Batten Down the Hatches—Dark Brandon Is Coming Back!

Cover the windows, batten down the hatches, and gird your loins because Joe Biden said on Sunday during a rally in Philadelphia that “Dark Brandon” is set for a sequel. If you remember, the Dark Brandon meme started on the internet early in the Biden administration and Team Joe tried to use it to his advantage to tout the president’s achievements. 

Remember this malarkey?

Well, unfortunately for us all, Biden evidently thought it was effective enough that it needs to be resurrected:

“Dark Brandon is coming back,” he joked to one supporter in Harrisburg who asked him about the meme, one that developed into a unifying force to fight off concerns about Biden’s age early in his campaign. [Yeah, not so much.]

While he faces increasing calls from members of Congress to leave the campaign after a faltering debate performance last month, Biden said he hasn’t seen the same response from voters.

“We’ve been drawing big crowds. Ever since the debate, not joking, even that night we had big crowds afterwards,” Biden said.

Biden's Philadelphia trip went about as well as can be expected:

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Does Biden know that the “Brandon” part of the meme originates from the famous “Let’s Go Brandon” hilarity, where the audience at a 2021 NASCAR race was chanting a profane anti-Biden sentiment, and the announcer pretended (or possibly misheard), claiming they were cheering on the winner of the event, Brandon Brown? “Let’s Go Brandon” became a conservative slogan that still sums up many Republicans’ sentiments to this day. (I am the proud owner of a "Let’s Go Brandon" T-shirt, for instance.)

The "dark" part of the name also has some not-so-flattering origins:

On Nov. 14, 2020 — just one week after Biden won the 2020 election — Chinese illustrator Yang Quan uploaded several images to Weibo depicting the 46th president as evil, presiding over zombie-looking creatures on a throne seemingly made of assault weapons, according to Politico. The first image in the set is the same illustration that Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, 49, would later post on Twitter, now called X.

"The sleeping king ascends the throne, the devil is resurrected," reads the Chinese caption of one of the images, according to Politico.

Sounds about right.

Some, however, attribute the use of the word “dark” to a Donald Trump meme:

Meanwhile, Dark Brandon also owes part of his name to "Dark MAGA," a hashtag and group of memes that "depict a 'punished,' more unhinged version of Donald Trump running for reelection in 2024 who has abandoned all optics, replacing his slogan MAGA with 'Dark MAGA,'" according to online meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme.

Whatever the origin of the cringe-inducing meme, giving it new life would further show the desperation of Team Biden’s team as they try to salvage his crumbling campaign. The reason it's so dumb in my opinion is because it unintentionally highlights the contrast between the vigorous (though evil)- looking guy with lasers in his eyes and the black-eyed, vacant-looking commander-in-chief that we saw on the debate stage (and elsewhere). 

They haven’t offered me a position on the campaign staff yet, but if I were hired, I’d tell them to shelve this ridiculous meme and all that comes with it and pretend it never happened.

 

Morning Joe's Total Meltdown After Trump Obliterated Biden in the Debate Is Worth Rewatching

So much has happened that I couldn’t get to MSNBC’s Morning Joe’s total freakout 

 

over Joe Biden’s abysmal debate on July 1. Mika Brzezinski delivered a most entertaining tantrum, emblematic of liberal America entering a state of hypoxia over Biden’s debate with Donald Trump because they don’t know what to do. Reality bashed them in the face, though if they only paid attention, they could have seen the president’s steep mental decline.

Brzezinski’s screed was something out of North Korean state media, listing the politically motivated charges Trump is facing, accusing him of slurring his words, bringing up his convictions, his liable suits, and claiming he tried to launch a coup in 2020. It was absolute cinema. Please list all the things that no one cares about because they’ve been either debunked or dismissed due to people seeing right through the political circus inherent with any anti-Trump campaign.

The MSNBC host then has the courage to ask why people aren’t calling for Trump to drop out of the race, claiming that maybe we’re all desensitized to the lies or misinformed. That was the kicker—let liberal America, which has shown to be media illiterate, lecture us about misinformation. It’s you people who manufacture it. 

