My baby want a Hardcore

She's been tellin' me all night long

As I’ve observed, usually the emphasis in Hardcore — our term of art for ragebait emails that lure your senile relatives to rightwing garbage sites — is on paranoid rants that lead to grifts, rather than up-to-the-minute reports on current events. But Joe Biden’s poor debate performance nearly two weeks ago has become a hot topic for all MAGA fans and enablers, from the classier conservative media outlets to the chumps in the Prestige Press to the hordes of Hardcore.

Some of the brethren resurrect pre-debate Biden Gone Gaga tales. American Patriot Daily, for example, claims “BARACK OBAMA LEADS JOE BIDEN OFF STAGE AFTER BIZARRE COGNITIVE FAILURE” — a rehash of the tsimmis made over Obama gently directing Biden as he left a Hollywood fundraising event weeks ago. Democrats waved off this and other such stretchers as “cheap fakes” — but since the debate, anything goes. That time Biden went “um”? Proof of dementia! We have a medical examiner (for Fox News) who says so!

2024 Battleground reached back to May for “Joe Biden’s Handlers Try to Hide the Fact that Biden can’t Walk Upright on his Own” — a claim not really borne out by the Axios report it cites, which says (based on the anonymous access upon which such bullshit factories depend) that Democratic aides endeavor to stand “between Biden and the press’ camera position outside the White House, the visual effect [of which] is to draw less attention to the 81-year-old’s halting and stiff gait,” which is not quite like concealing that Biden must either crawl like a baby or be carried on a litter.

Nonetheless 2024 Battleground tries to have fun with it — cracking, for example, that “Biden’s handlers being afraid for Biden to walk a couple hundred feet without dislocating a hip should’ve been the first sign that Biden shouldn’t be running for re-election.” (I’d say it would be interesting to see what they’d have made of FDR back in the day, but since Roosevelt gave us Social Security I think we already know.)

As you may have noticed, this topic has not improved Hardcore authors’ prose and perceptual skills. 2024 Battleground also reports that “Biden’s handlers have to treat him like a toddler in other ways by forcing him to wear special rubber shoes to help with his balance.” I believe those are known as “sneakers.”

DC Daily Journal is even worse. First they pretend sympathy for the old geezer: “It’s a sad situation seeing Joe Biden clearly so unfit for office while his close family members and allies essentially hold him hostage.” (I never thought I’d say this about anyone, but Megan McArdle does that sort of thing better.) Then, suddenly, the dotard Biden becomes a cunning mastermind!

In ABC’s interview with the president, Joe Biden made it extremely clear that he believes he’s the only one qualified to lead the nation and beat Donald Trump. This is ironic considering he’s never able to make anything else clear, ever.

Biden’s one moment of clarity promotes the lie that he’s clear! You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, though; get a load of the close —

This is the bed the Democrats have made though, and now they must lie in it. Huh, ‘lie’. There’s some joke there about how much Democrats lie, like they did about Joe Biden’s mental health.

Whatever bad things you can say about AI, it’s never going to come up with something like that. It makes one more indulgent of the imaginative feat of the DC Watchdog scribe who headlines his story “Biden Defended by WHO?! (Video)” and plays it out with this:

In a demonstration of the old saying that birds of feather flock together, President Joe Biden has been defended by no other than the scandalous former White House medical advisor Anthony Fauci, the man behind many of the outrageous developments surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

The author missed a trick: He points out that Fauci is 83 years old, but fails to speculate on his cognitive decline. Didn’t he get a look at Fauci’s shoes?

My hat is off to whoever managed to combine the two great Hardcore equities — rightwing propaganda and maximum grift — with this splash page:

Click to the video and surprise — it’s waxy Jim Rickards, author of The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System, of whom I’ve previously written. (Ol’ Jim isn’t looking too spry himself, reading his cue cards as if his lawyer advised him to hurry up and haul out the camcorder and make a video Last Will before his final collapse.)

It’s pretty much the same pitch as before, but now it begins with “bumbling Joe Biden” and the Deep State plan to “swap out Biden with a shadow candidate hand-selected to beat Trump” — which, as a side effect (or maybe it’s intentional, you know what monsters these Democrats are!) will “trigger a social and financial meltdown from shore to shore.” (There’s also a weird fantasy scenario in which Biden hangs in at the White House after the handoff just to write pardons, apparently with aides guiding his shaky hand, for himself and “the Biden crime family”.)

But don’t despair, says Rickards — you can “beat them at their own game” and save your “retirement income” (Rickards knows his audience!) from the Dem Shadow President with a “little-known ‘Chaos Rally’ strategy.”

If you hang in long enough (and it’s tough, even at 2x speed — they don’t let you skip ahead) you’ll learn (after a deluge of synonyms for senile) that the shadow nominee will be California Governor Gavin Newsom, which is totally cheating, and when he wins there will be riots (of course) spurred by righteous patriot fury but performed by Antifa (of course). America will be in ruins, but you can still make big money in the stock market if you take Rickards’ advice to find the golden window between the first wave of violence and total societal collapse.

Is there a pitch at the end of this interminable video? I didn’t stick around to see it — but that’s one good thing about having followed these guys for years: I may not be able to predict shadow presidential nominees like Rickards — after all, he’s had a lot of practice at predicting; in January 2024, he was telling the rubes Biden would be out by May! But if I bet that a long Hardcore video will lead to a stupid grift, I’m always sure to come up a winner.