One of the strangest portions of the angry old man yelling at us Tuesday evening — that is, Old Joe Biden’s State of the Union address — was when the putative president, his beady little eyes gleaming with rage and hate, shouted, “Make no mistake! If you try anything to raise the cost of frisizhnjubs, I will veto it!” That’s how Benny Johnson of Newsmax renders it. PJM’s own Stephen Green has it this way: “If we kjhdgfjhargijbrgiarg, I WILL VETO IT!” Whether or not they understood what the senescent figurehead was actually saying, the assembled Democrats loved this, and they jumped on their feet to give Uncle Joe a rousing standing ovation. It was yet another indication of how much of a totalitarian lockstep the Democrats, who are increasingly open and up-front about their authoritarianism, have already adopted.
BIDEN: "MAKE NO MISTAKE! If you try anything to raise the cost of frisizhnjubs I will veto it."
*Entire flock of Democrat clapping seals erupts in standing ovation*
This is so pathetic.
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 8, 2023
WhiteHouse.gov, as always playing the role of the man at the circus who follows behind the elephant with a dustpan, doesn’t give the slightest hint that anything was amiss. It gives us Old Joe saying: “Make no mistake, if you try anything to raise the cost of prescription drugs, I will veto it.” Then we’re told that there was “(Applause),” as if it were a perfectly reasonable moment in an utterly normal State of the Union speech. But it wasn’t, and not by a longshot.
While “prescription drugs” is a plausible thing for Biden to have said, and roughly corresponds to “frisizhnjubs,” there is no way that anyone watching the speech without a written copy of Old Joe’s remarks would have been able to divine that “prescription drugs” is what he said. Twitter was full of guesses: “Brazilian jobs.” “Fish and chips.” “Virginian jobs.” And so on. One Twitter user observed: “Not even the subtitles could translate.”
The assembled members of the House and Senate couldn’t have known what Biden really said, either. Yet when Kamala Harris leapt to her feet, applauding at the line, so did the Democrats in the chamber, cheering Old Joe as lustily as if anyone who didn’t applaud would end up in the gulag. That was what the bizarre scene resembled most closely: Soviet apparatchiks applauding the boss, not out of any genuine enthusiasm for what he said, but knowing that a lack of applause would be taken as a sign of disloyalty that could mean losing one’s job, or even imprisonment or death.
The great Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounts in his Gulag Archipelago that at one conference of Communist officials, “a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with ‘stormy applause, rising to an ovation.’ For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the ‘stormy applause, rising to an ovation,’ continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare to be the first to stop?”
No one dared, at least not for a good while: “after all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first!” The NKVD was the precursor to the KGB. And so “the applause went on — six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks!”
After eleven minutes, one man stopped applauding and sat down, and finally the rest could follow suit. But soon afterward, the man who had stopped applauding first was arrested: he had revealed himself as an independent thinker.
Related: Asked About His Mental Fitness, Biden Says ‘Watch Me’ – Yeah, That’s the Problem
The Democrats of today regard independent thought in just as negative a light. Remember how they ridiculed the Republicans’ fight over who would be speaker of the House, as if vigorous disagreement and dissent were not only absurd but something of which Republicans should have been ashamed? The House Democrats were actually proud of the fact that conformity is ruthlessly enforced upon them, and that none of them dare to stand up to their leadership in even the smallest detail.
The Democrats all leaping to their feet and cheering when few, if any, of them knew exactly what Old Joe had said was symbolic of the entire state of their party today. They’re unthinking authoritarians, intolerant of the slightest dissent and fanatical in their conformism. Just like the Stalinists. Just like the Maoists. Just like all totalitarian societies. Is there not a single Democrat in the House or the Senate who will dare to stand up to their naked emperor? Apparently not.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member