Does Mika know that Biden's standard is higher because he’s the president? He claimed to beat Medicare, brutally botched an answer on abortion, veering off into some tangent about how we need to codify Roe because families are raping each other en masse, and couldn’t deliver any lines without looking and sounding his age. He was also mentally gassed and had to be helped off the stage by Jill Biden. 

Trump doesn’t have the nuclear codes, Mika. That’s Joe, who thinks Philadelphia is in Delaware. In the coming days since this equally braindead soliloquy, the Democratic Party has approached a state of civil war over Biden as megadonors, and Hill Democrats want him gone. In contrast, Democratic governors and the base want him to stay. 

The North Korean media aspect arose when Brzezinski tried to claim that a terrible night for Biden wasn’t a victory for Trump. Yes, it was—your feelings don’t matter, ma’am. One person wins, the other loses—the most elementary part of this issue. She then goes on about how Biden tells the truth while Trump lies and how Trump will threaten our institutions and the like. I guess she hasn’t read about the pervasive overreach and overall creepiness from Biden’s Justice Department, which is now visiting Americans’ homes over anti-Biden posts on social media. 

Oh, and she claims that Biden was “slowed down by a cold” and Trump is a man with a “cold, vile, and merciless heart.” Please, this segment alone only reinforces my support for the former president, as it will for millions of other Republicans if we watched this show that no one watches. They never learn; the more you hate Trump, the more we like him. Your guy has a broken brain and can’t do the job—75 percent of Americans are with us on that one. And there’s nothing you can do about it. 

Re-watch this tantrum for motivation, folks. It’s liberals freaking out because there’s no spin, no explanation that’s remotely believable other than Biden can’t do the job. Trump didn’t win the debate—says who. The polls show Trump commanding a 30-plus-point blowout over Biden when asked who won the debate, so who is uninformed, Mika? Trump is beating Biden in key swing states, with the president bogged down by a 32 percent approval rating and three-fourths of the country saying he’s too old to be president.

They don’t know what to do or how to react, and I love it.

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Why Nate Silver Regretted Removing This Passage in His Recent Column About Joe Biden

Nate Silver is one of the most vocal voices backing Joe Biden exiting the race. One of politics’ preeminent pollsters and data crunchers, Silver has been blunt and unrelenting in making his case that Biden is cooked and should stand aside. It carries more weight that he’s no fan of Trump and liberal, but he’s not going to shy away from the fact that he’s apprehensive about Biden’s mental health and age. He noted that the president’s team might be under the impression that it’s 2020. It’s not; Biden has far worse numbers than any incumbent helming a re-election effort.

He also was honest, though some would see his lengthy paragraphs about the world of polling, getting things wrong, and other aspects of data journalism that most would find to be ways for him to cover for himself if things go haywire. Silver does delve into the minutiae of this world, but he also ends with a damning analysis of Biden. His latest piece spoke about the “broken leg” syndrome with Joe, where the model doesn’t consider some political aspects. While Biden’s chances to win aren’t good, Silver warned that there could be a circumstance where the president might be inclined to think that he could pull off a comeback.

Silver quickly throws cold water on that narrative, admitting that Biden’s chances now post-Trump debate are probably even worse than his model prediction. Second, after the ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos, he acknowledged that he ‘wimped out’ adding a few sentences about the president regarding his mental health, where the best possible move is to make plans to transition the presidency to Ms. Kamala Harris. He admits he’s entirely in that camp now after this interview, adding, “Something is clearly wrong here” (via Silver Bulletin):

Biden is, in all likelihood, literally incapable of waging the sort of campaign that a league-average Democrat would be able to wage. The reporting on Biden’s condition is highly distributing — the debate probably wasn’t entirely an anomaly, and it’s not even clear to what extent Biden is making the decisions rather than his staff. Frankly, I’d rather have Kamala Harris be president right now in the event of, say, an unconfirmed report of a North Korean nuclear missile inbound to Honolulu after 8 p.m. 

