We all saw it.
Let’s start there, with what was plain: a man aging in real time on the world’s brightest stage, voice thinner, gait slower, sentences sometimes slipping just out of reach. President Joe Biden, burdened by both the weight of the office and the march of time, was no longer the figure who once stalked Senate hallways or debated policy. This wasn’t character assassination. It wasn’t politics. It was observation.
The “sin” wasn’t the decline but the denial. It was the Orwellian twist that told us we were crazy and every glitch in the presidential matrix was Republican voodoo.
The pro-Biden media, once proudly skeptical in the face of power, became its public relations wing. There was a time when journalists speaking uncomfortable truths was a civic duty. Now, discomfort was spun as disinformation, and journalism chose to frame Biden’s faltering as a right-wing mirage.
Fox News, Newsmax, the constellation of conservative platforms were easy villains. And to be clear, many trafficked in distortion.
But what the mainstream press did was more insidious: they dismissed the concerns entirely. They treated the truth, or at least the question of it, as a contagion not to be investigated but quarantined.
The “sin” wasn’t solely that Biden aged or even declined. The sin was that he and his acolytes pushed an agenda untethered from America’s needs and that a generation of reporters, raised in Watergate’s shadow, decided that this time the cover-up was noble.