One reason Joe Biden is behind in the polls, I’m fairly convinced, is because Democrats relentlessly participate in an organized campaign to use Biden’s age to dehumanize him.
Whether it involves making reasonable critiques of the nonsense focus by the press on Biden’s age, loud fights about his age and how one might replace him, or the collapsing of all problems with Robert Hur’s report into his geezer comments, Democrats talk about Biden’s age all the time, even while complaining that the NYT does too.
Democrats talk about Biden’s age instead of all the other things (Gaza is an important exception) they should be talking about, whether they want to replace Biden or not. Want Kamala Harris to replace Joe Biden at the top of the ticket? You’re best served to talk about the historic successes of the Biden-Harris Administration. Want Gretchen Whitmer or someone else to replace both Biden and Harris? You’re best served to talk about the success of Democratic policies. Happy to have Biden continue what he’s doing or even just resigned that he’s not going to be replaced? You sure as hell should be talking about the remarkable successes his Administration has had.
Not Democrats. They’re talking about Biden’s age instead.
Out of frustration, I went on Xitter and … talked about Biden’s age.
The post went, by my modest standards, viral: as of this moment, 6.3K likes, 1.7K RTs, 65 QTs, and just north of 106K views.
Because Xitter is a toxic cesspool full of brainless MAGAts and bots and trolls, my post elicited a flood of replies — effectively I jumped myself right into a cesspool of far right memes about Joe Biden’s age.
Perhaps about a fifth of the replies attacked me because I posted this, including the always stale attack on my moniker that I should be called empty head. A few people even suggested I was a bot.
There were a number of gross memes, often with photos shopped to make Biden look older.
A number of the memes were racialized.
Both memes and posts stated as fact that Biden had dementia.
A good many featured pictures (again, often altered) of Biden at the beach, as if going to the beach is something only seniors do.
Some, thinking they were being smart, asked, “What did he accomplish in the last week?”
The was the historic drop in crime rates. There was the student loan debt relief.
There was his yearly physical, which shows arthritis in his feet continues to be a problem, but the root canal he had over the year required only local numbing.
There was the “intense” meeting Biden hosted, at which he, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hakeem Jeffries attempted to explain that the House had to fund Ukraine support to avoid a sure Ukrainian loss, the fracturing of NATO, and the conclusion by authoritarians of the world that the US was a soft, fat country that had lost its way.
And, yes, there were the inadequate efforts to reign in the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, the urgent topic that should be the focus of criticism. The White House hosted Israeli cabinet member Benny Gantz in what Bibi Netanyahu made clear was an unauthorized visit, but President Biden was not described as participating.
We know how the far right engages in troll and meme warfare to dictate press coverage. As Microchip described at Douglass Mackey’s trial, it didn’t matter whether the memes he was making go viral were true; what mattered was to “creat[e] the appearance of some controversy … [t]o cause as much chaos as possible so that that would bleed over to Hillary Clinton and diminish her chance of winning.” Those efforts have only gotten more professionalized since 2016. Elon Musk has made that far easier to do on Xitter. If anything, mainstream outlets like NYT have only proven easier to bully into chasing right wing narratives since.
The right wing noise machine turning Biden’s walks on the beach, walks he has been taken for over a half-century of living in Delaware, into some sign of abnormality will run rampant regardless of what Democrats talk about. But the choice to obsess about Biden’s age instead of the things his experience has allowed him to accomplish is equally a choice to participate in an information operation designed to dehumanize the President and drown out any discussion of his accomplishments.