A fully engaged president would have done something like this following his debate performance: schedule a press conference at 9 a.m. the next morning, and answer questions forthrightly and competently until he’d demonstrated that the debate was indeed just a “bad night”. Instead, it’s been more than a week, and Biden has continued to hide from the press, using a teleprompter even at private fundraisers and making repeated verbal stumbles –- like referring to himself as a “Black woman” — in the few impromptu media appearances he has done. 

I’m not going to mince words here: this is not remotely acceptable from the leader of the free world, or from the staff advising him. In consideration of Biden’s age, 81, his debate performance, and his obviously deteriorating condition, it’s not tenable for him to ask for another four years as president. (That’s not a prediction of what Biden will do but rather a proscriptive statement of what would be best for the United States.) 

What’s more up for debate is whether Biden should be president now. My personal view is that we’re past the point of no return — one or two good interviews (say on ABC News tonight) would be too little, too late to restore enough trust, especially given the White House’s persistent lack of transparency. These are precarious circumstances for Democrats, at best. Although I don’t think this is the base case, I think Democrats are underestimating the possibility that this could turn into a Watergate-type scandal if the White House has been concealing details about the president’s condition from the American public. 

OK — let’s turn it down a notch and get back to the implications for the forecast. Because as much as I’m a probabilist at heart, if you sweat enough sports bets, you’ll sometimes encounter circumstances where sometimes the outcome does seem pretty damned deterministic. For instance: the obviously severely concussed quarterback, down 7 points at halftime, is brought out for the second half and then immediately throws a pick-six. That’s a hard deficit to overcome to begin with — but it’s much harder if the concussed QB can barely do more than hand the ball off and the coach insists on keeping him in the game anyway. 

Now, unlike in football, the “final score” in elections isn’t always accurate — sometimes the polls are wrong. It’s almost as though there’s a fifth quarter after the game in which the referees audit the result to make sure they have the right score. If a lot breaks right and if the polls aren’t pegging the situation correctly to begin with, it’s not out of the question that Biden could win. 

But it’s pretty unlikely — this is a “broken leg” circumstance if I ever saw one. Biden plainly has shortcomings that the model isn’t really designed to account for. When we launched the forecast last week, I promised that I’d tell you if we reached a point where there were material circumstances that weren’t being handled well by the model. We’re in such a circumstance. 

And then, post-ABC News interview, he tweeted this:

Everyone can see Biden is a mess, except the people paid to advise the president on the best possible course of action. Either they’re incompetent, just as mentally ill as Joe, or they're being held hostage by the wrath of Jill Biden, who very much has a ‘we’re done when I say we’re done’ attitude within this White House.

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Comer reveals White House physician was involved in Biden family business deals, demands he testify

Dr. Kevin O’Connor

FIRST ON FOX – House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is demanding that the White House physician appear before Congress to answer questions on President Biden’s "declining mental state," while also revealing that the doctor has been involved in the Biden family’s business dealings. 

Fox News Digital obtained the letter Comer, R-Ky., sent to Dr. Kevin O’Connor on Sunday. Comer is seeking to question O’Connor, given his "connections" with the Biden family, on whether he is "in a position to provide accurate and independent reviews of the President’s fitness to serve."

Comer wants to know whether O'Connor's medical assessments of the president have been improperly influenced by his work with the Biden family with the company Americore. 

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"After a concerning debate performance by President Biden against former President Donald Trump on June 27, journalists have rushed to report on what Americans have seen plainly for years: the President appears unwell," Comer wrote. 

President Biden speaks at a campaign rally in Madison, Wisconsin. (Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Comer said that because Americans have been questioning Biden’s "ability to lead the country," his committee has been investigating circumstances surrounding O’Connor’s February assessment of the president. 

Comer noted that O’Connor determined in February that the president "is a healthy, active, robust 81-year-old-male, who remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency." 

