Dear Readers,
I just realized that Substack’s “subscribe” buttons transform into “pledge now” buttons when published. I can’t figure out how to change that, and while I very much appreciate those who have pledged support, Shiny Herd is still free for now.
Thanks for making Shiny Herd a part of your day.
All the best,
Ted
Each day you wake up and realize today could be the day the world discovers your chicanery.
Each day requires you to push your fakery a little further. Each day demands another agonizing test—maybe your act has to go on the road or fool a new group of people. Forget President Biden’s mental fitness, White House staffers must be edging toward insanity.
They’ve been carefully orchestrating his every halting step and word. Each public appearance requires almost Cirque du Soleil levels of choreography. And if anyone catches on, staffers must attack like their political lives depended on it.
Imagine the stress they’ve endured as they have tried to hide what nearly everyone already knew— that Biden’s not all there.
The failing octogenarian protagonist offers a new twist, but the core of the story is as old as politics. Push a narrative, attack dissenters, and survive one more election. Eight Percenters assume groupthink will advance their political goals, but sometimes it undermines them.
Here’s how Jonathan Haidt puts it in The Coddling of the American Mind movie:
When we suppress dissent, when we intimidate dissenters, we make ourselves stupid, because other people challenging us make us smart. It's almost like they're an extension of our brain.
Haidt likens punishing dissenters to “shooting yourself in the brain.”
Punishing dissenters makes us dumber, and it does more than that. It creates a fog of ignorance that makes us vulnerable. It might even cause ambitious elites to lose what they covet so dearly—power.
Let’s examine the players and ponder why they behaved as they did.
The White House Staff
The members of Team Biden have long insisted the President is just fine, and they attacked anyone who suggested otherwise. Recall their fury over special counsel Robert Hur describing Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory" or The Wall Street Journal’s report from just a month ago whose title now reads like an understatement: “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”
The reporting by Hur and the Journal are some of the only things that have aged well in this saga. But we shouldn’t be too surprised by the behavior of the president’s staff. They had so much to gain by maintaining the illusion, so it’s no wonder they would defend Biden’s mental capacity so ferociously.
It’s easy to depict them as cynical puppeteers hungry for personal glory, and maybe that’s an apt description. But we should never underestimate the power of self delusion. When our careers are on the line, we humans become extremely creative rationalizers. We become blackbelts in motivated reasoning.
The Media
Most in the mainstream media stuck to the White House’s script.
Journalists largely share Team Biden’s progressive worldview, but there’s another force that contributed to the groupthink—fear. Journalists are terrified of doing anything that could be perceived as helping the orange Satan.
Even former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson highlighted that fear. She told Semafor, "I worry that too many journalists didn't try to get the story because they did not want to be accused of helping elect Donald Trump."
That same fear courses through actors, writers, producers, and directors.
Related:
Why Won’t Late Night Comics Rip Biden? Conventional wisdom can’t explain the groupthink
Why is Late Night Comedy One-Party Territory? Groupthink grips Colbert, Kimmel, and Fallon
Hollywood
The incentives for people in the entertainment industry mirror those in the media. They also fear being ostracized for helping Trump. They also root for progressive policies. Indeed, they’re often more brazen about their partisanship than their media comrades, who are still somewhat burdened by the expectation of nonpartisanship.
For the Hollywood set, their participation in the ruse goes beyond their predictable support for anti-Trump movies and their reluctance to needle Biden. They have been actively involved in Biden’s campaign. Just over three months ago, Stephen Colbert moderated a star-packed Biden fundraiser that hauled in a record $26 million. Last month, Jimmy Kimmel racked up an even larger amount.
Then came the debate, and the charade could last no more.
So what can this fiasco teach us?
Lessons Learned
Power can sometimes foster weakness. Eight Percenters dominate the institutions that had been keeping the smoke and mirrors show chugging along. They were mighty enough to orchestrate the illusion, but their power remained brittle.
It took only a few minutes of debate stumbles to destroy the elaborate apparatus of illusion. A little reality goes a long way.
But they almost got away with it.
Biden received relatively strong marks after his State of the Union speech, and with a little luck, he might have earned a passing grade for his debate performance. Elderly people who struggle with cognitive decline often have good days and bad days. Had the debate coincided with a good day, Biden might have sidestepped the mutiny he now faces.
In hindsight, the Eight Percenters probably would have been better off if they hadn’t forbidden dissent.
Imagine a Different Story
We shouldn’t expect much from the White House staff, but imagine if the other designers of delusion behaved differently.
Instead of falling back on milquetoast routines, SNL could have treated the Biden presidency as the comedy goldmine it’s been all along. Party apparatchiks like Kimmel and Colbert could have done likewise. The press could have remembered their duty to prioritize truth over partisanship.
If the monoculture had taken that approach, the truth about Biden’s mental fitness would have been revealed sooner. Biden supporters could have panicked sooner and regrouped sooner.
Instead of spiraling toward election day in chaos, they could have found a better replacement with plenty of time to fundraise. That hypothetical campaign would also enjoy more credibility than whatever swamp thing emerges in the coming weeks, because its organizers wouldn’t be tainted by their participation in a bumbling coverup.
Who knows what twists and turns await, but right now there’s a very good chance that Team Biden’s implosion has cleared the way for Trump to waltz to victory in November. How ironic that, through their hyper-partisan approach to enforcing groupthink, the Eight Percenters brought their worst fear to life—they helped Trump.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and the new feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Stream the very first “Substack Presents” feature documentary here.
Brilliant. Censorship and self censorship deepen delusions. That is why free speech and open debate are so important. Will the 8 percenters learn their lesson? Can you reason with a demoralized person?
Thanks for these good points. I think we will be lucky if the blob behind the curtain is merely feckless and hoist by their own petard. There is surely a layer of folks who thrived on the petty power plays of the lockdown years, who no longer have any guts or ability to cope at all in a world of actual risk and uncertainties. I was in the office today with people wearing paper masks. All day. They've committed to a mentally debilitating spiral out of which they cannot break themselves. Some of the wreckers in DC are these people, no doubt.
When all the crazy breaks in one direction, though, every time, empirical data are trying to tell us something else. My blind spot is that I'm never quite able to believe people are as bad as they continually prove themselves to be, but a darker possibility is that whoever has been running the show since the 2020 basement campaign (it has never been that thuggish dolt) is content if not pleased with the cascade of catastrophes.
[Wrt the pledge button: If you put your own buttons in, and edit, it might not auto add the buttons it will otherwise select for you.]