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From the battle over social media censorship to the history-making take-down of a sitting US president, protests over Palestine to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, summer 2024 could aptly be described as the summer of complicity.
As wars raged and an election rumbled, the murky relationships between enablers and the enabled revealed their outsized influence on the very foundations of our democracy and nation.
With no “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer” or domestic Taylor Swift concerts to distract us, complicity has emerged as the common thread within these warm-weather months — a pas de deux between impotence and overreach propped up by a compliant media and an American public exhausted by partisan extremism.
The ousting of Joe Biden and his replacement by Kamala Harris in July was a master class in grand-scale complicity. Everyone seemingly knew about the president’s enfeeblement — from Kamala Harris and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to the Parkinson’s specialist who repeatedly visited the White House and the Washington press corps who largely, bafflingly failed to report on it. Whether snoozing on the Delaware shore or ambling along the White House lawn, Biden’s handlers literally covered him up as they covered up his gaffes and missteps.
Progressive media, of course, was front and center in perpetuating the Biden charade. Barely a week before his fate-sealing debate with Donald Trump, The New York Times reported that video fakes — not Biden’s decline — were the real cause of the president’s disastrous optics, “play[ing] into and reinforc[ing] voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.”
Just a week earlier, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough declared, with tones both urgent and unequivocal, that Biden “is far beyond cogent, in fact he’s better than he’s ever been intellectually, analytically.” Two weeks later the president gave up his re-election bid as Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama hid from the complicity of this historic coup.
Many of the same forces that shielded Biden from scrutiny also had a hand in America’s most pressing foreign concern: Iran’s imminent nuclear readiness. According to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in mid-July, Iran’s “breakout time” — the period required for the Islamic Republic to produce weapons grade material — “is now probably one or two weeks.” Back in 2015, that figure stood at a full year, according to US officials.
What changed? Rather than maintain Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” of sanctions aimed at crippling Iran’s economy, Biden immediately returned to Obama’s laissez-affair approach of negotiations and deal-making.
Not only did this include a heavily-criticized plan to trade $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets for the freedom of US citizens held in Iran, but the release of billions more dollars for humanitarian purposes. Such hand-shaking has so emboldened Tehran that the regime is not only flouting sanctions at home — and getting richer for it — but causing chaos across the globe.
Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah are all Iran-funded, as are many of the anti-Israel protests at colleges — along with, most ominously, plots to murder American citizens on American soil. Tehran’s highest-profile target: Donald Trump, in retaliation for ordering the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani while he was president.
“Weakness and appeasement” is how Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) has described the Harris-Biden Iran policy.
True, Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned containing Iran in her DNC acceptance speech last month. But it’s Democratic concessions — rather than containment — that allowed the Islamic regime to achieve its current state of unchecked global menace.
A similar air of invincibility pervades Big Tech, which is now touting itself as champions of free speech despite an extensive paper trail of politicized censorship and suppression. Whereas today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to “push back” against government attempts at censorship, he was directly involved in Democratic demands to squash COVID skepticism and suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
Five years after Harris demanded Twitter ban President Trump, meanwhile, the mainstream media is attempting to overhaul her pro-censorship image. But it will be a tough slog considering her deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty was a key architect of Facebook’s COVID-skepticism suppression efforts while serving as Biden’s digital strategy director.
Zuckerberg’s newfound zeal for free speech unexpectedly pushes up against another summer flashpoint: Israel’s war in Gaza and the global rise of antisemitism. This week, Facebook made clear that it won’t remove posts featuring the controversial slogan “from the river to the sea” because, the company claims, it does not necessarily glorify Hamas — despite condemnations by hate speech groups.
The move is yet one more example of the widespread complicitness of everyone from major corporations and college administrators to Western governments and international NGOs in hamstringing efforts by Israel and global Jewry to defend themselves from the forces of Hamas and hate.
“I’ve studied the maps, there’s nowhere for those folks to go,” Harris declared of Gaza’s Palestinian civilians back in March as Israel prepped its invasion into Rafah. Such pushback, along with threats to withhold arms sales to Jerusalem, hampered Israel’s campaign in Rafah, where the bodies of six Israeli hostages were found last week.
The body count — whether an ousted Biden, free speech or dead Israelis — reflects the ultimate by-products of the indifference and complicity that have so defined this past summer: a lack of accountability.
As Biden’s ouster shows, with so many players denying so much culpability, no one pays the price for systemic rot. While Harris swans on through her campaign — unchecked by the media that both enabled and betrayed her predecessor — complicity has become normalized. Move over joy — America is now entering its autumn of impunity.