The Times Call for Courage

We all aspire to be the kind of person who defies the mob, yet few of us actually live that way.

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About the Author

Julian Adorney is the founder of Heal the West, a substack movement dedicated to combating illiberalism via spiritual formation and rebuilding the American community.

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Jake Tapper (of CNN) and Alex Thomspon (of Axios) have a new book coming out about the Biden administration, titled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. The book promises to reveal the full extent of the cover-up surrounding Biden’s cognitive deficiencies. As the authors write, “Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify trying to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.” “What was the extent of it?” they ask. “Was it a cover-up? Was it a conspiracy? We will let the facts speak for themselves.”

While the subject is important, the book itself comes across as blatantly hypocritical. If there was a cover-up, then these two national reporters were almost certainly among its most influential participants. As a CNN anchor and an Axios correspondent, respectively, Tapper and Thompson were in prime positions to investigate and expose Biden’s cognitive decline at any point over the past few years. Instead, they ignored or downplayed the issue. Defending himself against accusations of hypocrisy on this topic, Tapper points to a 2022 softball interview in which he gave Biden the opportunity to shut down concerns about his age and then refused to offer any pushback (for instance, by showcasing evidence that those concerns were in fact well-founded).

The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire site, captured the irony with the headline: “King David Co-Authors Book Exposing Government Cover-Up Of His Affair With Bathsheba.”

Of course, Tapper and Thompson weren’t the only ones involved. Almost the entire Democratic establishment, including its allies in the media, ran cover for Biden and shielded him from scrutiny. Behind closed doors, his decline was undeniable. Donors were voicing serious concerns as early as 2023, when Biden froze mid-sentence and forgot the term for a former military service member (“veteran”) until he asked the audience for help. If donors noticed, surely the top journalists and Democratic lawmakers who interacted with Biden regularly did as well. Yet in public, almost the entirety of the party’s apparatus marched in lockstep: Biden was “sharp as a tack.” He was “at the top of his game.” He was “the most accomplished president in history.”

Among other things, this whole debacle represents a glaring failure of courage. On X, anyone who questioned Biden’s age risked being accused of helping Trump. Prominent Democrats hesitated to challenge the mental and physical fitness of their party’s leader. Only after the presidential debate—when the entire world saw that the emperor had no clothes—did top Democrats feel safe publicly acknowledging the obvious.

Of course, the failure of courage isn’t exclusive to leftist media and politicians. They are hardly the only ones who have lacked a spine in recent years.