by
Austin BayJuly 3, 2024
The June 27 televised Biden-Trump debate fully exposed America's and the Free World's most grave strategic weakness: dominant mass media organizations that fail to hold their favored government, economic and media elites accountable for policy failures.
Strategic weakness — that's a Washington wonk way of saying "a social, political or military flaw a dedicated enemy of America identifies and then exploits over time" with the goal of weakening or destroying the U.S.
Informed citizens keep free societies free. Informed citizens need facts, not propaganda. Reporting facts — no matter how awkward or politically damaging — sustains freedom. A news organization that sticks to the facts trusts its audience to make their own decisions.
Trust. A very important concept. Creating trust takes time. It requires mutual respect and demonstrated reliability over time.
Prior to the June 27 debate, major U.S. and international media knew Joe Biden suffers from dementia. Beltway insiders knew Biden cannot and does not function as president of the United States.
Yet the White House denied it. Videos showing Biden stumbling and mumbling were "cheap fakes." Major news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post and NBC parroted the White House lies.
Essentially, the White House and its media allies told the American people, "Don't believe your lying eyes." They didn't trust the American people.
Then came the June 27 debate. Joe mumbled; his sentences fragmented then disappeared. The Biden Moment — incoherent fragments, glazed eyes.
Now the White House and protective media lies no longer work.
A dysfunctional president of the United States is a high order defense problem in a world of nuclear weapons, ICBMs, wealthy enemy states (China) and suicidal terrorists.
The American president must make quick yet thoughtful executive decisions — at 3 a.m. when the red phone rings and a cool Pentagon voice tells him, "Mr. President the Afghan bugout situation in Kabul has gone to terrorist hell. Thirteen killed, sir, our people."
On June 27, Slow Joe proclaimed no U.S. military personnel had died on his watch during his administration, and ... slow fade to the truth that 13 did.
Biden's big media buddies and his duplicitous White House have already harmed U.S. and Free World defense.
Yes, the U.S. has the world's most powerful military forces and largest economy. That's been the long run case since World War II ended.
In 1991, Desert Storm crushed Saddam Hussein, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Cold War was definitely over. The so-called Peace Dividend kicked in and the Pentagon slowly shrank. 9/11 turned the Pentagon into a counter-terror organization. Meanwhile, Communist China began building a near-peer military force, including a navy numerically superior to the U.S. Navy.
It's 2024: The long run is in a sprint phase toward disaster.
Communist China thinks it has answered the 21st century's biggest strategic question: How do you defeat America?
Beijing's answer: You get America to defeat itself.
I suspect future historians will write, "America's enemies created conditions that leveraged U.S. weaknesses."
In 2024, the U.S. military looks like a slowly disintegrating institution, one disintegrating at the level of human beings willing to serve.
The U.S. once assumed its states were secure from internal attack — Pearl Harbors and 9/11-type attacks were the threat. But open borders — a Biden administration policy — has changed that. It's not merely the rise in crime, the burden illegal aliens place on the social safety net and the fentanyl drug crisis spurred by Mexican cartels and China. It's the presence of terrorists connected to the Islamic State and Iran. America now faces the prospect of fighting small proxy armies on its own soil.
Biden's media allies didn't report on the border fiasco. Instead, they called critics of his open borders policy racists and Nazis.
The Biden Moment of one policy failure after another has been a disaster for U.S. defense. Biden's Afghanistan bugout encouraged Vladimir Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine — Putin seized The Biden Moment. Biden's ineptitude encouraged Iranian troublemaking, to include pursuing nuclear weapons.
But the most insidious threat is China's "disintegrative warfare." In a disintegrative war, a "unitary belligerent becomes increasingly fragmented by secessions."
Increasingly fragmented. The Biden Moment writ large.