said, you have full immunity on all charges but, once they had to explain themselves and justify the plea deal to the court upon just a little bit of judicial scrutiny, the prosecutors were so embarrassed by how generous this plea deal was that, on the spot, they reinterpreted it and they told the judge it did not include other investigations and criminal activity that Hunter Biden may have been responsible for when it came to illegal foreign lobbying.
The minute the prosecutor said that Hunter Biden's lawyers were outraged – correctly – because they said, “That wasn't our plea deal, you told us that it covers all charges.” The prosecutors were too embarrassed to have the public know just how broad it was. They had to deny that it included all future charges, and that was when the plea deal fell apart and then they took this case to trial.
There were all kinds of shenanigans, as Democrats tried to claim all this proves the justice system is politicized, it is blind to who they're treating, even convicting the president's son. Remember how many times whistleblowers came forward, it was very clear that these prosecutors were doing everything possible to protect Hunter Biden in every way.
One of the things that has long disgusted me about the media’s attempt to defend Hunter Biden, and we're seeing it in all sorts of different places now with this trial ongoing and the conviction is, the idea that, oh, actually, this is not about his criminality. It's actually a beautiful and moving story about a father's love for his son and the struggles that many families in America face in overcoming addiction. Of course, indeed, millions of Americans either themselves or members of their families, a close family member or friends struggle with addiction and alcoholism, and it can ruin their lives and wreck their lives. But they don't have the media launching a propaganda campaign to say that they shouldn't have to pay for any of the consequences of that because of this addiction. And yet, here's what the media has been doing from the start when it comes to Hunter Biden. And only Hunter Biden.
Here was the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof, when these charges were brought:
It was not only something that didn't reflect negatively on Hunter Biden or his father. It was actually something that showed how beautiful they are because the crimes that Hunter Biden committed were actually motivated by his addiction, for which we should not have any sort of anger toward him as a society or seek to punish him, but have only empathy – an idea which, by the way, I generally support, that addiction is more of a health problem than it is a penal problem, that addicts should be treated with resources and not put into prison. That doesn't mean that crimes they commit, actual crimes, should be excused because they're addicts. But in general, I agree that that is the correct approach to drug addiction and alcoholism in the U.S. And I would be celebrating this if it weren't for the fact that it's only being invoked not on behalf of all American families struggling with addiction and alcoholism, but only in the case of Hunter Biden.
Here is a video of a segment on “Morning Joe” about the Hunter Biden case yesterday that involved the extremely partisan columnist for “The Daily Beast,” Molly Jong-Fast, who grew up in Manhattan as the daughter of an extremely famous and wealthy novelist, Erica Jong.
The graphic on the screen reads “Republicans are going after Hunter Biden for his addiction, and they're playing a dangerous game.” That was the title of the article she wrote, claiming that Republicans were going after Hunter Biden not because he committed crimes, not because he was lobbying in Ukraine and China, or pursuing business deals but they are going after him because he's an addict. He was the victim here. The real victim was Hunter Biden. Listen to this.
(Video. Molly Jong-Fast. MSNBC. June 10, 2024)
Mika B: You could talk a little bit more about this. It seems to me that it would be very hard to find a jury that has been untouched by addiction completely.
Molly Jong-Fast: Yeah. And the reason that I wanted to come forward and write about this is because even though I've been sober since I was a teenager, I felt that the disease Hunter Biden has is the same disease that I have, is the same disease that, you know, almost 20% of the country has. And, you know, Republicans do love to talk about, like, fentanyl coming over the border like there's a reason that, you know, drugs are a problem in this country and it's largely because of addiction. So, this is another part of that. I think Republicans have really, actually not had a lot of success using Hunter Biden to sully Joe Biden. But they have tried one of the sort of moments in the debate where Biden ended up, you know, being that Biden that voters really like was when he talked about his son's addiction. And he said, you know, he struggled with addiction. He's made it through and that he's incredibly proud of his son for that. And look, I came forward partially because I wanted to destigmatize this. And I feel like, you know, a lot of talk for a long time, alcoholism and addiction was this terrible secret we didn't talk about. I feel like for me because I've been sober since I was a teenager, I have this ability to talk about it in a way that's a […]
Okay. She's so brave. She admitted she was an alcoholic when she was a teenager and therefore she shares the same illness as Hunter Biden.
