You know what I’m talking about. The speech on Thursday night was widely acknowledged as one of the worst presidential speeches in American history. To be sure, we’ve had some bad speeches before. Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise Speech” was certainly a bad speech, but compared to Joe Biden’s Threatysburg Address, it was virtually Pericles’s Funeral Speech.
I won’t talk much about the optics of the speech, which were spiritually tantamount to a Nazi hellscape or a Clive Barker horror film from the 80s. Why Independence Hall was drenched in blood red, with two Marines in the background on Biden’s left and right (which might be illegal, by the way), I have no idea. It may be that the folks minding Biden’s store are so wrapped up in their echo chamber and their groupthink that they are simply unable to see things clearly. Everything about the optics of Thursday night’s speech was purely bad. It’s particularly egregious to me personally because I was there at Independence Hall in November 2019. That is sacred ground to me. I really feel that what Biden and his minders did there on Thursday night was commit sacrilege.
I’m more concerned about what the speech itself means substantively. I think it signals a black shift in our politics. The shift of course has been occurring for quite some time. I won’t bore you with those details. This speech runs a thread back to the Democrats’ histrionic response to the events of January 6.
The real deep meaning of his speech: Biden declared war on conservative dissent. To be sure, conservatism these days is deeply fractured. And Biden made it clear that what he describes as “MAGA Republicans” are the domestic threat that he wants to eradicate. He ingratiatingly signaled his approval of “mainstream” Republicans, presumably meaning quislings like Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell.
Don’t believe it. Folks like Romney are the equivalent of Lenin’s “useful idiots.” In the end, the Democrats want a one-party state and the complete elimination or collapse of the Republican Party. If Biden and the machine were able to eradicate MAGA Republicans, other Republicans like Mitt Romney would be next on the list. I tend to agree with Rod Dreher’s sentiments:
It seems very, very clear to me that this Administration is laying the groundwork, rhetorically and otherwise, for the suppression of political and religious dissent in this country. As I have been saying again and again, people who came to this country to escape Communism have been warning us Americans for years that something dark and wicked is arising here.
Something very, very wicked this way comes. Mark my words.
You're right, Dreher is right. Sadly where I live, many, many people believe Biden and find nothing wrong with this speech and its presentation. The fracture in conservatism has always bothered me. I'm not sure how to help people see past their self-imposed purity tests. I keep telling people here, in regard to our gubernatorial election, get the current lady out first, fix the rest second.