One of my favorite children’s books growing up was The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen.
The story is about two swindlers posing as tailors who convince a hapless Emperor to purchase an invisible robe. They tell him the fabric is so fine only someone of his stature can see it. The Emperor and all those who report to him play along with the scam so as not to be thought a fool by their comrades.
The swindlers dress the Emperor up in his new suit, pocket a prodigious sum and set him off in a procession before the whole city. The townsfolk, knowing he is bare, politely play along with the pretense not wanting to appear in defiance of the groupthink. It takes the innocence of a child to blurt out that the Emperor is simply naked. The people then openly recognize what was objectively true all along - that the Emperor had been fooled by the swindlers.
The United States has its own version of the Emperor’s New Clothes in Joe Biden’s mental capacity. During the election cycle, polite society would not risk questioning the mental health of the Emperor and happily played along with the political charade that he was fully mentally capable.
And that charade of Political Truth has continued for much of Biden’s hapless (there is that word again) administration.
Did you ever wonder what it would feel like to be one of the townsfolk in the Emperor’s fully naked procession through the streets having to force yourself to see Political Truth while knowing Objective Truth was vastly different? It probably felt like how Jimmy Kimmel looked in this clip from June 2022:
Well, enough with that. I want to see what the Commenters have to say about our Emperor. You can find the posts below and more more on our Instagram @zhcommenter.
(The event referenced above is when Biden read aloud the silent cues on his teleprompter, “End of quote. Repeat the line.”)
And then there was another time when Joe was supposed to tell the world that Western nations were about to seize prized assets (namely superyachts) from Russian oligarchs, which in this case were supposed to be labeled kleptocrats.
Like always, the truth is in the wisdom of the crowd.
-ZHcommenter