As I said, I actually do believe strongly in this model of empathy for addicts and in using our resources to help them recover from that addiction or from alcoholism, instead of just throwing them in a prison cell where it's likely to get worse. But what sickens me about this is fake compassion. This is fake empathy. It's politicizing empathy for addiction. I want you to think about this: have you ever heard major television outlets, or a huge army of pundits, coming forward to defend ordinary Americans who are being convicted of crimes that resulted from their addiction or from their alcoholism in this way? And what sickens me even more is this idea that Joe Biden is a particularly compassionate politician who Americans love when they get to see that side of him. He's expressing so much support and empathy for his son's drug addiction and that shows what kind of person Joe Biden is.
The irony of that is that there is no single political official in Washington over the last several decades who has been a more aggressive, unapologetic and unyielding supporter of imposing the harshest possible prison sentences not on major drug lords or drug dealers, but on drug users. This empathy has never emerged or been seen in Joe Biden's entire life until it came time to defend his son. And I think the notion that someone has compassion or empathy for a certain behavior only when it affects themselves and wants to throw everyone else in prison, far from being a virtue, is a very repellent character flaw.
Let me just show you one of Joe Biden's many, many speeches on this issue that completely contradict this narrative. It’s from 1991 when he was speaking on the Senate floor. Remember, he's been a senator since the 1970s, when he was 29 years old.
(Video. Joe Biden. U.S. Senate Floor. 1991)
Joe Biden: […] But let's look at the facts. Since 1986, Congress has passed over 230 new or expanded penalties for drug and criminal offenses in the United States – 230 new penalties. And these penalties range from an automatic five years in jail for any person caught with a rock of crack cocaine, a piece of crack cocaine as small as a quarter. I don't have a quarter with me. Maybe if you visualize what one looks like. Yeah, I do have a quarter. If you have a piece of crack cocaine, no bigger than this quarter that I'm holding to my head, one-quarter of $1. We passed a law through the leadership of Senator Thurman and myself and others, a law that says if you're caught with that, you go to jail for five years, you get no probation. You get nothing other than five years in jail. The judge doesn't have a choice. Now, the fact of the matter is, we've gone from there all the way up to saying, under the leadership of Senator Thurman – and I'd like to suggest that I take some small credit for it myself as well, and others, the presiding officer – that there is now a death penalty, and we passed it a couple of years ago. If you are a major drug dealer involved in the trafficking of drugs and murder results in your activities, you go to death.
Okay, so we've all by now seen the video of Hunter Biden using crack cocaine. The amount of crack cocaine that he had and was using was far, far, far bigger than that quarter that Joe Biden was referring to. And in this video, Joe Biden was boasting of the fact that a law that he helped implement required – not permit a judge, but required a judge – to send anybody possessing crack cocaine, even a tiny amount, directly to prison for five years, with no possibility of parole or mitigation or any kind of understanding of their situation. And this is something that he's done his entire career. He's never apologized for this, rescinded this, said that he was in error. So, this idea that Joe Biden is empathetic to drug users and we all should be so moved by that is a complete revision of the actual history of the actual behavior of Joe Biden and his attempt to imprison and, of course, doing that with crack cocaine also had made to racial disparities. It put a huge number of black people in prison whose crime was nothing other than being a drug addict using crack cocaine that they got hooked on, just like Joe Biden's son did. And so, to watch this kind of serious issue about how we treat addiction, how we deal with communities ravaged by addiction, trifled with and played with and so cynically manipulated, simply to defend Hunter Biden, when the real story is how the Biden Justice Department, just like they've been going after Trump, tried to do everything to shield his son, is truly sickening. It gives you an idea, however, of just how these partisan channels are willing to say literally anything to distort reality right in front of your eyes to achieve their partisan objectives.
One of the things that you would have thought the 2016 election demonstrated or proved to the corporate media, or at least prompted a lot of self-reflection, was just how completely removed and out of touch and separate they are from the ordinary voter. The entire media essentially was united in support of Hillary Clinton's campaign and against Donald Trump's campaign. They did everything possible to sabotage that campaign, including drowning the country in yet another disinformation campaign – not the laptop disinformation campaign that was 2020 – but the Russiagate disinformation campaign that came from the FBI and the CIA, an attempt to sabotage Donald Trump's candidacy that they did fear because of the ideology, views and policies he was advocating.
