Yes, Biden Is Swindling Americans: White House Staffer Lets the Cat Out of the Bag
The myth of the “moderate” Joe Biden stubbornly refuses to die — partially because the Democrats and the legacy media are working overtime to keep it breathing. From day one, Biden has aimed to erase his predecessor’s legacy, rejected Republican efforts to pass clean bills on COVID-19 and infrastructure, and inflamed the culture war on abortion, transgenderism, and race. He even called Georgia’s new election integrity bill “Jim Crow on steroids.”
“[A]t his hundred-day mark, Biden is the most liberal president we’ve had — and the public thinks he’s a moderate,” an unnamed White House staffer told New York Magazine. “That’s a winning strategy to me. They’re willing to accept that you’re gonna write this piece as long as they know that swing voters in Colorado aren’t gonna read it.”
This gobsmacking admission comes nine paragraphs into Olivia Nuzzi’s article about “How the White House Polices Language in Washington.” Nuzzi’s piece focuses on how the Biden White House responded to the president’s recent gaffe in which he admitted there was a “crisis” on the southern border in contradiction to his administration’s messaging that there was no “crisis” on the border.
Nuzzi noted that the word “crisis” “suggests spiraling, breakdowns in the system, and the people who work for the new president happen to love systems.”
This is the return to normalcy: The professionals are back in the building — hyper-sensitive and type A — and Washington sure feels tense. “We are just not going to get pulled down in the muck of right-wing-driven arguments about word choice,” Psaki said. Semantics debates, she added, keeping with the swamp imagery, are a form of “crocodile wrestling.”
Yet the Biden administration does focus on word choice, intently. Conservatives have merely raised complaints about the White House’s intentional strategies.
Last month, the Biden administration issued memos to immigration agencies dictating changes in terms: ditch “alien” for “noncitizen” or “immigrant”; ditch “assimilation” for “integration”; ditch “illegal” for “undocumented.”
The legacy media has even complied with the White House’s attempts to redefine reality. In March, the Associated Press issued a memo advising reporters to “avoid” or “use caution” when using the word “crisis.”
As Nuzzi noted, when Biden made his “crisis” gaffe, “Psaki attempted to clarify: It was not the position of the White House that the border was in crisis; Biden had meant to refer to the circumstances everywhere prior to migrants’ arrival at the border.”
The White House decided to split hairs in order to deny the plain truth:
Psaki and other White House officials carefully explained to me the distinction: The conditions that compel migrants to the border are crises, and the conditions of the journey are a crisis, but the border itself is not a crisis because the Biden administration has not sown chaos as Trump did, and the policy response to the challenge has not been chaotic. It’s a crisis until it reaches American soil, in other words, then it’s a challenge.
Nuzzi concluded her article with a telling quote:
This reminded me of something William Safire once wrote describing how the administration of George H.W. Bush had screwed him over to neuter a damaging story: “What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.”
Indeed, the Biden administration is working overtime to manipulate the media, and legacy outlets are merely playing along. When conservatives rightly object, Psaki chides us for “arguments about word choice,” giving the modern Left’s Pravda an excuse to dismiss the truth right in front of their noses.
This anonymous White House staffer has copped up: Biden’s staff are intentionally pulling the wool over the eyes of Americans, and they celebrate when Americans get hoodwinked into thinking the president is a “moderate” hard at work to return America to “normalcy.” Meanwhile, the president keeps pushing a divisive partisan agenda while gently chiding the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal bitter-clinger deplorables to “Come on, man.”