Joe Biden’s First Press Conference
Joe Biden has conducted his first press conference as President of the United States. I did not watch it, and I have not listened to clips from it, read any summaries of it, or come across any “takeaway” soundbites from it. I promise you, and myself, that I will make every effort never to become aware of a single thing he said or a single question he was asked. I furthermore promise myself, and you, that I will not join the conservative media chorus in picking apart Biden’s words for things to pick apart. Nor will I join the mainstream (aka leftist) media chorus in digging for things to praise in Biden’s historic remarks.
Joe Biden is of no consequence to anything that matters to me now, nor anything that should matter to you. He is just a guy, and not a very interesting or intelligent one. He is certainly not a legitimate president of anything. My reason for saying that, however, has nothing to do with any of the Trump cult hokum about stolen elections and satanic voting machines — every word of it lies, every assertion laughed out of court by conservative judges, every “spokesman” for that narrative exposed as a bald-faced liar and treasonous fraud.
No, my reason for saying that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president is that I reject out of hand the idea that America can still have a legitimate president. Those days are long gone. There will never again be a person referred to as “President of the United States of America” who has any right to that title. For the nation’s political apparatus has been so fundamentally corrupted by a combination of oligarchs and communists — with most members of each of those factions also being subterranean members of the other — that no national election in that country could ever again produce anything vaguely resembling a real popular mandate for the executive branch. Consider that in the two most recent elections, 2016 and 2020, the only three Americans with any hope on Earth of coming within sixty million votes of winning the presidency were Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. Quibbling about who deserves to win, when those are your “realistic” options, is like debating about whether it is more reasonable to entrust your life savings to a gambling-addicted heroin addict or your daughter to a serial rapist.
So I continue to make occasional observations about the practical workings of American (or other) government, i.e., its steps on the road to full-on dictatorship, since understanding what is happening around us is essential to the development of practical wisdom. But I no longer waste any of my precious time on this planet parsing the words of politicians in any way that could be mistaken for, or aligned with, any tribal agenda. I am a practical and philosophical loner anyway, and as such averse to all tribes as a matter of principle and temperament. But more importantly in this context, I know that the tribes of today are merely rival groups of slaves that, having lost their collective will to escape or rebel, have taken to deludedly identifying with their masters.
“What did Joe Biden say?”
Why does it matter? I have a serious friend to converse with, a student to teach about political philosophy and literature, a soul to purge of its confusions and contradictions, and a world of eternal ideas hiding behind so many veils of practical ephemera that I might need ten more lifetimes to reach it with my outstretched mind. I’m busy; I don’t have time to waste.
