How to Stop the Woke Coup Against Joe Biden
The woke shadow party’s coup attempt against President Joe Biden has entered its second week, and I think we need to have a more detailed analysis of the situation, and think seriously about where to go from here.
Firstly, many people out there still seem to disagree with my assessment that there is a premeditated coup here. My justification for this assessment is based on how the anti-Biden actors behaved. They started calling for Biden to drop out even before the debate had ended! Normally, if your side had a bad start to a debate, you would at least wait until the end to comment, in the hope that things would get better in the second half. Even when the debate is finished, and your side definitely lost, your first instinct would normally be to salvage the situation as much as possible. And this was actually very doable in this case: while Trump technically ‘won’ the debate, he also came across as somewhat dishonest, and the fact checks clearly demonstrate how many questions he dodged or answered untruthfully. But those calling for Biden to drop simply never attempted to salvage the situation, or point out Trump’s faults. They wanted the focus to be on whether Biden should drop out. They didn’t even wait for the polls to show how much damage there actually is! All this is very abnormal behavior, certainly not something I’ve ever seen from any party that had an unexpectedly bad debate. Add in the fact that in the weeks leading up to here, I’ve seen some people talk about getting Biden to drop out in the event of a bad debate and/or Trump opening up a big lead before the convention, I can’t help but conclude that all this was premeditated, and very well executed too.
The other thing we simply can’t deny is that the woke shadow party has never liked Joe Biden. They were clearly going for Elizabeth Warren during the 2019–2020 primaries. Their response to the defeat of the identity politics heavy Hillary ‘I’m With Her’ campaign of 2016 was to double down, hoping that they get to prove their model works the second time around. As I said before, there was a real attempt to make the Democratic Party thoroughly woke back in the 2010s, which tempted some old-school liberals to consider moving to the right. That would have been a disaster. Luckily, all that was averted when the actual primary results came in, particularly on Super Tuesday 2020. While the woke shadow party wanted Warren, the revolutionary left wanted Bernie, and politically engaged moderates wanted Buttigieg or Yang, the silent majority spoke and they wanted Biden. This was how Biden ended up being the nominee despite having almost zero support on Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and basically every other social media site. Biden is the best proof that Twitter is not real life, and that the silent majority still prefer old-school Democrats to the newer, woker variety. Of course, the losing camps weren’t just going to accept defeat. The Buttigieg and Yang camps were more okay with Biden, being moderates themselves. But those further left have always been quite uncomfortable with Biden. Earlier in the year, some in the formerly-Bernie supporting revolutionary left advocated boycotting Biden in the election, but this only amounted to a 1–2 point drop in the polls for Biden, because, let’s face it, they don’t have institutional power. On the other hand, the formerly-Warren supporting woke shadow party now appear to be mostly on board with this new coup, launched from within the media and donor establishment. Unlike the revolutionary left, they have real institutional power in the form of mainstream media platforms, connections with powerful players behind the scenes, and huge sums of money.
The fact that most Democrats in elected office continue to support Biden’s candidacy, even as calls for Biden to drop out are heard loudly in the media, points to the fact that this is a shadow party campaign. And we all know that the shadow party is the epicenter of wokeism in the Democrats. Moreover, it appears to me that the less woke-left a Democrat is, the more likely they are to stand by Biden. A good example is Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, clearly not a favorite of the woke crowd, who has taken on media outlets like the New York Times for smearing Biden. “If anyone lost their way, it’s The New York Times,” Fetterman wrote, and I completely agree. (Again, we really need to remember that the New York Times is home to The 1619 Project, the epitome of woke ideology.) The Democrats really need more people like Fetterman, who are brave enough to push back against the shadow party’s excesses. On the other hand, woke forces are already salivating at the prospect of a non-Biden-led campaign: for example, they really want abortion to be made into an identity politics issue. (To clarify, I am 100% pro-choice, but I believe abortion rights should be a matter of individual liberty, not oppressor vs oppressed identity politics. It is a matter of opposing the authoritarian religious right, period.)
Right now, the anti-Biden forces are running a scare campaign about Biden losing to Trump. While Trump is only about 2 points ahead on average, and the debate doesn’t appear to have had a material impact on the polls, anti-Biden forces keep citing outlier polls putting Trump 6 points ahead, even though at least one of such polls also showed Trump 6 points ahead a while ago, demonstrating its likely pro-Trump bias, or at least that this latest result has nothing to do with the debate. Going forward, I would logically expect the polls to deteriorate a bit, because of the big scare campaign against Biden. Right now, the Democratic anti-Biden forces are making the case against Biden, using the same talking points as MAGA-aligned media outlets, and doing it in a much more aggressive and nasty way too. You can’t expect anything other than the polls moving towards Trump, given this.
The question then becomes, even if all this has happened not as a result of any fault on Biden’s part, he might still have been irreversibly damaged by this drama, and this could justify changing the candidate now. My answer is simple: we don’t negotiate with, or give into terrorists. Not even to save human lives. As much as I dislike Trump, if the result of all this would be a Trump victory, then so be it. We can’t let the coup succeed, no matter what, including four years of Trump. Letting the shadow party coup succeed would strengthen the shadow party, and put the Democrats back on track to be transformed into a party beholden to woke ideology again. This, arguably, would be worse than four years of Trump. Besides, the election is still four months away, and there is plenty of time for things to turn around. Therefore, I believe the most important thing to do right now is to stop the coup against Biden’s candidacy. Biden says he’s not going anywhere, and we should support him in this. I stand with Biden, no matter what.
The next question would then be, given the relentless nature of the anti-Biden forces, how can they be stopped. The answer lies in the fact that the nomination has to be finalized soon, perhaps even by early August, because of Ohio’s early deadline. Therefore, if the coup doesn’t succeed within a month, it would have to back down. The key here is to prevent there from being a successful unification around a candidate.
We need to stop this coup, no matter what. The future of the Democrats, and hence of the center-left in the West generally, depends on doing this successfully.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
