After exhausting claims of "misinformation" and "disinformation" in response to inconvenient facts on the internet, this week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre introduced a new term with help from leftist reporters in the briefing room.
"I think you all have called this the 'cheap fakes' video. And that's exactly what they are. They are cheap fakes video. They are done in bad faith. And, and some of your news organizations have, have been very clear, have stressed that these right-wing, the right-wing critics of the President, have a credibility problem because of, the fact-checkers have repeatedly caught them pushing misinformation, disinformation," Jean-Pierre berated from the lectern.
"And so, we see this, and this is something coming from, from your, your part of the world, calling them cheap fakes and misinformation," she continued in her usual exacerbated tone. "We're seeing these deep fakes, these manipulated videos. And it is, again, done in bad faith."
She was referring to a number of videos showing President Joe Biden wandering off, looking confused and being led in the right direction by others in a healthy mental state. The "cheap fake" videos are as fake as Hunter Biden’s laptop. They are not fake, they are very real, and the American people can see for themselves that Biden's mental fitness is a problem — which is precisely why it's showing up in polling.
"63% of U.S. adults say they lack confidence in Biden's mental capability to serve effectively as president," the Associated Press reports.
These are precisely the kinds of real things the Biden administration used to demand social media companies pull down from their platforms.
"We've increased disinformation research and tracking," former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki argued in February 2021 about pandemic information. "We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation…It's important to take faster action against harmful posts and Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts."
But this isn't the 2020 campaign – when Twitter censored negative stories to help Team Biden – or the first three years of the Biden administration. Elon Musk now owns Twitter, rebranded as X, and last summer, a federal judge slapped down the Biden administration's systemic censorship of things on the internet that were inconvenient to their lie-filled narrative following a lawsuit by the state of Missouri.
"The present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech," Judge Terry Doughty wrote.
"Although the censorship alleged in this case almost exclusively targeted conservative speech, the issues raised herein go beyond party lines. The right to free speech is not a member of any political party and does not hold any political ideology. It is the purpose of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of the market, whether it be by government itself or private licensee," Doughty continued.
Now that team Biden can't pressure social media companies to censor information, they're resorting to desperate claims that what people see with their own eyes is fake. That tactic won't carry them very far and certainly won't ease concerns from voters about Biden's mental acuity. Instead of making Biden or his physician available to the media for questioning to combat accusations the president is "slipping" behind closed doors — or to refute the Hur Special Counsel report which said Biden is an "elderly man with a poor memory" – the communications shop keeps them both hidden. There are ways to mitigate the situation, yet it's obvious why other options cannot be deployed.