Throughout the year, they insisted that there had never been a candidate as dangerous as Donald Trump. Every newsroom was absolutely certain that Hillary Clinton was not only going to be the winner of that election but also win by a very comfortable margin. None of that happened. Voters had very different priorities than people who are ensconced in studios in Washington and New York and working with large contracts from major media corporations.
Surprise, surprise, people who are far less economically well-off or who live in different places or have different values, don't actually feel represented by the media that, say, 50 or 60 years ago, they felt very represented by and that actually tried to support all sectors of American life. That's no longer the case. Everything is segregated. Liberal outlets, which aren't most in the corporate media, know that they're speaking only to liberals. That's their business model. It's their political activist model. And so, when they drone on and on and on, they're mostly speaking to people who already are on their side, and it changes nothing.
Here we are in 2024 and I don't need to tell you everything the media has been saying and doing to convince Americans, yet again, that Donald Trump is not just a bad president, but basically a Hitlerian figure, a major threat to American democracy. It's something we hear over and over and over. As I mentioned, they were quite certain that convicting Donald Trump on any felony, no matter what it was, would basically sabotage and doom his candidacy and at the same time ensure Joe Biden's reelection.
And yet, lo and behold, from FiveThirtyEight, the site that Nate Silver founded that analyzes and aggregates polling data, here you see that Joe Biden's approval rating is currently at its lowest ever rate.
This is from February 2023 and throughout 2023 into 2024. His disapproval rating is now 56.6%, while his approval rating is 37.6%. And this comes in the wake of an onslaught by the corporate media to glorify Joe Biden's presidency, to convince Americans that their belief that they're struggling economically is misplaced and baseless.
I cannot tell you how many times I have heard or seen journalists who work for cable outlets or other major media corporations who have multimillion-dollar contracts as their annual salary, who have large homes in which they live, paid off along with their summer homes in the Hamptons or in Georgetown, where they live, and then in Martha's Vineyard, tell everybody the economy is doing very, very well. It’s you Americans out there who think that you're economically struggling and don't understand the data. You should not be angry at Joe Biden. You should be grateful because of how good your lives are. And then they're shocked when Joe Biden's approval ratings continue to plummet. It is a reflection not only of how little in common they have with the people who they think they are lecturing and directing and leading but also just how incapable they are of understanding the priorities of American voters because they're completely different from these media figures, for obvious reasons, that if you're very wealthy, if you're making a lot of money, your concern for the economy is much less. Your belief that the economy is doing very well is much higher because the economy actually is doing well for you, which doesn't mean it's doing well for everybody else.
The other aspect, obviously, and we've seen this in polling data over and over and over and over, is that one of the main reasons the American public does not trust Joe Biden and does not want to vote for him for a second term is the obviously well-grounded belief that Biden, who is now 81, already the oldest American president ever to serve in that office, is trying to run for a second term, which will bring him to the age of 85 at the end of that term. Everyone can see in plain sight that he is rapidly deteriorating cognitively and in every other way as a result of age. One of the reasons why American voters are so impervious to being gaslit and told that what they're seeing is not the truth is because this is one of the areas in which Americans have a lot of confidence in their own ability to judge, they don't need experts to help guide them through that. That's because most of us have had the experience – I know I have and most people I know have – of having loved ones or family members who get very old, in their 80s and 90s, deteriorate in every way, cognitively and physically. And we can recognize it. We don't need journalists to tell us whether it's true. We can see it for ourselves. Just that video clip I showed you from Biden in 1991 shows he's a completely different individual.
And yet, I want to show you just a clip that I found so amazing. There was recently a Wall Street Journal article that was headlined “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.” And it quoted a lot of Democrats, although none of them, because they're cowards, would go on the record talking about how in meetings it's actually embarrassing, he sometimes rambles and no one has any idea what he's saying. They're talking about matters of war and peace or economic policy or the debt ceiling or agreements and he just starts rambling, and there's a very soft voice that almost nobody can hear. Half the time he's reading from note cards that are the most basic and elementary points that everybody already understands and agrees with, and that has nothing to do with the negotiation. And for a long period of time, he'll just close his eyes and check out. Or when it's time for him to speak, there will just be dead silence for 30 seconds. Even Democrats are saying how uncomfortable it is, how visible it is that we're all seeing the same thing in public.
