JOE BIDEN SHUFFLES OFF THE STAGE. It’s hard to believe now, but at this moment, 82-year-old President Joe Biden once imagined he’d be getting ready for a second term in office. Instead, he delivered a “farewell address” Wednesday night, making very clear, for the nth time, that he is not mentally or physically up to the job of president of the United States. The idea that Biden could serve four more years, which many Democrats accepted as fact just last year, was ridiculous.
So, with a small group watching inside the Oval Office — wife Jill Biden, recently pardoned son Hunter Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff — Joe Biden made his last speech to the public. Apart from a lot of sentimental boilerplate, its key message was: The super-rich have too much power in politics. But it was a very specific type of super-rich person who is worrying the president.
“I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern,” the president said. “The dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”
Biden said he was particularly worried about “the concentration of technology, power, and wealth.” Today, he continued, “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy.” Echoing President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address warning about the “military-industrial complex,” Biden said there is a “tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country.”
It’s hard to believe Biden is really concerned about the dangers the super-rich oligarchy supposedly poses to American democracy. After all, less than two weeks ago, he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, a billionaire who has spent a lifetime using his wealth to push highly partisan and sometimes dangerous ideas into the American political debate.
Soros, who is 94 years old, did not attend the White House ceremony. But his son Alexander Soros, who has taken over the family’s political influence operation, did. If you’ve never seen it, you should look at Alexander Soros’s Instagram page. It’s a diary of the extraordinary access he, as the son of a politically active billionaire, enjoys with leaders around the world. Just from the recent U.S. presidential campaign, the younger Soros has posted photos of himself with Biden, Harris, Tim Walz, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Josh Shapiro, Hakeem Jeffries, Mark Kelly, Gretchen Whitmer, Charles Schumer, Amy Klobuchar, Raphael Warnock, John Kerry, and more. There is no one in the Democratic Party who is unavailable to George and Alexander Soros.
So, Biden refined his allegation. It is tech billionaires — people who have built big things, as opposed to currency speculators such as George Soros — who pose the real danger to American democracy. “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” Biden said. “The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”
We know that Democrats are unhappy with the policies of X since it was purchased by Elon Musk, head of Tesla and SpaceX. We know they are unhappy with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that he is changing the content moderation policies of Facebook and other platforms to make them less biased. And we know that they are unhappy with Amazon chief Jeff Bezos’s management of the Washington Post, particularly his decision not to endorse a candidate — as opposed to its traditional endorsement of the Democratic nominee — in the recent presidential election.
We also know that those three — Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, the three richest men in the world — have been quite open, and in the case of Musk, wildly supportive, of the return of President-elect Donald Trump to the White House. It seems odd that Biden would use the final address of a 50-year career in politics to denounce them, but that is what he did. National Review’s Rich Lowry got the sense of it when he posted: “Washington’s Farewell Address — avoid entangling alliances. Biden’s Farewell Address — I don’t like Meta’s new moderation policy.”
Beyond his own limitations, Biden’s address showed the deep anxiety among Democrats that they might lose control of key media outlets. For many decades, they enjoyed enormous influence over the news delivery system — network broadcast television newscasts, as well as big newspapers. That control slipped with the arrival of talk radio and Fox News. And then came the internet, which opened the political conversation to more voices. Yes, Democrats still control much of the communications world — broadcast and cable news, most papers, not to mention Hollywood and academia. But it is no longer monopoly control, and the fear and angst change it is causing among those on the Left is very real.
The consternation is so intense that it dominated some of the outgoing Democratic president’s final words in office. With all the things the Democratic Party has done wrong just in the last year — watching them has been a master class in political mistakes — they seem to believe they can communicate themselves out of their problems, and they want Big Tech to help them in the task. And that is what, apparently, was on Biden’s mind as he said farewell to the public.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
