The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Throughout his presidency, as with all presidents, there have been videos of President Biden, stumbling upstairs, falling over cables, and the usual pratfalls to whuch anyone, particularly someone more elderly, is at risk when moving through unfamiliar environments.  Gerald Ford nearly fifty years ago was especially mocked for such accidents but he was still a relatively young sixty-one and a relatively vigorous former college football athlete.  

Still, this episode from Season 1, Episode 4 of the then new Saturday Night Live in 1975 seems strangely prescient of the material available today.  Except that you won't see SNL mocking a sitting Democratic president.

Double click to enlarge.

In the past couple of years, the volume of video of President Biden doing strange things, beyond mere pratfalls, keeps increasing by the month.  It would appear that there is a rising issue with cognitive decline as illustrated by disorientation, confusion, loss of focus, etc.  More and more footage of his wife or members of his entourage or peers intervening to address some addled action (see A deft kindness for a recent example.)

This past month has seen a cascade of video of incidents of inattention, confusion, disorientation, freezing in place, etc.  Multiple videos from many angles of each incident.  

You can read into each more or less significance as one might be inclined to do, but they each and all happened.  There they are, on video.  Lots of video.  From different sources.  From different angles.

The legacy mainstream media, as an extension of the White House administration, are working hard to hide the videos or recast them.  The White House anchors and their pet journalists have worked their way through claims of deep fakes (AI enhanced CGI-type new content of things that did not happen but can be made to seem as if they did) to misinformation (deceptive editing or unsubstantiated claims based on the video) and now are reaching to the bottom of the bag for . . . cheap fakes?   

Yep.  There is so much of the disturbing behavior that they had to come up with a new name to try and hide it.  Cheap fakes.  The deception is laughable.  

Misleading video clips of President Biden watching a skydiving demonstration at the G7 summit in Italy went viral last week, prompting the White House to say Biden is victim to a simpler version of "deepfakes." So, what are "cheap fakes"? CBS News Confirmed Executive Editor… pic.twitter.com/o7mHw9U3s4

— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 18, 2024

The CNN anchor is working hard to refute the representation in the video that Biden wandered aimlessly away from his peers, diverted by something happening off screen.  Critics are of course representing this as the cognitive confusion, distraction and inattention of an elderly man in decline.  The CNN anchor shows us one of the more common versions of the video which seems to show pretty much exactly that.  

But, she claims, it is a cheap fake.  

But actually, he, if you widen the frame out, you can see he was talking to one of the members of the military that was participating in that demonstration.  

AND THEN SHE DOES NOT SHOW THE SUPPOSEDLY CONFUTING VIDEO!

I have seen perhaps 3-6 versions of the incident from slightly different angles and of varying length from 30-90 seconds.  They all appear to show the same thing.  Biden losing situational awareness, getting distracted by something offscreen, breaking away from his peers in the photo-op to go talk to someone, and then being guided back to the photo-op.

The CNN anchor would have us disbelieve our lying eyes and makes the verbal claim that there is video that shows he is not distracted and wandering but she doesn't show that purported video.  It becomes very difficult to believe that they are not doing anything but straight up lying to their audience.

Perhaps there is an angle and a length of video that makes Biden's action seem natural and alert.  Perhaps.  But all you have to do is show that video.  To claim and then not show?    That is just childishly insulting.

To borrow NPR's favorite formulation, the CNN anchor has claimed without evidence that Biden's critics are using a tactic involving a new technique known as "cheap fakes" to misrepresent his cognitive condition.  She has refused to show supposedly refuting video.  She makes the unsupported argument and moves straight to a claimed "expert" to discuss

How prevalent are deep fakes and how big a problem will they be in this election?

We are deep into George Orwells' 1984 where:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.

Followed by

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

The Mandarin Class, the glitterati, the legacy mainstream media, the deep state "government", the CNN anchors - they are telling us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears, to reject the otherwise indisputable so called "cheap fakes."  Add in the profound incoherence of the Woke ideology and Critical Theory and we are well down the path of War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.