The White House has been trying to say, oh, don't worry, in private, he's this very sharp, robust leader, even if you don't see it in public. So, the Wall Street Journal was deeply reported, but the only ones who would go on record were Republicans, even though a lot of Democrats were saying the same thing.
Here's how Joe Scarborough, who let's remember, was a Republican his entire life. In 1994, he was elected to Congress as part of the anti-establishment, conservative backlash led by Newt Gingrich. He was one of those congressmen, and now he has a multimillion-dollar contract with MSNBC. And he knows that to keep that, he has to essentially engage in anti-Trump propaganda every day, which he does. But here is Joe Scarborough, trying to convince people that not only is Joe Biden not suffering cognitive decline, but he is essentially sharper, more analytically sophisticated and more tuned to complex issues in economics and foreign policy than almost anybody else in Washington. Just listen to this.
(Video. Morning Joe. June 9, 2024)
MB: […] When Biden was negotiating with House Republicans to lift the debt ceiling, his demeanor and command of the details seemed to shift from one day to the next, according to then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy,
Joe Scarborough: […] people around Mike Johnson and the senator admit that this was basically House Republicans whacking.
MB: Why didn't they just ask Marjorie Taylor Greene?
Joe Scarborough: Exactly. Why? Yeah. They could […]
MB: And Lauren Boebert
Joe Scarborough: It's it it's really shocking, especially when you see what Kevin McCarthy has said repeatedly, publicly and behind the scenes, about Biden, on those same days when they were negotiating,
MB: The strong feelings you're seeing about this article comes also because the context of this race and these two candidates… It's interesting. That's all I'll say. Anyhow, that flies in the face of what McCarthy said about Biden's effectiveness in the past. From Politico last year, quote, “McCarthy mocked Biden's age and mental acuity in public.” […]
Joe Scarborough: In public, like he did in this article.
MB: […] “While privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations – a contradiction that left a deep impression on the White House.” This is from the New York Times: “Privately, Mr. McCarthy has told allies that he has found Mr. Biden to be mentally sharp in meetings.”
And Joe Scarborough rather went on a five-minute rant about how he has known how speakers met with House speakers for over 30 years, and that the current Joe Biden puts every one of them to shame, including Kevin McCarthy, when it comes to his mental acuity, his ability to understand and make strong, reasoned decisions on complex matters… I mean, this is North Korea-level-style propaganda. This is the sort of thing that anybody with a minimal amount of shame would refuse to do. But these partisan outlets have none of that shame. I mean, they're counting on trying to tell the American people that what they're seeing, they should not believe, they should not trust their own lying eyes. I mean, that is the only strategy and every day you see new images of Biden shuffling, that kind of very slow shuffle, representing just a complete kind of gradual shutdown of the human organism, of the body, which obviously includes the brain as well. You can see him, half the time, with no idea where he is, no idea where he's supposed to go, looking extremely confused.
And yet, Democrats, wealthy, out-of-touch Democrats, really believe that what people are going to vote on are things like Trump's conviction in a Manhattan courtroom, in what they probably perceive to be nothing more than a private matter of infidelity, something that during the Clinton years they proved they really don't care about. What they want in their political leaders are people who are going to make their lives materially better. They have a positive recollection of the Trump economy, before COVID, and they feel they're economically struggling under Biden. And yet the kind of people who are reading Democrats and telling them what it is that they should say are people like Alexander Soros.
If you can find a person who has less in common with almost every other American, let alone average Americans in swing states, than Alexander Soros, I'd like to find out who that is. He was not only born into multi-billionaire wealth that he did not earn, though inherited, but every single thing that Alexander Soros has done in his life – everything that he is – is the exclusive byproduct of genetic luck, of having been born to somebody who actually compiled a massive fortune, regardless of how they did that.
Alexander Soros didn't try to go into another field to prove that he was capable. He just followed his father around and he inherited the Open Society Foundation that his father runs, and the way that he exercises political control with billions of dollars, and even that alone. Imagine the Open Society is a big foundation with huge numbers of employees. Do you think George Soros’s son just happens to be the best person, the most competent person to run it?
