Beware the oligarchy, warned the president who ... just gave George Soros a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Beware the oligarchy, warned the president who ... cajoled and pressured tech billionaires to comply with his attempts to censor speech and suppress dissent through his State Department's Global Engagement Center. 

Beware the oligarchy, warned the president whose party gets massively funded through Arabella, a network of leftist billionaires using dark money to fund candidates and activist campaigns. 

Pardon me while I attempt to suppress my gag reflex at the worst case of valediction projection ever. 

Joe Biden will leave office just as he entered it -- twenty pounds of bull**** in a ten-pound bag. Biden, or whoever is filling his Teleprompter these days, tried cosplaying FDR and LBJ for the last four years and proved disastrously inept. Now he's attempting to exit like Dwight D. Eisenhower, while being nothing like Ike in the least, let alone in Ike's honesty.

One point to note: I did not watch Biden's speech. I've had enough of televised elder abuse to last me a lifetime. Instead, I read the speech transcript at the New York Times, after noting that the White House still hasn't posted it as of 8 am this morning. Are they that embarrassed by it? Because they should be, just as they should be embarrassed to have participated in a cover-up of Biden's cognitive collapse for the last four years.  

Most of this speech is nothing more or less than Biden's standard campaign speech. He credits himself with Saving Democracy!, as well as saving the economy, saving the whales, etc etc etc. This too we have heard ad nauseam for the last four years, and the last year in particular. It's his breathtaking hypocrisy and projection in this last missive -- or dear Lord, we hope the last -- that's worth any comment at all. 

Biden warns that the nation has a new set of "robber barons," which mainly comprise his supporters until a hot second ago with the exception of Elon Musk:

That’s why my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.

Ahem. Other than Musk, we saw Biden leveraging these "robber barons" to silence dissent and debate. Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pinchai cooperated with the Biden regime to suppress any message that didn't meet the standards of the Biden administration on a wide variety of subjects, but especially about COVID-19, its origins, and the US role in its development. Biden turned the GEC -- which had previously been an outward-facing counterpropaganda unit of little note -- into a domestic Speech Police, and he did so with the help of his "oligarch" buddies. Only when Musk bought Twitter and exposed these operations did the White House's censorship efforts begin to fail, which is why Musk finds himself at the center of Joe Biden's Lawfare Project now. 

The reference to Eisenhower -- yes, Biden actually invoked his name -- really will trigger the gag reflex:

You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us that about, and I quote, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six days — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.

Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.

The biggest problem with the tech-industrial process has been Biden's attempt to create a fascist marriage between it and the federal bureaucracy. Biden's GEC was one point of coitus between the two, but hardly the only one, and the "fact checks" that Biden discusses were the enforcement mechanisms for it. Zuckerberg talked at length about how Biden officials would use them to demand suppression of speech even for claims that turned out to be true but politically inconvenient.

As for the collapse of the mainstream media, that speaks for itself. They spent the last decade regurgitating every falsehood about Republicans while covering up Joe Biden's dementia. These news orgs also used "fact checks" as a blunderbuss to tote the progressive party line, even when the evidence showed otherwise. Now no one trusts them, because no one should trust them. Biden has spent his life being twenty pounds of bull**** in a ten-pound bag, but the Protection Racket Media industrialized its production.

Oh, and there's also this:

We need to get dark money — that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaign contributions — we need to get it out of our politics.

Just a reminder: It was the Obama/Biden ticket that ended the Presidential Election Fund by being the first since Watergate to refuse its limits on fundraising. It's ActBlue that faces investigations in Congress and several states over their fundraising activities. And it's Democrats that have benefitted from Arabella, as mentioned above. Why didn't Biden do anything about that over the last four years?

And we haven't even begun to address the Biden Inc corruption of his career. At least Biden didn't lecture us on the rule of law after giving Hunter a pardon for evading income taxes and a firearms violation, and also from any federal crimes that he might have committed over an 11-year period -- oh, wait:

People should be able to make as much as they can, but pay — play by the same rules, pay their fair share in taxes.

Womp womp.

Let's just sum this up by saying that this disgraceful and hypocritical lecture's only virtue is that it at least reflects one of the most disgraceful occupants of the White House in modern American history. Dana Perino summed it up well by the end of the speech:

.@DanaPerino: To me, it felt like Biden’s farewell address speechwriters have already left the building, and they asked ChatGPT to write a speech for Joe Biden in which he doesn’t remember he was president for the last four years. pic.twitter.com/l06IyItxrP

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) January 16, 2025

Update: Jim Geraghty can't quite believe the level of hypocrisy either, especially in such a short time frame:

We have to be wary about “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people” and “extreme wealth, power and influence,” unless it’s George Soros, in which case we give him the country’s highest honor.

And that was only ten days earlier, too!

Update: Glenn Reynolds posts a hilarious thought from a friend about this speech. I won't give the punchline away, though.