Comer, though, pointed to reports that O’Connor did not recommend that Biden take a cognitive test. 

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"The Oversight Committee is concerned your medical assessments have been influenced by your private business endeavors with the Biden family," Comer wrote. 

Comer said the committee has obtained evidence that shows he was involved with Americore Health, LLC, along with the president’s brother, James Biden. 

President Biden speaks with White House physician Kevin O'Connor as he arrives back at the White House on Aug. 28, 2023. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Americore, a company which operates rural hospitals, has been investigated by the committee as part of its impeachment inquiry against the president – specifically related to James Biden's work, which brought him more than $600,000. 

The committee says James Biden, while serving as a principal at Americore, received payments for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The committee found that James Biden received a $200,000 wire in 2018 from the company that he then used to write a $200,000 check to his brother, President Biden, which he labeled as a "loan repayment." 

JAMES BIDEN GIVEN LOAN, DIDN'T PROVIDE SERVICES TO AMERICORE DESPITE PROMISES TO USE LAST NAME, TRUSTEE SAYS

James Biden, according to testimony from other Americore employees, did not provide any services to the company, but instead, promised that his "Biden" name could bring funding to the struggling hospital operator from the Middle East. 

That employee, Carol Fox, a Chapter 11 trustee for Americore, testified that the loan was provided to Biden with no documentation in return for the promise of funding from the Middle East that never came. She filed a lawsuit against James Biden, saying he made "representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections." 

But during James Biden’s interview with the committee earlier this year, he told investigators that O’Connor "provided him counsel in connection with the alleged work he was performing for Americore." 

James Biden arrives to federal court during Hunter Biden's trial, June 11, 2024, in Wilmington, Delaware. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

"I met with, for example – my brother wasn’t in office at the time. He was a private citizen. And I had gotten through his – as vice president, his personal physician was Colonel Kevin O’Connor," James Biden testified. "And Kevin O’Connor – there was a very – and still there is an outcry for a solution for post-traumatic stress disorder." 

James Biden said O’Connor "introduced me to a team" that worked with PTSD and alcoholism amid a "backlog" at the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

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Comer, in the letter, also notes that O’Connor, along with Hunter Biden, "joined a meeting with Jim Biden and the president of a hospital being acquired by Americore." 

Hunter Biden was found guilty on all counts by a Delaware jury. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Meanwhile, the White House maintains that Biden has not been examined by a doctor since February. But during a call with Democratic governors last week, the president himself told governors "he was checked out by a doctor and that everything was fine." 

President Biden speaks at a campaign rally at Sherman Middle School in Madison, Wisconsin, Friday, July 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

"The statements by the White House Press Secretary and President Biden appear inconsistent, and the Committee seeks to understand the extent of your role at the White House at this time," Comer wrote. "Given your connections with the Biden family, the Committee also seeks to understand if you are in a position to provide accurate and independent reviews of the President’s fitness to serve."

Comer requested that O’Connor make himself available for a transcribed interview with counsel for the House Oversight Committee by July 14. He is also demanding all documents and communications that O’Connor has regarding Americore and James Biden. 

The request for O'Connor's cooperation with Congress comes amid calls for Biden to suspend his re-election campaign – even from top Democrats, former staffers and allies. 

But the White House maintains that President Biden is "absolutely not" considering dropping out of the 2024 presidential race.

"I am running. I am the leader of the Democratic Party. No one is pushing me out," Biden said last week. 

Brooke Singman is a political correspondent and reporter for Fox News Digital, Fox News Channel and FOX Business.

Target To Stop Accepting Personal Checks As Form Of Payment Starting Mid July

Target will no longer accept checks as a form of payment beginning July 15^th.

According to a representative who spoke with NBC Chicago, the retailer has taken “several measures” to notify customers in advance and that the decision was made due to “extremely low volumes.”

Target takes cash, Target Circle Cards, credit and debit cards, digital wallets, SNAP/EBT, and buy-now-pay-later services, among other payment methods, the spokesperson said. 

