Real Clear Policy, October 18, 2024

Will A Potemkin Election Follow Biden’s Potemkin Presidency?

Blindfolds and systemic deceit are the death of self-government.

by James Bovard

President Biden has been derided for being a Potemkin president, a figurehead in a vast charade portraying him actually running the government.  Biden was forced to withdraw from the presidential race after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in June.   But is a Potemkin presidency being followed by a Potemkin election?

Biden’s expulsion from the presidential race did not herald the arrival of truth. Most of the media still tolerates pervasive secrecy on prime issues of the 2024 campaign.

In bygone times, elections were about self-government.  Nowadays, voters merely have a cameo role to sanctify the nearly boundless power of officialdom.  Every year, the federal government slaps a “secret” label on trillions of pages of information – enough to fill 20 million filing cabinets.  And since the government is automatically benevolent (if a Democrat is president), there is no need to trouble citizens with the grisly details of how they are being served.

At the same time Special Counsel Jack Smith is racing to fling all possible dirt at Trump before Election Day, each week we learn of new cover-ups designed to deceive Americans about how badly they have been misgoverned:

1. Biden administration has mostly succeeded in covering up the crime wave by illegal aliens ushered into the nation since 2021. Former Border Patrol Sector Chief Aaron Heitke testified to Congress last month that the Biden administration hid the adverse impact from deluging U.S. cities with illegal aliens, including those with terror ties.
2. The National Archives announced on Wednesday that it would delay until after the election the release of potentially damning records on Vice President Joe Biden’s dealings with his son and foreign wheelers-dealers – records that have been sought for more than a year by conservative lawyers and activists.
3. Biden’s Justice Department sought to bury all the tax charges against Hunter Biden but were thwarted thanks to courageous IRS whistleblowers.  Hunter’s guilty plea last month to the tax charges confirms that the Justice Department’s offer a wrist-slap plea bargain to Hunter last year was a shameless obstruction of justice.
4. Biden’s FBI last year created “a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers,” Newsweek reported. FBI whistleblowers have exposed the politicization of an agency that even secretly targeted traditional Catholics who prefer to hear mass in Latin. But the vast majority of FBI surveillance and entrapment abuses remain shrouded.
5. Team Biden is covering up both Trump assassination attempts. Biden appointees have stonewalled bipartisan congressional investigations into the abysmal Secret Service failures at Butler, Pennsylvania.  The Justice Department has indefinitely delayed hearings for Ryan Routh, the 58-year-old guy caught waiting to shoot Trump on his Florida golf course.  Delaying proceedings against Routh assures that Americans will not learn before the election whether the would-be assassin had ties to the CIA, Pentagon, State Department or other agencies that assisted Routh with his massively-publicized campaign to recruit foreign soldiers to fight for Ukraine.
6. The Biden administration continues covering up almost everything regarding its support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia.  The best info Americans have received was thanks to a young military computer technician who leaked revelations that the Ukrainian military was in far worse shape than Team Biden claimed. Americans have been forced to pay hundreds of billions of dollars but are left in the dark regarding Biden administration machinations that risk pulling this nation into World War Three.
7. The House Oversight Committee this week subpoenaed DHS for its records on Tim Walz’s possible ties to the CCP after being contacted by a whistleblower.  There is zero chance that the Biden administration will release any of those records before Election Day.
8. Political convenience is practically the sole determinant of what Americans are permitted to learn nowadays.  After Biden dropped his re-election bid, the administration disclosed records showing that his son Hunter sought U.S. government handouts for Burisma when Joe Biden was Vice President.  That scandal was buried until Joe Biden was no longer politically relevant.

Is censorship the biggest X factor for this election? Four years ago, the presidential election may have been swung by the coverup of the damning revelations in Hunter Biden’s laptop.  The FBI and the CIA hustled to censor and defuse that story with false rebuttals in October 2020.  According to multiple federal court rulings, federal agencies tampered with the 2020 election by censoring millions of comments by Americans who raised doubts about the trustworthiness of mail-in ballots and other election procedures. Federal judge Terry Doughty noted that  “virtually all of the free speech suppressed was ‘conservative’ free speech.”  A federal appeals court issued an injunction prohibiting federal officials from acting “to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce . . . posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

But the Supreme Court refused to recognize that the censorship victims had any legal standing and canceled the injunction.   Americans will likely have no idea how many muzzles and blindfolds were secretly attached by federal agencies and federal contractors before Election Day.

Don’t expect journalists to suddenly get hot to thwart those Biden cover-ups. When the media shrouded Biden’s mental debility, it directly endorsed de facto secret rule. How much effort has the New York Times or Washington Post or National Public Radio exerted to reveal who is actually exercising the supreme power nowadays? Exposing that issue could derail Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign so it is ignored. But ​​​​​Biden is as oblivious as ever. When asked by a reporter on Thursday about the situation in the Hurricane Helene storm zone, Biden replied that those states “are getting everything they need. They are very happy across the board.”

Earth to Uncle Joe?!?

But as long as Donald Trump is not elected next month, most of the Washington media doesn’t care who is in control. If the Wizard of Oz was a contemporary political campaign story, the media would overwhelmingly side with the guy behind the curtain. As long as the Wizard recited “Orange Man Bad,” the media would cover up all his abuses.

But “informed consent” is a mirage if the feds blindfold voters. As long as Team Biden keeps a lid on its worst outrages until Election Day, Democrats can snare four more year to abuse the Constitution, the law, and the American people. Unfortunately, self-government is not retroactive.

James Bovard is a contributing editor for The American Conservative. He is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. His latest is Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, and a frequent contributor to The Hill.