The Outsider Perspective Issue 492 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Except for Florida law enforcement. A sheriff’s deputy in Lake Worth, Florida, pulled over a woman named Kathleen Thomas back in February as part of a distracted-driving sweep. His reason, delivered on his own body camera, was admirably specific: he had watched her drive past holding her phone and “manipulating that phone” with her right hand.

There is one small problem with the deputy’s eyewitness account. Kathleen Thomas does not have a right hand. Her right arm ends above the elbow. She held it up on camera, said “So, obviously not,” and laughed. And the deputy, looking directly at the proof that his own story was physically impossible, wrote her the ticket anyway. The video went viral on TikTok, and the citation was quietly dismissed a few weeks later. The sheriff’s office explanation, and I promise I am not making this up, was “a lack of clarity on how violations are labeled in our citation software.”

You should watch the clip. It is a small masterpiece of a man who would rather rewrite reality than accept that the movie playing in his head got a detail wrong. She has the arm right there. He keeps explaining what he saw. The arm does not change his mind. He even abruptly asks her, “Hand to God,” if she didn’t use a phone with her right hand. She dutifully rights her right… stump.

Speaking of being told not to believe what you can see with your own eyes: Jill Biden has a memoir coming out, and she would like the country to know that she never noticed her husband was in any kind of decline — right up until the moment she thought he was having a stroke on live television. I’ll get into why that doesn’t make sense any way you spin it – links to follow.

Quick Hits:

Someone tried to get the police to kill Amy Coney Barrett. On Wednesday night, somebody called in a false report of gunfire at Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s home, hoping to send armed officers charging into a house in the dark on a lie. Police in Fairfax County, Virginia responded and quickly realized it was a “swatting” call, leaving after they met with her security detail. Treat the word “swatting” with the seriousness it deserves. It is an attempt to get heavily armed strangers to a target’s front door under false pretenses, and it has gotten innocent people killed. Aimed at a Supreme Court justice, it is an attempt to do by proxy what the caller will not risk doing himself. We have watched this escalate before: in 2022 a man was arrested near Justice Kavanaugh’s home and charged with attempting to assassinate him, and last year Barrett’s own sister received a bomb threat. And note the timing. The call came the night before Barrett walked into the Court on Thursday morning and handed down two opinions, Rutherford and Fernandez, both of them siding with the government in sentencing disputes. There’s no evidence the swatting event was connected to those cases, but, given the leaks in the court, it does make you wonder.

Where you can find me this week

Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter and The American Almanac.

Democrats Endorsed a Man Who Worked for an Al-Qaida Front – Conservative Institute

The Democrats’ Top Influencer Confesses On A Live Stream – Conservative Institute

Democrats Released an Autopsy With No Cause of Death – Conservative Institute

Edith Wilson With a Book Deal

Jill Biden Saw Nothing. Everyone Else Saw Everything.

Two days ago, selling her new memoir, Jill Biden sat across from CBS’s Rita Braver and was asked a simple question: did she see signs that her husband was falling into cognitive decline as he ran for a second term? Her answer was one word. “No.”

In the same interview, she described watching the June 2024 debate against Donald Trump and thinking, “Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.” She said she had “never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never.”

Both of those cannot be true. A wife who watches her husband have a stroke on live television in front of fifty million people does not conclude that he is fine and the job is his to keep. She does not take him out for waffles afterward. Jill Biden did. Her memoir, out June 2, was supposed to be her side of the story. Instead it pries the lid back off the one question the whole of 2024 was built to keep shut, and every answer it leaves is worse than the one before it.

What she says now

The book is called View from the East Wing. The headline from it, the line the press ran with, is the stroke. She told CBS she was “frightened” because she had never seen him that way. In the book itself, she writes that she watched the debate thinking, “Is this a stroke?” — that it felt like watching “an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching.” When Joe walked off the stage, by her account, he said, “I really f**ked up, didn’t I?” She whispered back, “Yes, you did.”

She has a second shock to sell, too. When her husband was diagnosed last May with prostate cancer, a Gleason score of 9, already spread to the bone, she says it was “quite a shock getting the diagnosis.” In the book she protests that it made no sense: Joe “couldn’t stub his toe without 10 people wanting to run at him waving bales of gauze. You put the president in bubble wrap, and he ends up with stage IV prostate cancer?”

