The Outsider Perspective Issue 423 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Especially to the town of Whittier, Alaska, which went viral over Christmas after some travel accounts noticed it was a town of 272 people, and almost everyone lives in the same high-rise condominium building. It’s nicknamed the “town under one roof.”

The only way to access Whittier is via a 2.5-mile-long one-way tunnel that closes at night and is surrounded by water or steep mountains on all sides. The town used to be a military location earlier in the 20th century but shrunk after the base closed down. People continue living there, though it remains an extremely remote location.

This week, we’re covering “lies of the year.” Politifact named the claim it believed was the lie of the year, and they missed it entirely—more on that below, with links to follow.

Quick Hits:

The Wall Street Journal published an extensive report on how the Biden administration ignored calls from the “spy-world scientists” that COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak. Specifically, the WSJ reporting traces how the FBI evidence was ignored in favor of WHO-connected members of the bureaucracy, who toed the line against a lab leak. This is one of many things I’m hoping Jay Bhattacharya will help uncover once his nomination goes through.

Where you can find me this week

Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter.

Horse Race Ep. 018: Biden’s Pardon Crisis | Trump Transition Is Popular | Dems Civil War Brewing…

Joe Manchin Goes Scorched Earth On Democrats… And He’s Right – Conservative Institute

Joe Biden Throws Open The Prison Doors For Christmas – Conservative Institute

Jay Bhattacharya Is The Perfect Nominee To Restore Trust – Conservative Institute

The Real Lie Of The Year… Maybe Decade

It’s the end of the year, and everyone is putting out articles listing the “things” of the year. Politifact decided to name their “lie” of the year and went with the whole “eating pets” story from the election around Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. The Politifact crew said this lie won their reader’s vote overwhelmingly.

I won’t challenge them; that’s not the point of this week’s newsletter. However, the immigration issue was also clearly there. For instance, police in Aurora, Colorado, busted more than a dozen Venezuelan gang members in The Edge apartment complex, which drew national headlines at the same time. I remember more than a few people on the left suggesting this was a fake story, too.

Ignore all the facts relating to those stories for a moment: it is empirically untrue that this was the lie of the year. I’ll accept everything Politifact says at face value, but there’s no way any historian looking back at this year will consider that the most important lie. In fact, Politifact’s selection of this as their lie of the year reflects the blinders with which they view the world.

The lie of the year was Joe Biden’s mental and health condition. Full stop.

We know it was a lie because the cover-up relating to Joe Biden’s cognitive decline single-handedly wrecked the Democratic Party and got them to dump Biden in favor of Harris at the last second. These events have never happened in the course of United States history.

In his reporting, Mark Halperin suggests that the recent Wall Street Journal reporting is only the tip of the iceberg. The headline for this WSJ story was “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge. Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.”

We’re entering the mid-mark of the 2020 decade. This is one of the most enormous lies of the decade. If it’s not, the only other lie that’s been as consequential as this one is China, the WHO, and everyone else responsible for lying about the lab leak hypothesis and COVID-19.

Joe Biden walking out on the debate stage and revealing to everyone that he no longer could be president stunned the nation. Here in this newsletter, I started writing in January and February that Democrats were already having this conversion. The State of the Union pushed that pressure back. Biden ended his campaign with one debate performance.

The debate moment with Trump was when everyone knew the emperor had no clothes. Trump even said at one point he didn’t understand a thing Biden said in the debate, enhancing the disaster for Democrats. It wasn’t a bombshell news story the White House could deny; it wasn’t allegations, an attack ad, or anything else. Joe Biden went onstage and made the point himself, and there was no going back.

What’s even more ridiculous is that the press immediately started leaking that Biden was losing it in the aftermath in an effort to push him out. Biden’s decline is an open secret in Washington D.C. That’s what makes Politifact’s “lie of the year” more ridiculous. The WSJ’s reporting clearly states that the White House and D.C. reporters spent the last four years covering this up, and what we’ll learn in the future will be worse than what we know now.

The lies didn’t stop there, though. Kamala Harris continued to defend Biden as being up to the job, and Biden himself claimed the same. No one believed it. It’s the first cover-up of this kind since Woodrow Wilson (arguably the worst president in history).

Biden nuking himself for everyone to see was wild and forever altered the election. But that’s only part of the story. Because it’s the second question that will get far more scrutiny in the coming years: who was actually running the White House?

Notably, in foreign policy, Donald Trump hasn’t been inaugurated yet. Still, things shifted from Biden to Trump on election night. Biden’s not even a lame duck. He’s non-existent. In the Congressional shutdown drama, Trump pushed Congress in a given direction. The White House was a rubber stamp.

The White House staff is allegedly angry that Biden can’t even show up to give pictures with staff members as everyone leaves, a common courtesy for previous presidents. Biden is more gone now than ever before. Sure, you see him walking around and “doing things.” But he’s not showing up for anything. It’s over.

At the beginning of the Biden presidency, one of the first things I wrote was that he was the president who “wasn’t there.” That continued for all four years. It’s the most notable thing as he leaves. He’s the vanishing president, and no one has told the truth on why that’s been the case.

Now that he’s out of office and his career over, those loyalties are dead. The truth is coming soon. That will make the Biden cover-up the biggest lie of the year and likely the decade.

The “eating the cats, eating the dogs” discourse will become a difficult trivia question in a few years.

Links of the week

CNN journalists offer brutal assessment of why their network is failing – Daily Mail

A Mom Asked for Public School Board Records. They Charged Her $33 Million. Parents are suing schools to find out what their kids are learning. Schools are suing parents to shut them up. How did we get here? – The Free Press

Signs of Revival: Is the West Returning to Christianity? – PJ Media

Europe Is Canceling Christmas: Moves in France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Germany are a worrying sign of the West’s renunciation of its Judeo-Christian identity – The Free Press

Accusations of genocide. Charges of corruption. Improbably, Netanyahu had a good year – CNN

What Does It Mean When Your Party Brand Collapses? Repairing a deeply negative image is never easy. Democratic “fusionism” may be needed. – The Liberal Patriot

Democrats need to heal their fractures or find a new candidate from Hope: Refusing to admit Kamala Harris was a bad candidate hurts Democrats’ ability to move forward – Mark Halperin, Fox News

Biden’s horrific commutations are a grotesque abuse of the US justice system – Rich Lowry, NYPost

Done With Never Trump – Bret Stephens, NYTimes

X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week