Team Biden rejects ‘cheap fake’ videos

Who can you put next to President Joe Biden that will make him look good? We know it’s not the G7, as Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni had to wrangle the US commander-in-chief when he threatened to drift away from the group of world leaders during a parachuting demonstration. And Saturday confirmed that former president Barack Obama isn’t the answer either, after grabbing his former VP by the wrist and guiding him by his shoulders off the stage at a Los Angeles event as Biden appeared to freeze for about five seconds. Biden’s handlers have already equipped him with special shoes and a gaggle of aides now surround him during boarding of Marine One to disguise his shuffling gait. What might they dream up next to protect the fragile president from unfortunate optics?

So far, their best answer has been to deny that what we’re seeing with our own eyes is even happening. White House spokesman Andrew Bates suggested that right-leaning media outlets are “disrespecting… readers” when they publish “cheap fakes.” He’s not talking about knock-off Louis Vuitton bags outside of the NYC subway — “cheap fakes” is apparently the new term for videos that show things Team Biden doesn’t like. Karine Jean-Pierre repeated the term at the White House briefing room podium on Monday. 

In response to the New York Post’s description of the Obama incident, former Obama advisor Eric Schultz simply said “this did not happen.” Some started circulating their own video that contained multiple cuts and conveniently zoomed out during the six-second period that Biden seemingly froze and Obama subsequently served as his visiting angel — far enough that we couldn’t see the specifics of the exchange. How’s that for a “cheap fake?” 

The other defense from Democrats was to point to former president Donald Trump mixing up the name of his White House doctor. He mistakenly referred to now-congressman Ronny Jackson as “Ronny Johnson.” Sure, Trump is only three years younger than Biden (as Dr. Jill often reminds us) but we all know the difference between misspeaking on occasion and claiming you started doing civil rights activism when you were fifteen, forgetting when your son died and the circumstances of his death, insisting you were vice president during the pandemic and trying to shout out a congresswoman who passed away in a tragic car accident the month prior. 

Voters are not buying the excuses for Biden’s poor mental and physical state. According to a new poll by Echelon Insights, voters are more concerned with Biden’s age than with Trump’s felony conviction. There’s even more reason for the Biden camp’s desperate attempt to downplay reality; Trump leads Biden by eighteen points in a new poll by Ann Selzer, who is considered one of the most reliable Iowa pollsters. As Frank Luntz said, this is “bad news for Biden in more competitive Midwestern states like Wisconsin and Michigan.”

-Amber Duke

On our radar

GRILLER INSTINCT Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer deleted a Father’s Day tweet in which he was attempting to grill burgers as critics roasted him for putting a slice of cheese on a completely raw burger patty. 

COLUMBIA ON NOTICE  Columbia University created a task force to address the harmful impact of rising antisemitism on campus. Early reports say that Jewish students reported that professors repeatedly asked them to defend the actions of the IDF and insisted the media was controlled by Jews. 

‘WHAT HAVE WE LIBERALS DONE?’ Liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof blasted the effects of progressive policies in his city of Portland, Oregon, in a new column over the weekend. The West Coast, he said, is “infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes.” 

Cori Bush, miracle worker

Representative Cori Bush’s statements are often prone to hyperbole, but she claimed with all sincerity in her autobiography that she performed multiple miracles. In The Forerunner: A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America, Saint Cori tells stories in which she purports to have immediately healed two people with severe illnesses by praying over them. 

“As I learned how to apply God’s Word to my life in new ways, I better understood the power that was already residing in me,” Bush, who worked as a nurse before joining Congress, wrote. “It was there, waiting for me to acknowledge it, to use it. I had the confidence to heal others with God’s power.”

Retelling one of her many miracles, Bush wrote: “The child had had a bleed in her brain, shortly after she was born, and so couldn’t walk. She had never taken a step in her life. I carried the child from the prayer room in the back of the church out into the sanctuary… ‘Walk,’ I said gently to the three-year-old girl, ‘you will walk.’ And this girl took her first step. Then another, and another. She walked.”

Can I get a Hallelujah?

Before the skeptics try to deny her holiness, we have a witness. “Her grandmother walked into the sanctuary just in time to see the child take about two dozen steps. She screamed, and then she kept screaming.”

Hallelujah!

There’s more. “One woman whom we met had several visible tumors on her torso. She was due to have surgery but lacked health insurance and living in the park. One of the tumors was particularly painful to her. I laid hands on her and prayed, and I felt that my hand was no longer touching a tumor. It shrank along with the others on her body.”

The autobiography first came out in 2022 but these bombastic claims of faith-healing went largely unnoticed — probably because no one bothered to read the book.

Bush was asked about this particular miracle, which was performed on an “unhoused” lady she never saw again, but people mostly stopped asking questions after she doubled-down. She told PBS’s Firing Line presenter Margaret Hoover of critics, “You know, they are not the woman that had the tumors.” 

The Washington Free Beacon previously reported that Bush was part of a church that laid claim to resurrecting people from the dead and cured thousands of people suffering from AIDS, cancer and other maladies. Bush herself relied on one of the group’s other faith healers, “Chris Chris,” to cure her of the coronavirus over the phone.  If this isn’t miraculous, then what is? Set aside your Ruth Bader Ginsburg prayer candle, Saints Cori and Chris Chris are coming through. 

-Juan P. Villasmil

The ‘Resistance’ prepares for second Trump term 

“The resistance to a new Trump administration has already started,” the New York Times reported yesterday. The piece was based on interviews with more than thirty officials of organizations that are preparing for the potential re-election of Donald J. Trump. They claim democracy is doomed and the “radical changes with authoritarian overtones” that Trump plans “include using the Justice Department to take revenge on his adversaries, sending federal troops into Democratic cities, carrying out mass deportations, building huge camps to hold immigrant detainees, making it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with loyalists and expanding and centralizing executive power.”

“What Trump and his acolytes are running on is an authoritarian playbook. So now we have to democracy-proof our actual institutions and the values that we share,” said Patrick Gaspard, the chief executive of the CAP Action Fund. But the NYT assures us the “Times journalists are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. That includes participating in rallies and donating money to a candidate or cause.”

Storing up mifepristone pills, mass protests, legal challenges and a ”flurry of regulations” from the Biden administration are some of the precautions progressive organizations are taking.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded to the article: “It’s not surprising Biden and his cronies are working overtime to stymie the will of the American people after they vote to elect President Trump and his America First agenda. Their devious actions are a direct threat to democracy.”

Cheung has a point: if the voters elect Donald Trump, wouldn’t it be anti-democratic for the progressive “resistance” to try and stymie his agenda? 

–Ella Johnson