But the headline Monmouth chose to encapsulate its findings crystalized these disparate factors into a single, overarching grievance against Democratic governance. Joe Biden is, according to voters, just “not paying enough attention to [the] most important issues.”
What issues? Inflation, obviously, which is the single most important issue on all voters’ minds, regardless of party affiliation. Crime is another, as is immigration. Both issues matter more to voters today than they did a month ago. If there’s a common banner under which these seemingly disparate issues can be filed, it is a general sense of precarity. Voters who don’t feel safe in their homes or on their streets, who are concerned about the capacity limits of America’s social services, and who don’t know what the money in their bank accounts is going to be worth tomorrow will prioritize those concerns over just about everything else. Only 31 percent believe the president and his party are focused on those “bread-and-butter concerns.” They’re right. But that’s just what the voters that the White House is courting want.
There is a popular Twitter account that goes by the handle “Mueller, She Wrote.” The account is managed by a former employee at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Allison Gill; and she was fired for it. An internal audit of her conduct at the VA turned up some discomfiting questions “about how she could record a podcast and perform live shows while claiming to have post-traumatic stress disorder,” as Politico reported. But creating speculative “Resistance” fiction has proven a lucrative alternative to government work. It’s clearly much more personally rewarding, too.
“If you’re wondering why Twitter is so quiet today,” Gill wrote, it’s because so many of the people who constituted “Resistance Twitter” during Donald Trump’s presidency spent the day at the White House. Given how politically engaged these people are, it’s a safe bet that their agenda at the White House today was dominated by politics. For some participants, it’s the first time they’ve been in the president’s proximity since September, when the White House inexplicably threw a party for itself to celebrate what a great job Democrats had done to contain inflation. You’d think they’d have learned their lesson.
It’s tempting to question the competence of a political operation that would so indulge an unrepresentative sample of people who dominate an unrepresentative platform like Twitter. Are the president’s advisers cosseting Joe Biden in a cocoon of admirers? Is the administration settling into an information silo that filters out the many mounting signs of imminent disaster on the horizon? Maybe. But there appears to be an insatiable appetite among the president’s supporters for news and information that distracts, if only for a moment, from the pervasive sense of impending doom.
Also among the gang: “The White House invited Dylan Mulvaney — the transgender activist who went viral for documenting ‘days of girlhood.'”
Dylan has been a breakout sensation for making a series of TikTok videos documenting his “days of girlhood.” Dylan, you see, is a grown man pretending to be not even a woman, but a young girl. A sort of auto-pedophilia, I guess, and apparently just the sort of person that Joe Biden needs to meet so that he can sniff the hair of an exotic “child.” After 8 decades of sniffing cis-girls, the aging president needs ever stranger thrills to keep him interested.
Dylan is a perfect match for the insanity of our times.
Dylan’s rise to stardom has been meteoric. A few months ago he was an adult male with nobody to celebrate him, but since creating videos of himself pretending to be a female child prancing through forests he has become not just a TikTok sensation, but a cultural icon fit to sit down with the President of the United States.
Biden’s administration indeed takes most of its cues from DNC-MSM journalistic Twitter. But the gathering of “Resistance Twitter” and trans activists in the White House also seems eerily reminiscent of another stunt by the Democratic Party on the eve of its 2010 shellacking: Stephen Colbert Testifies in Congress, in Character:
During questioning, subcommittee members had some trouble navigating Colbert’s faux-serious turf. Conyers, who’d asked Colbert to leave at the beginning of the hearing, pointed out that Colbert’s spoken testimony differed significantly from his written one.
Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican, told Colbert that he would take his jab at congresspeople not reading bills as an implicit endorsement of GOP House members’ “Pledge to America,” which demands — among other things — a 72-hour window to give representatives time to read bills before voting on them. Colbert confirmed this assumption with his always straight face, saying, “I endorse all Republican policies without question.”
Smith then asked, “I know you’re an expert comedian, an expert entertainer … but would you call yourself an expert witness?” Colbert cited Rep. Lofgren’s invitation to him following their day working together in the fields. Smith asked if one day of farm work made him an expert, to which Colbert replied, “I believe one day of me studying anything makes me an expert.”
As they say at Sen Blutarsky’s old fraternity, “I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part. And we’re just the guys to do it.”