Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
“Right-wing media figures are desperately pushing conspiracy theories about Biden ahead of the debate.”
That’s what Oliver Darcy, who was then with CNN, wrote just days before the first (and only) 2024 presidential debate between President-elect Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. The “conspiracy theories” were that Biden is a “senile, mentally incapacitated elderly man who cannot remember what he had for breakfast, let alone run the federal government.”
But the “conspiracy theory” that Biden could not “run the federal government” turned out to be true, according to a Wall Street Journal report that describes how Biden’s inner circle worked to conceal his physical and mental decline.
“To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, [Biden’s closest aides and advisers] told visitors to keep meetings focused,” the WSJ reported. “Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members — including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen — were infrequent or grew less frequent.”
“Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan,” the report continues. “Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy.”
These concerns happened as early as “the first few months of his term,” according to the report, meaning the cover-up has been ongoing for years.
Unfortunately for the American people, “journalists” lost their appetite for accountability and instead gobbled up the spoon-fed propaganda about Biden’s cognitive state the White House shoveled to them — before excreting it out for all of us to see.
The Independent’s Noah Berlatsky wrote, “Let’s fact check Biden’s so-called mental decline” in July of 2023. Berlatsky contended that “questions about the president’s fitness for office aren’t in good faith” and that Republicans “have put a lot of effort into claiming that the 80-year-old Biden is mentally incompetent to hold the Presidency.”
“But the insistence that Biden is incompetent and weak also has real downsides for the GOP. If Biden is in mental decline, it should, in theory, be easy to defeat him.” Notably, Democrats ousted Biden from the nomination via a coup just one year later because of his severe cognitive impairments.
NBC News’ Matt Dixon, Dasha Burns, and Alex Tabet wrote in October of 2023, “Republicans float a quiet conspiracy theory that Biden won’t be on the ballot,” asserting that the theory was “centered largely on the thought that Biden is too old and not sharp enough mentally.”
The Guardian’s Nick Robins-Early tried to downplay the concerns in 2023 as a “fixture of conservative media” that caught on with the general public. “As Biden … prepares for the 2024 presidential race, it’s likely that his age and mental faculties will be a primary target for conservatives during the campaign.” Robins-Early goes on to argue that “much of this narrative has relied on either specious allegations or outright deception.”
And even after Robert Hur came out and said he would not charge Biden for his mishandling of classified documents because Biden would likely present himself to a jury as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” the left-wing corporate press still didn’t want to ask questions. Instead, the media just doubled down on their defense of Biden.
The Washington Post’s Toluse Olorunnipa and Adriana Usero tried to undermine Republicans’ concerns about Biden’s physical and mental fitness by writing in June that “Republicans” were using “cheap fakes” and “misleading videos” to “attack” Biden and try to portray him as a “physically and mentally challenged commander in chief.”
The New York Times’ Stuart A. Thompson tried to pretend that conservatives got lucky when Biden was being ousted since it bolstered their “right-wing conspiracy” that Biden would be replaced and that another “baseless belief” is that “Biden is merely a puppet of Democratic elites or a shadowy political body referred to as the Deep State.”
But that’s exactly what the WSJ report tells us — unelected bureaucrats were being placed in roles that aides thought Biden himself should be occupying.
It shouldn’t have taken four years for this report to come out. Biden put his cognitive decline on display for the whole world to see. Outlets like CNN, the NYT, and The Washington Post have endless resources and could have uncovered this for themselves. But left-wing corporate media decided to abdicate their responsibility to do real journalism. Thursday’s report from The Wall Street Journal should be the final nail in the coffin of the propaganda press and serves as a reminder to the American people: Don’t trust these organizations or their “reporters.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2