That is the version she is selling: a wife at her husband’s side every day who somehow saw none of it coming.

What she did then

She did not act like a woman who had watched a stroke.

Less than two hours after the debate ended, the Bidens stopped at a Waffle House outside Atlanta. Joe told the crowd, “I think we did well.” At the debate-night party, Jill stood next to him and delivered the line that even friendly reporters compared to praising a small child: “Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question, you knew all the facts!”

The next morning they staged a rally in Raleigh. Joe read the lines the campaign had cut for the moment: “I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know how to do this job.” Jill told the crowd what they had watched the night before was “Joe Biden, a president with integrity and character who told the truth.”

Hold the two stories next to each other. You do not throw an after-party for a stroke. You do not book a rally the next morning for a man you watched glitch like a hologram. Either Jill Biden did not believe in June 2024 what she now says she believed, or she believed it and sold the country something else. There is no third option.

Everyone saw it

Her defense rests on a single word — “never.” She had never seen him like that, before or since. The trouble is that almost everyone who got near Joe Biden had seen it, and many of them said so out loud while she was saying nothing.

The journalist Olivia Nuzzi reported it in New York magazine in early July 2024, under the headline “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.” Longtime friends of the family, she wrote, “were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names.” Nuzzi was later forced out of her own magazine over an undisclosed relationship with a different subject she had covered, but the outside investigation that ended her career also reviewed her Biden reporting and found “no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias.” Even a reporter the establishment had every reason to bury was right about this.

The clearest piece of evidence needed no reporter at all. At a star-studded Los Angeles fundraiser on June 15, 2024, Barack Obama took Joe Biden by the hand and led him off the stage as Biden appeared to freeze and stare. Tens of millions of people watched the clip. The White House called it a “cheap fake.” An Obama aide insisted “this did not happen.” It happened on video, at an event with a thousand witnesses.

George Clooney was one of them. He co-hosted that fundraiser, and three weeks later he put his name on a New York Times op-ed telling his own party the truth: “The Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.” Clooney has since called writing it a “civic duty.”

It was not only the famous. A year before the debate, a photographer caught Biden holding a cheat-sheet card at a Rose Garden press conference, complete with a reporter’s photo, the phonetic spelling of her name, and a pre-written question. The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2024 that behind closed doors he spoke so softly that people strained to hear him and read from notes to make simple points.

Donors saw it. Obama saw it. Clooney saw it. Reporters saw it. The cameras saw it. The one person who insists she saw nothing is the woman who never left his side.

What the machine said

While the country watched Joe Biden decline in real time, an entire apparatus told the country it was wrong.

The clips of him freezing, wandering, and trailing off were dismissed from the White House podium as “cheap fakes.” Karine Jean-Pierre used the term again and again and called the whole thing “misinformation.” When the debate made denial impossible, the explanations came in waves: he was tired, he had a cold, he had jet lag. A Democratic congressman went on CNN and explained that the real problem was that Biden had been “overprepared” — that he knew too much and suffered a kind of sensory overload. Heather Cox Richardson told her readers the president had simply “covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.”

The fact-checking class protected the man, not the truth. It did so by telling tens of millions of Americans that their own eyes were the disinformation. That habit did not retire with Joe Biden.

The interview that proved it

So they put him in front of a camera to settle the question. On July 5, George Stephanopoulos sat down with Biden for the interview that was meant to end the panic. “It was a bad episode,” Biden said. “No indication of any serious condition. I was exhausted.” He blamed a cold. “Nobody’s fault but mine.”

It settled the question the other way. Within two weeks more than thirty congressional Democrats had called for him to step aside, and on July 21, twenty-four days after the debate, he ended his campaign. The interview designed to prove he was fine proved the opposite to everyone who watched it.

The things they buried

None of this began on the debate stage. The hiding ran the length of his presidency, and arguably back to the 2020 campaign that kept him in his basement. By the summer of 2024 it was simply getting harder to hide.

