🌊 The Art of the Grift

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By Max Towey

The current #1 NYT best-selling book is Original Sin by “journalists” Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. The existence of the book – and a similar one just announced – is a farce.

Original Sin describes how the media and Democratic Party covered up President Biden’s cognitive decline. The book argues that Biden’s decision to run for a second term was a critical and ego-fueled mistake – his “original sin,” which doomed the Dems in 2024. 

The irony is not hard to find. With the exception of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough – whose “this version of Joe Biden is the best Joe Biden” monologue has aged like milk – perhaps nobody in the media is more to blame for the coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline than Jake Tapper.

With a two-hour daily news show on CNN and 3.5M followers on social media, Tapper had the perfect platform to highlight Biden’s gaffes, freezes, and incoherent ramblings. He even served as the moderator of Biden’s now-infamous June 2024 debate with Trump. Why cosplay as a courageous politically independent journalist now when he could’ve been one just months before? Was he worried about helping Trump? Was it the lack of a book deal?

Tapper didn’t merely commit sins of omission. Ahead of the 2020 election, around the time his book claims Biden’s cognitive downfall began, Lara Trump raised questions about Biden’s mental fitness on Tapper’s show. He confronted her, accusing her of making fun of his stutter: “How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” He continued, “[You have] absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.” 

Tapper claims he was more scrutinizing in the 2024 election cycle. He cites his confrontation with White House officials about special counsel Robert Hur’s report that found the president to be mentally unfit. In the wake of the Hur report, after Biden turned down the traditional pre-Super Bowl interview for the second year in a row, Tapper asked in a panel discussion, “Isn't the White House signaling with that decision, like, ‘We're afraid of putting him out there?’” 

But it was the equivalent of mumbling “it’s a little warm here” in a house on fire. Then again, compared to some of his colleagues at CNN he sounded like the fireman who ran into the burning building and carried out two bodies.

CNN legal expert – and noted Zoom exhibitionist – Jeffrey Toobin scolded Hur for making “unnecessary points” about Biden’s advanced age and characterized the special counsel as a “Republican partisan.” CNN pundit Paul Begala chalked up the report to Hur wanting revenge on Biden, who voted against Hur’s old boss, William Rehnquist, during his Supreme Court confirmation in 1986. And these were their legal analysts! The main hosts – including Tapper – stayed relatively silent.

Alex Thompson, Tapper’s co-author of Original Sin and an Axios journalist, at least has some self-awareness. As he confessed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story. And some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”

Yet despite their complicity with the media’s coverup, the book is crushing: It’s topped the NYT best sellers list for two consecutive weeks and is currently #2 on Amazon’s best sellers list. Think it’s a shameless money grab? Too little too late? Well, just wait until you hear about this next book!

In a “hold my beer” display of one-upmanship, Biden’s former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre (KJP) just announced her tell-all book. 

In Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, KJP explains her decision to leave the Democratic Party and become an independent. KJP – whose job was to trumpet misinformation about Biden’s cognitive state – now wants to tell you the cold hard truth. 

Or, from a skeptic’s point of view, it’s another tell-all by a public servant who could’ve told all when it mattered just months before.

KJP’s White House colleagues seem unconvinced of a genuine conversion. One of them quote tweeted her book announcement with a caption of “lol,” while another told the NY Post they “[cackled] in chats all day.” The pivot, that person said, can be explained by one word: “Money.” The book comes amid reports that KJP also sought a gig as a co-host on The View after leaving the White House, however, no such offer materialized. The book route may be a next best bet.

To our non-partisan eyes, KJP’s book condemning partisanship and political lies may be worse than OJ Simpson’s If I Did It. After all, we have days’ worth of footage of KJP perpetuating the shameless partisanship and political lies that she now condemns. KJP didn’t just play down concerns about Biden’s cognitive abilities – she tried to shut them all down. As she replied when asked in 2022 if Biden had the “stamina” for a second term, “That is not a question that we should be even asking.”

This sort of grift is hardly unique to Bidenworld: Bookstores could each have an entire section devoted to Trumpworld tell-alls. But the shamelessness from Tapper and KJP, who are now proving that they were complicit in a cover-up for the ages, is the story of the moment. And as people examine this most toxic form of partisanship, the authors’ bank accounts are growing by the day.

Editor’s Note

This is why Roca exists. As alternative media monetize conspiracy theories and legacy media monetize partisanship, we seek the truth. Having a politically diverse audience who supports this mission holds us accountable. If you support our mission, please subscribe here. Unlike Jake Tapper, we have no audience or advertiser pressure to deceive. Your support of our mission to provide unbiased news makes that possible.

Now if you’ll excuse us, we have to run to Barnes & Noble for Nick Cannon’s book on the importance of monogamy.

As always, please send us your thoughts on today’s reporting.

And in case you missed our latest stories, find them here:

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• The Gaza War: Part Three

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Thanks for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. See you then.

–Max and Max