Everyone knows Alexander Soros is only relevant and important because he got billions and billions of dollars that he did not earn. He's somebody whose entire life comes not from any of his accomplishments, but purely his father's. And you would think that would bestow somebody with a sense of shame, or at least humility, like, “Maybe I don't actually understand how the majority of American voters reason and what's important to them and what they're going through because I was born into unimaginable billionaire wealth that I've now inherited.” But apparently, people like him have no shame. What ends up happening is that because of how I'm sure everyone around Alexander Soros has treated him since birth, how elites treat him knowing that he has more money than almost anybody – George Soros uses more money to influence the political system than anybody, so, you can imagine how the doors swing open for Alexander Soros and how they always have – and somehow that has convinced him not that he is a byproduct of luck and unearned success, but that he somehow has been endowed with great wisdom as reflected by the power that he has amassed.
Here he is issuing instructions to the Democratic Party. Every day, he posts pictures of himself with Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Nancy Pelosi. He's always with them, donating money and having fundraisers. And here he is telling them what Democrats should do to win the election. This is the decree he issued on May 31:
If you're Alexander Soros and you're drowning in billions of dollars of wealth, and you have access to every single elite sector, maybe the things that you think are the top concerns for voters are not really the top concerns for voters. Maybe believing that Trump's conviction in the Manhattan trial in a case involving a porn star and hush payments might not be the most important thing to Americans who weren't born into billions of dollars of wealth. Yet, this is how they constantly reason. That's the way in which these media people are: so out of touch with the public who they think they're lecturing into and directing.
Here is actual empirical data, polling data after the Trump conviction that shows what Americans' priorities actually are. From CBS News on June 9:
Among all the factors on voters' minds this election, former President Donald Trump's guilty verdict pales in comparison to issues like the economy, inflation, and the border — all items on which Trump maintains advantages. As such, the verdict has not dramatically reshaped the race.
(CBS News, June 9, 2024)
Again, if you are a very wealthy liberal immediately, let alone Alexander Soros, none of these issues matter to you. You don't care about inflation. You don't even notice inflation.
The first issue that Americans are concerned about, the major factor is the economy (81%); inflation (75%); state of democracy (74%); crime (62%); the U.S.-Mexico border (56%); gun policy (52%).
At the very end is Trump's conviction: only 28%.
Look at the enormous disparity between that and all those other issues that have affected people's lives. I'll guarantee you that the 28% who even said they cared that much were overwhelmingly Democratic voters who would never vote for Trump, in any event. But the media keep telling them that's such an important issue.
Again, if you're a wealthy liberal elite on the coast, of course, you don't think these issues matter. The economy is doing great for you. You don't notice inflation because you're so rich. You live in neighborhoods where crime doesn't happen. You send your kids to private schools. You live in the kind of community where you don't have to deal with assimilating immigrants. So, you can focus on these kinds of ethereal issues, like these abstract dangers Trump poses because of his conviction. And this gap between elite, political and media sectors, on the one hand, and the entire rest of the country on the other, can't really be understated in terms of its importance.
Historically, it's kind of like the Versailles model when you have the elite completely clustered in certain exclusive places that have nothing in common with the lives of all the other people over whom they think they have a right to rule. You get extreme levels of hatred, justifiable hatred from the ordinary people towards these elites.
We covered the EU elections last night. That's been the major driving force of anti-establishment sentiment all throughout the West since 2016, with Brexit and Trump and even before that, and certainly since. And the more the elite class sees that ordinary Americans, ordinary citizens, are disobeying them and voting differently than they are instructed, the more contempt the elite class has for those people. And that, in turn, is perceived by the ordinary people, and they then repeal that class even more. That's exactly what's happening. It's the reason why almost all institutions of authority have completely lost the faith and trust of the citizenry they once commanded, and why media institutions and media corporations, in particular, are so intensely and pervasively despised.
All right, let me quickly show you, because I've been talking a little bit about the desperation of liberal discourse and the like and how the more liberals start seeing things like this, they start panicking and really start getting extremely desperate. So, first let me show you an interview that Rachel Maddow gave to CNN's Oliver Darcy, the media reporter. I'm sure we can imagine how adversarial that interview was, where CNN's Oliver Darcy interviewed MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.
Here is part of the exchange that they had.
Oliver Darcy: Trump and his allies are openly talking about weaponizing the government to seek revenge against critics in media and politics, with some of his extremist allies even talking about jailing their fellow Americans.