Go back to Las Vegas, July 17, 2024. Biden abruptly canceled a speech, and the White House announced he had tested positive for COVID and was flying home to isolate. RedState’s Jennifer Van Laar reported that something else had happened — a possible neurological event, a hospital placed on standby, roads cleared. The fact-checkers rushed to call the “medical emergency” rumor unfounded. Then FactCheck.org conceded, in the same article, that “a hospital in Las Vegas was on standby to potentially receive the president” and that “police proactively shut down roads.” Their reassurance was that “the president never went to the hospital.” A hospital on standby and roads closed for a man with a head cold is its own kind of answer.

There was the doctor. A movement-disorder neurologist from Walter Reed, a Parkinson’s specialist, visited the White House at least eight times in eight months, according to the visitor logs. The official explanation was that he simply happened to be a very good neurologist.

And there was the prosecutor. In February 2024, special counsel Robert Hur described the sitting president of the United States as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” When the audio of that interview finally came out a year later, it showed why: Biden could not recall when his son Beau had died or what year Donald Trump was elected, and his own lawyers stepped in as, in Axios’s phrase, “caretakers of his memory.” The White House fought to keep that tape from the public and trained its fire on the prosecutor instead of the diagnosis.

It was an open secret

By 2025, the people who had lived inside it started to talk. Original Sin, the book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, laid out a president whose working hours were walled off to the middle of the day and whose decline was hidden by the people closest to him. “The White House was lying,” Tapper said, “not only to the press, not only to the public — they were lying to members of their own Cabinet. They were lying to Democratic members of Congress, to donors, about how bad things had gotten.”

So Jill Biden’s memoir does not drop into an empty room. It lands on top of a mountain of evidence of a cover-up, written by the person who stood closest to the center of it — and her story is that she was the last to know.

Edith Wilson with a book deal

We have been here before, almost exactly.

On October 2, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke. He was paralyzed and could not do the job. His wife, Edith, did not tell the country. Instead, as the Miller Center records, she began “choosing to admit or turn away visitors and deciding what papers Wilson did or did not see.” She screened the issues that reached him and took on what she called “the role of secretary, reporting the President’s decisions to government officials.” The cabinet did not meet with him until April 1920. The concealment ran nearly to the end of his term, roughly seventeen months.

Her defense then is Jill Biden’s defense now. Edith wrote in her memoirs that she “never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs.” She claimed she only decided “what was important and what was not,” and “when to present matters to my husband.” Historians sometimes call her America’s first woman president. She waved that away: “I am not thinking of the country now, I am thinking of my husband.”

And underneath it all sat one decision that made the rest inevitable. Edith refused to let Wilson resign, because she believed that losing the office would kill him. “This was the single most important decision she made during Wilson’s illness,” the Miller Center concludes, “and from it followed all the rest.”

Now read that sentence with Joe Biden in it. Jill Biden was, by every account, the staunchest voice for him staying in the race; she said she was “all in.” If her husband was as far gone as her own memoir now insists, then someone decided he would run anyway, screened what reached him, and spoke for him to the country. A few weeks ago in this newsletter I wrote about the preemptive pardons and the autopen signatures of his final weeks in office — the use of the most awesome powers of the presidency by a man his own wife now describes as glitching. If he could not reliably recall the year Trump was elected, who was running the pen? That question does not have a mysterious answer. It has a name, and it is the name on the cover of the book.

No good answer

This is the trap the memoir builds for its own author, and there is no way out of it.

If she is telling the truth now, then she watched her husband have a stroke, took him out for waffles, praised him like a toddler the next morning, stood by while her party branded the country’s own eyes as “cheap fakes,” and spent a year inside a concealment she now blames on everyone but herself. That is the story of the person who ran the cover-up, not of a victim.

If she is lying now, if she is repackaging a re-election collapse as a sympathetic medical scare to move copies, then she is strip-mining a national deception for book sales, with her cancer-stricken husband propped up as the emotional centerpiece. The bubble-wrap line gives the game away: she wants full credit for protecting him and full absolution for missing every single thing that mattered.

There is no version of this where Jill Biden looks good, or smells good, or reads as anything other than what it is.

The country did not need her book to know the truth. It watched the debate. The only people still pretending otherwise are the ones now selling it back to us at $30 a copy.