OVER THE LAST WEEK, a conspiracy theory caught fire on the American right that was so easily disprovable that it’s worth taking the time to name and shame the people who spread it or otherwise abetted it, whether out of malice, stupidity, or sheer tinfoil-hat lunacy.
The crux of the rumor: that President Joe Biden was dead or dying.
Biden had last been photographed in public on Wednesday, July 17, after a positive COVID test earlier that day. He began self-isolating at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, but continued to work and to discuss the future of his re-election campaign. Numerous news stories during these days reported on people who had spoken with him. Then, on Sunday, July 21, Biden announced via written statement that he was bowing out of the 2024 presidential race.
Runaway speculation spread among Republicans on social media about whether the president was incapacitated, in hospice care, or had already passed away.
At the milder end, the speculation was in a just-asking-question vein, as in this tweet from Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) after a laconic White House press release on Sunday listed no specific events on Biden’s schedule for the week ahead.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Col.), exhibiting all the class that we have come to expect from her, not only demanded “proof of life” from Biden but also suggested that his withdrawal announcement had been made without his knowledge. (Can we demand some proof of life from Boebert’s brain?)
Tech mogul David Sacks—fresh from the Republican National Convention, where he managed to alienate even most of the MAGA crowd by leaning too hard into the idea that Biden had “provoked the Russians to invade Ukraine”—weighed in with some concern-trolling of his own:
Sacks apparently hadn’t read Biden’s letter. Biden hadn’t “signed away his presidency,” merely withdrawn his candidacy for a second term and promised to speak to the nation via video in a few days. But who cares about such details when there are Weekend at Bernie’s jokes to be made?
The reliably looney Naomi Wolf, far along in her journey from left-wing nut to right-wing nut, decided to demonstrate that she is as ignorant of graphology as she is of every other subject she holds forth on:
For his part, the reliably partisan hack Charlie Kirk claimed to have gotten a lead from “a source close to Las Vegas Metro” about a rumor that “Joe Biden was dying or possibly already dead.” (It was in Vegas that Biden tested positive for COVID, interrupting his stay there.)
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But perhaps none took irresponsible tweeting quite so far as hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, until recently a Democrat who first clashed with the liberal establishment late last year over allegations of antisemitism at Harvard and apparently got a bad case of the anti-woke mind virus. Fresh on the heels of tweeting and then deleting a “second gunman on the grassy knoll” conspiracy theory about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Ackman (now a Trump supporter) had this to say about the president’s short time away from cameras:
(Thank God Bill Ackman isn’t China. Also, it’s unclear where Ackman got the notion that the Biden statement was “digitally signed.”)
ON MONDAY, BIDEN MADE a live, audio-only phone call to campaign headquarters for an event with Vice President Kamala Harris. The event was widely broadcast. Yet there followed more conspiracy theorizing—including a “BREAKING” tweet from real estate entrepreneur and “internet personality” Matthew Sabia (who has over 100,000 followers) claiming that the audio had been exposed as generated by a “Popular AI Voice Cloning Tool.” The claim was thoroughly debunked by a community note, though needless to say that did not put an end to the speculation.
Also on Monday, hours after Biden’s phone call with Harris, Students for Trump head Ryan Fournier (1.1 million followers) tweeted that Biden was on his deathbed. He got over 40,000 “likes” and a community note.
The conspiracy theory wasn’t confined to social media. On Fox News, Dana Perino and Brett Baier echoed the demand for “proof of life”. Bari Weiss’s Free Press weighed in with an article headlined “The Curious Case of the Missing President,” which didn’t exactly validate the conspiracy theories but suggested that Biden’s absence fully justified them and made his withdrawal look “seedier and more suspicious than it needed to.” Author Oliver Wiseman added a couple of theories of his own:
Maybe Joe Biden knows all this. Maybe he is sulking. Maybe he is fully aware that his absence only makes his party look worse, and he’s reveling in the schadenfreude.
Maybe!
Never content to let an opportunity to be both stupid and obnoxious pass him by, Matt Taibbi wrote on July 22:
The only person we know for sure isn’t currently running things is Joe Biden. Are we even sure he’s alive? The video below from July 17th is the last public sighting. Did he make it out of that car? Was there a box of cannolis on the next seat? I wish I were joking.
I also wish he were joking.
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AFTER THE JUNE 27 DEBATE with Donald Trump in which Biden flamed out, people on both sides of the political aisle raised questions about his health and expressed grave doubts about his ability to handle the presidency for another four years—or withstand the rigors of an intense campaign. To the extent that Biden and his inner circle had previously shielded his decline from the public and the press, they bear some responsibility for feeding that speculation. (While accusations of a media coverup are now standard on the right, many mainstream media outlets had in fact vocally complained about a lack of access and discussed the issue of Biden’s aging long before the June 27 debate.)
But none of that justifies the nutty speculation about Biden’s brief and easily explained absence—especially since the conspiracy theories made no sense. If Biden had actually died or become incapacitated over the weekend, he would have been replaced by Harris, arguably putting her in a stronger position in the upcoming campaign—and quite possibly generating a sympathy vote, as well. Unless, of course, the theory is that Biden refused to bow out and was not just figuratively but literally stabbed in the back by Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Or that he was literally strapped into a chair and being tortured with electroshocks while Pelosi was drafting his announcement. Let’s face it, we wouldn’t put any of that past Naomi Wolf or Charlie Kirk.
On Tuesday, July 23, Biden returned to the White House. But that afternoon, the tinfoil-hat crowd was still mumbling. Former academic Bret Weinstein, onetime luminary of the Intellectual Dark Web, tweeted a ten-minute video laying out a “hypothesis” that conveniently explained both Biden’s absence and his resurfacing.
The whole thing, Weinstein posited, was a super-Machiavellian Deep State psyop intended to plant clues that would alert any truly inquiring mind to a conspiracy to cover up Biden’s incapacity or death, then triumphantly show an alive-and-well Biden to the world, and thereby destroy the credibility of conspiracy theorists who might be getting a bit too close to the truth about the conspiracy to kill Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. In other words, it’s the Deep State equivalent of the Agatha Christie novel in which (spoiler!) the murderer carefully plants clues implicating himself, knowing they’ll be exposed as fake and not only remove him from the list of suspects but frame another intended victim for trying to frame him.
It’s beautifully unfalsifiable, of course, just like a good conspiracy theory should be. (Most of the people who commented in Weinstein’s thread, at least, thought it sounded plausible.)
On Wednesday, July 24, President Biden gave a televised Oval Office address about his decision to exit the presidential race. Presumably that put this particular set of conspiracy theories to rest—but there’s no rest for the conspiracy theorists themselves, who, you can be assured, are already moving on to their next big “hypothesis.”
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