I absolutely love the irony where liberals say, oh, we have to prevent Trump from getting into office because if he does, he's going to use the Justice Department to prosecute, criminalize and imprison his critics, when that is all liberals have been trying to do to Trump for the last three years. Trump was president for four years and never once did that. The difference, though, is he didn't do it, Democrats are actually doing it. And then, the Oliver Darcy goes on and says:
Oliver Darcy: You're one of his most notable critics on television. Are you worried that you could be a target?
Rachel Maddow: I'm worried about the country broadly if we put someone in power who is openly avowing that he plans to build camps to hold millions of people, and to "root out" what he’s described in subhuman terms as his "enemy from within." Again, history is helpful here. He’s not joking when he says this stuff, and we’ve seen what happens when people take power proclaiming that kind of agenda.
I think there’s a little bit of head-in-the-sand complacency that Trump only intends to go after individual people he has already singled out. Do you really think he plans to stop at well-known liberals?
For that matter, what convinces you that these massive camps he’s planning are only for migrants? So, yes, I’m worried about me — but only as much as I’m worried about all of us. (CNN, Oliver Darcy, June 10, 2024)
So, she’s basically saying: I’m one of the most notable people on television who criticizes Trump and even though he had already had four years in office where he didn't do a single thing like any of this – he didn't build concentration camps or gas chambers; he didn't round up his critics and put them in prison; he didn't close newsrooms – now suddenly they say, “No, this time he's really going to do it.”
They were saying these things all before the 2016 election as well. I think it's very difficult to convince Americans that Trump is a Hitler figure when he was actually just president four years ago and I don't think Americans got the impression that he was doing things that made Hitler, Hitler.
If you think what Rachel Maddow was saying - that she’s going to be sent to a camp - was deranged, I need you to listen to what Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said yesterday as well, when speaking to Kara Swisher. And listen not only to her words, but also the tone of voice she's employing when saying these things.
(Audio. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Kara Swisher. June 10, 2024)
Kara Swisher: What happens to you if Donald Trump wins? What do you do? What's your first […]
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I mean, it sounds nuts, but like, I wouldn't be surprised if this guy threw me in jail.
Kara Swisher: Really?
“I wouldn't be surprised if this guy threw me in jail.” That was her first answer when she was asked, as a congressman, what's the first thing you would do? And she said, look, I'm probably gonna end up in jail. This guy's going to throw me in jail. That's how important I am and that's how dissident I am. I’m such a threat to establishment power that Trump intends to put me – me, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – who's basically a glorified social media influencer, into a gulag, a concentration camp. Listen to the rest.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: He's out of his mind. I mean, he did his whole first campaign around “lock her up” like this was his motto.
Kara Swisher: But he didn't say that. You know, he said he didn’t say that
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Right? I take him at his word. I take him at his word. I take him at his word when he says that he's going to round up people. I take him at his word when he threatens journalists. I take him at his word. I feel like what we saw in his first presidency was an amuse-bouche to what his intentions are. He has learned from his mistakes of appointing professionals, and he will not make that mistake next time […]
Amazing that AOC is now saying, oh, in his first term he appointed professionals. Do you think that was what they were saying about Trump's team during that first term in office?
Anyway, it's not even just the utter narcissism and inflated self-importance that Trump is coming to put Rachel Maddow and AOC into concentration camps because they're such grave threats, such brave dissidents, I think they really believe it. It's like a kind of hysteria that they've been feeding on.
Remember, these people only talk to each other and for each other. They only listen to the same media outlets that repeat all the same things. It's kind of not just a group think or her behavior, it's like a cult where you have this message indoctrinated, drummed into your head, every day, by your colleagues, by the media, by everyone who can provide you with positive rewards or negative rewards that Trump really is this Hitler figure that they start to believe in, even though he was just president four years ago and absolutely none of this happened. He did not put anybody in prison who were his political enemies. These are the people who are trying to put their political enemies into prison, and they've been doing it going all the way back to Trump's candidacy, to his campaign and then to his presidency here. Look at all the people who almost ended up in jail. Michael Flynn, Trump's incoming national security adviser, almost ended up in prison. He was charged and pleaded guilty because he picked up a phone and reached out to his counterpart in the Russian government to try to smooth over relations, exactly what you would expect them to do in the transition. They've been wanting the imprisonment of their political enemies, and they're getting the imprisonment of their political enemies for years, while at the same time they're projecting onto Trump what they themselves are doing. I suppose if you're somebody who really craves the imprisonment of your own political opponents, maybe, I guess you just automatically assume that that's how everybody else thinks as well.
