I’ve voted for the Democratic candidate for president in every election since I could vote, all the way back to 1988. Now, at 55 years old, I’m a registered independent. And I will not vote for any Democratic candidate for president in this election, very possibly in any election ever again.
But I also think President Joe Biden needs to step down, for the sake of democracy.
We need two viable, sentient candidates who could actually lead the country and serve honorably and honestly in order for this country to call itself a democratic republic.
I continue to consider myself a liberal (not a “progressive”) despite walking away from the Democratic Party in 2021. I believe in expansive individual rights and freedoms, including free speech and bodily autonomy. I thought the Democrats believed in these things as well as standing up for the most vulnerable in our society. I thought they cared about women’s rights and actually knew what a woman was.
But their handling of COVID-19 was such a trespass of the Democrats’ own stated values (severely restricting our speech and movement, violating our bodily autonomy, forcing women out of the workforce to care for their children, enacting policies that harmed the poorest among us the most, shutting down public schools while private schools remained open) that I doubt I could ever bring myself to vote that way again.
I deeply regret my vote for Biden in 2020. I did it out of some combination of habit, lingering but fading Trump derangement syndrome, and mistakenly believing that if Biden won, the Democrats would stop their illiberal COVID-19 policies when it was no longer a viable political strategy to position themselves as everything that is the opposite of Donald Trump. (Go ahead, laugh at me. I don’t mind.)
I thought that once Trump was out of the way, the Democrats would be free, and willing, to forge ahead with opening schools to benefit the nation’s nearly 100 million public school children. Biden could open the schools and declare that he’d beat COVID! I feared the feud and polarization would just continue if Trump won, with Democratic governors going even harder against him.
I was wrong about it all.
The Democrats were in too deep to turn back. It was the sunk-cost fallacy writ large. After Biden won, the party continued to press the same ineffective lockdown, distancing, and demonizing of the unmasked and unvaccinated strategies because not to do so would be an admission that it was all for naught in the first place. (It was.)
I fear we are in the same sunk-cost fallacy death spiral right now. If the Democratic Party’s leaders were to push Biden to step down, they would be admitting they’ve been lying about his fitness for years. Literally no one believes senility snuck in just on debate night last month.
No one is buying the “it was a just a bad night” hocus-pocus. No one believes that Biden, out of nowhere, found himself dazed and confused and unable to string a sentence together (we “beat Medicare!”). The newly revealed fact that a Parkinson’s disease specialist visited the White House eight times in as many months puts an end to any doubt that the administration knew Biden’s health and sentience were failing before debate night.
Watching the pundits perform being aghast on the evening of the debate made me embarrassed to be human. The whole affair was painful to watch, precisely because it exposed the lie furthered by the administration and complicit media for so long.
As Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi wrote a week after the debate, there has been a conspiracy of silence to protect Biden, and his “mental decline has been a dark family secret for many elite supporters.”
This “family” she refers to includes his donors and members of his own team. I’d add many in the legacy media to that list, most notably MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough with his over-the-top obsequiousness and hyperbole:
“This is the best Biden ever!”
“He’s sharp as a tack!”
Though doth protest too much, Joe!
I’d also add to Nuzzi’s list the propaganda-peddling Washington Post with its cringe-inducing headlines of the last few years, including this: “It’s not a sin to be 81!”
No, of course it’s not a sin to be 81. But it is a sin to lie. And the journalists in the tank for Biden have been lying to us the whole time, hoping we wouldn’t notice material reality.
Watching the liberal media pundits melt down in the aftermath of the inevitable truth revealing itself was a sight to behold. The secondhand embarrassment was almost too much for me to bear.
In a republic with democratically elected leaders, we vote for a person, not an anonymous cohort of puppeteers. Telling us Biden was just fine (better than ever!) while knowing he was not and having a horde of unelected bureaucrats run the show behind the scenes is anything but democracy.
The Democrats are fond of saying, “You must vote for Democrats or it will be the end of democracy!” But when you demand we vote for the unfit, senile, barely functioning candidate who isn’t able to comport himself in a debate (let alone a town hall) addressing the people or, heaven forbid, the situation room, we are living in more of a monarchy akin to that led by the leprosy-addled King Viserys in House of the Dragon than an actual democracy.
In the HBO series, Queen Alicent and the Hand were making the decisions before Viserys died. But this is not Westeros. And for the sake of democracy, Biden needs to go. The Democrats need to suck it up, force him out, and take one for Team Democracy. Even if it means they lose.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
I don’t care who steps in to be the Democratic candidate. I won’t be voting for him or her. I won’t forgive the Democrats’ destructive lies during the pandemic. And I won’t believe them when they say this is the only candidate, whether it’s Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) or Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) or any other authoritarian who has been lying about Biden’s fitness for the past two years, who can save our democracy now. Why would I when they’ve been lying about Biden’s fitness for years?
We need at least two candidates to vote for, lest we become China. Only when the Democrats fess up to their lies and put forth a candidate who can actually govern will we be back on track to saving our democracy.
Jennifer Sey is a USA champion gymnast, the producer of the 2020 Emmy-winning documentary Athlete A on Netflix, and the founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics.