The move comes as the retail giant has made several money-saving changes, as it says it has been plagued by thefts.

Target put a 10-item limit on customers utilizing self-checkout in March.

Target instructed store employees to stop thieves who attempt to flee with items totaling $50 instead of $100, as recently as last week.

Last autumn, Michael Fiddelke, Target’s chief financial officer, informed investors that the company anticipates shoplifting to be a “significant financial headwind.”

Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts

 

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Rep. Jack Bergman to Newsmax: We Have a Crisis with Our Veterans

Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., told Newsmax on Saturday that the U.S. has a mental health "crisis with our veterans and their families."

Bergman, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, said veterans and their families are facing "suicidal tendencies and mental health anxieties" daily and that the government needs to "provide them the services they need for better mental health."

"And that means in a lot of ways not doing business as normal the way we've always done it. Here's a pill for this. Here's a pill for that.

"It's time we begin to move forward with breakthrough therapies that really look at how do we take mental health issues and turn them into therapy that allows them to get off medications to restore their self-confidence and to move forward," he during an appearance on "Saturday Agenda."

Bergman said that he and Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., created the Psychedelics Advancing Therapies (PATH) Caucus together in order "to create new breakthrough therapies for veterans and their families."

He said "one of the first ones that we've come across here that is very close to approval" by the Food and Drug Administration is MDMA-assisted therapy "that will allow these veterans to get the treatment they need."

© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

 

Trump Has Some Surprising—and Funny—Campaign Advice for Joe Biden

Donald Trump has some advice for Joe Biden. Following the president's horrific debate performance and subsequent ABC interview, Biden’s reelection prospects melted like the Wicked Witch of the West. 

But don’t listen to the naysayers, Trump advised in a tongue-in-cheek Truth Social post on Saturday—just keep doing what you’re doing. “MAKE CHINA GREAT AGAIN!” the former president exhorted:

He should be sharp, precise, and energetic, just like he was in The Debate, in selling his policies of Open Borders (where millions of people, including record numbers of Terrorists, are allowed to enter our Country, from prisons and mental institutions, totally unchecked and unvetted!), to Ending Social Security, Men playing in Women’s sports, High Taxes, High Interest Rates, encouraging a Woke Military, Uncontrollable Inflation, Record Setting Crime, Only Electric Vehicles, Subservience to China and other Countries, Endless Wars, putting America Last, losing our Dollar Based Standard, and so much more. Yes, Sleepy Joe should continue his campaign of American Destruction and, MAKE CHINA GREAT AGAIN!

I personally find this sarcastic trolling to be quite funny, but I know that some on the Republican side and virtually everyone on the Democrat team despises his odd use of the rules of grammar, including his sentences in all caps and capitalizing random words. But even if you don’t like his style, he’s dead right on calling out the mentally declining president not for his apparent cognitive difficulties, age, or personality—but for the very real failure of many of his policies. 

He should be “selling his policies of Open Borders,” Trump says, mocking the absolute humanitarian and security disaster the president has created. Biden has overseen an estimated 7.8 million illegal border crossings and at least 1.5 million “gotaways” – with some estimates coming in much higher. Who knows how many of those want to commit terroristic acts against our country?

Biden should be campaigning on “Uncontrollable Inflation,” the former president suggests. As we all know, inflation has skyrocketed under Biden, and interest rates have at times gone up to heights not seen since 2006.

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Trump’s laundry list of Biden’s failures includes “Men playing in Women’s sports,” “encouraging a Woke Military,” “Subservience to China,” and more. What I like about this humorous approach is that instead of just saying, “You’re an old, dementia-riddled fraud who should step down,” he instead uses well-deserved mockery to make his point. They’re not personal attacks (except for the "Crooked Joe" nickname, of course); he’s simply pointing out all the areas where Biden has hurt America.

At this point, however, it’s hard to predict whether Joe can continue his “powerful and far-reaching campaign.” With the calls for him to step down reaching a deafening cacophony, it’s fair to wonder whether he’ll make it through this week.