Now, let me just give you this kind of amazing contrast to make this point that I want to underscore. Again, this is where you get a sense of how unhinged, how demented these people are, how maniacal they are, and the kinds of hysterical claims that they're trying to make, knowing that they're seeing the same poll numbers as we just showed you. Nothing is working and so they're getting out of their minds.
At the end of April, just a couple of months ago, the former Bush-Cheney spokeswoman, Nicole Wallace, who is now a very popular liberal host on MSNBC that has its own interesting dynamic buried within it, but Nicolle Wallace went on the air and while she didn't say she expects Trump to put her in a concentration camp the way AOC and Rachel Maddow did, this is something that, seemingly on the verge of tears, she was so worried about that she warned her audience what might likely happen if Trump were elected. Listen to this.
(Video. Nicolle Wallace. April 29, 2024)
Nicolle Wallace: I've seen that toast a bunch of times, but it landed very differently this year because depending on what happens in November, seven months from right now, this time next year, I might not be sitting here. There might not be a White House Correspondents Dinner or free press while our democracy exactly falls apart immediately without it. The real threat looms larger. A candidate with outward disdain, not just for a free press, but for all of our freedoms and the rule of law itself.
First of all, I think it's so funny that in trying to warn people of just how evil and extreme and dangerous Trump is, she said there might not even be a White House Correspondents Dinner. That thing where they all dress up in gowns and pretend that they're at the Oscars and they get to go to the White House. But she is, again, saying, like, I think Trump's going to take me off the air like he's just going to order me off the air. And the reason why I just find that so interesting is because I want you to hear the glee and the joy to the point where Nicolle Wallace was almost cackling in August of 2023 when she talked about how Trump was not only on his way to jail but was being put into one of the most dangerous prisons in the entire country where people have been murdered before, and how gleeful and happy she was. In other words, she's the one who wants to put her political enemies in jail, and I'm going to just leave to the side everything the Bush and Cheney administration did to destroy civil liberties while she was there defending it. Listen to what she said back in 2023, when Trump was on his way to a Georgia jail.
(Video. Nicolle Wallace. August 24, 2023)
Nicolle Wallace: Just a few minutes ago, Donald Trump, the disgraced ex-president, the front runner for the Republican nominee for president four times indicted, departed his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. He's en route to Fulton County, Georgia. At Newark Airport, we believe he will surrender himself for processing at an overcrowded jail with a reputation for violence and neglect, a jail that is accustomed to holding defendants facing charges up to and including violent crimes. Stabbings are frequent. Actually, three people have lost their lives over the last month. That jail is where the disgraced ex-president of the United States is heading right now.
I mean, do you see that? Who talks about prison that way? She's so excited. Trump's not just going to prison, but he's going to a prison that's one of the worst, most repressive, most dangerous prisons where people get raped and murdered. She's the one who wants to put her political enemies in prison.
And she and this crowd are doing that very well. They have nothing to run on. They are behind the candidate. His brain is melting and everyone can see it. They are really spiraling out of control. And we're only in June. Imagine what they're going to be doing in July, August and September if these polling numbers stay the same or even get worse. I just think it's so important to take a step back and realize sometimes – probably most of you don't watch these shows, they're only speaking to like-minded people anyway – but I think it's important to note these are some of the world's largest media corporation, NBC News here, and then CNN, how genuinely detached these people are from reality. Not just how partisan they are, but how hysterical they are. They're spreading a kind of paranoia and sickness into the American body politic out of their desperation that Trump might win. That is really disturbing, not just politically, but psychologically and emotionally.
As a final note, we have some very sad news to report. The legendary journalist and author David Talbot suffered a near-fatal and deeply debilitating stroke yesterday, leaving him entirely unable to write, to speak, or even to really minimally function. It's perhaps a permanent state of debilitation.
I first got to know David Talbot because he was the founder of Salon.com, which I know it's hard to believe but was actually a truly innovative and interesting online journal at the time that he founded it, back in 1998. One of the very first, if not the first, online political journals on the Internet. Writing at Salon, in 2007, was actually the first journalism job I ever had. It was the first place that hired me after I was writing up my blog and I got to know him somewhat. Then he was not really at Salon so much, but he was still the founder and so I got to know him, really liked him, and respected him.
But even more importantly for me, Talbot is the author of what I really regard, as I've said many, many times, as the single best and most important history of the U.S. Security State in the post-World War II era.
“The Devil's Chessboard Allen Dulles, the C.I.A. and the Rise of America's Secret Government” does describe how our democracy ended up with this permanent faction of a secret government within our government that has no accountability. This book was incredibly influential in my understanding of how our democracy ended up being saddled with those kinds of people, and that kind of agency. It is a book I have highly recommended many times on this show, on our Locals program and in my personal life, because I really believe that it's vital reading.
We had David Talbot on our show in November of last year, and the interview was every bit as illuminating, as I expected it to be. We have a short video that I just want to show you, mostly to honor David Talbot, but also to, again, encourage you to really get this book if you haven't yet read it.
(Video. System Update 175. November 2023)
David Talbot: […] One of the taboo topics in this country, in the United States, is the assassination of President Kennedy, which happened almost sixty years ago. Still, at this late date, the media refuses to, I think, seriously consider the possibility that elements of the U.S. government killed the president.
Now, why do I think the killing and the cover-up were organized by Allen Dulles? And by the way, I have a long chapter in my book called “The Power Elite”. Allen Dulles would never have acted on his own against the president […]
I should say the main topic of his book is not the JFK assassination. He traces the unbelievable and secret power exercised by the Dulles brothers, Allen Dulles, who was the head of the CIA until John Kennedy fired him over the Bay of Pigs invasion, and his brother, John Foster Dulles, who served as Secretary of State under President Eisenhower. And those two brothers basically ran American foreign policy, but in secret. And then Talbot is sort of taking that proven history and using it to apply it to and question what happened with JFK. Obviously, Allen Dulles hated JFK who fired him. And here's what he had to say.
David Talbot: […] Allen Dulles would never have acted on his own against the president – whom he despised. He always acted on behalf of his wealthy and powerful clients. And I believe that Allen Dulles was not alone in doing this, that he was backed by people who are very powerful in the national security state and on Wall Street where he'd spent most of his career. So, Allen Dulles was head of the CIA and he was, as you say, fired by President Kennedy after the disastrous invasion of Cuba in April 1961. He was given a medal by President Kennedy and was ushered honorably out the door. But he despised the president for firing him. He couldn't believe that this young, untested president had the temerity to fire someone as senior as him, someone as powerful as him. I believe that he turned his house in Georgetown, the neighborhood in Washington, into an anti-Kennedy operation. High-level CIA operatives and deputies continued to report to Allen Dulles in the months and years after his firing, including James Angleton and Richard Helms, who later became head of the agency. I think John McCone, who was put in charge of the agency by President Kennedy, was a figurehead. He didn't know what was going on. The people who really understood how the CIA operated were still in charge. Allen Dulles was still in charge – and his deputies.
And, of course, he goes on to explain the amazing fact that when it was time to form the Warren Commission to investigate what happened with JFK's assassination, one of the people who was put on the commission was Allen Dulles, even though a lot of people at the time were wondering whether the CIA was involved, given the CIA is incredibly powerful. History now. Talbot admitted in this part of the interview, but also in that last chapter of his book on the JFK assassination, that this was not proven, but he was given informed speculation. But the really valuable part of the book that is not in any way speculative is the way in which the CIA began as this relatively small and limited part of our government but, like all agencies that have unaccountable power, it grew and grew and grew and grew leading Dwight Eisenhower on his way out to warn of the unaccountable and growing power of the military-industrial complex. And this was before the Vietnam War, before the War on Terror, before all the wars of the last 10, 15 years, or so. When you read this book, you’ll really understand how this part of the government not only formed but grew to the point where nobody controlled it.
Despite that work, David Talbot lived until the stroke with a very modest income. He was the sole provider for his family. They're navigating an extremely difficult time emotionally and also financially.
There is a GoFundMe page that has been set up by his family entitled Help David Talbot after a severe stroke. It talks about the financial difficulties they are now facing including housing and even some uncovered medical costs.
If you can donate, a modest donation, that will obviously be of great help to David Talbot and his family, the link to that GoFundMe page will be at the bottom of the notes to our show. We wish him and his family the fastest and most complete recovery possible.
So, that concludes our show for this evening.
