By Ben Johnson

In his televised farewell address to the nation Wednesday night, President Joe Biden suggested lawmakers target social media companies that refuse to stifle “misinformation and disinformation” on their platforms, that Americans must wage a “constant struggle” to protect “democracy” at home, and proposed a radical realignment of the U.S. government’s constitutional order.

Biden — who repeatedly threatened to physically assault President Donald Trump on the campaign trail, investigated and imprisoned peaceful pro-life advocates, and called Trump voters “garbage” — boasted, “I’ve kept my commitment to be president for all Americans.”

The 82-year-old one-term president sandwiched factually dubious claims about his accomplishments between an announcement of a Middle East hostage deal and a dark warning of an America dominated by an “oligarchy” into a brief 17-minute speech from the Oval Office.

“I love America. You love it, too,” concluded Biden. “Thank you for this great honor.”

Taking Credit for the Hostage Breakthrough

The 46th president began by announcing a newly minted deal to release hostages from the clutches of Hamas “after eight months of nonstop negotiation” by his team. “This plan was developed and negotiated by my team, and it will be largely implemented by the incoming administration,” said Biden, attempting to take credit for the late-breaking development.

Yet he did not mention his negotiators experienced a breakthrough in the deadlocked discussions less than one week after President-elect Donald Trump announced that, if American citizens being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza are “not back by the time I get into office, all Hell will break out in the Middle East, and it will not be good for Hamas.” Similarly, in 1981, Iran released U.S. hostages it had held for 444 days just moments after President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration out of fear of retaliation from Jimmy Carter’s new, tougher successor. For their part, the Trump transition team has generously allowed the outgoing administration to accept some part of the praise.

Biden stated he created “building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again. The last four years, that is exactly what we have done.” Thanks to his policies, “millions of Americans now have the dignity of work.”

Yet the vast majority of jobs the administration claims it “created” merely came back online after the artificial job destruction of the COVID-19 lockdowns. In its first year, the Biden-Harris administration created 136,000 fewer jobs than the Trump administration would have, according to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office estimate. Furthermore, 183,000 fewer Americans were in the workforce in 2023 than in 2019, while 2.9 million immigrants entered the U.S. labor force, leading Heritage Foundation economic scholar E.J. Antoni to conclude, “all net job growth has gone to foreign-born workers.”

Record-setting inflation squeezed U.S. citizens at a greater level than any time in four decades. Americans must now earn an extra $13,000 a year for the same standard of living as under President Donald Trump — and wages have largely not kept up with prices. “Inflation has outpaced wages during the length of Biden’s entire presidency,” reported the left-leaning Poynter Institute. The cost of groceries has soared 23% during the Biden years. A gallon of gasoline is 84 cents higher than when Biden took office, a 35% increase. The median house now costs $420,400, $65,400 more than in 2021. As a result, median mortgage payments have more than doubled (104%) since Biden took office.

Biden Calls for Renewed Social Media Censorship

Faced with a crushing loss in November, Joe Biden retreated to the familiar liberal refrain that “experts” must regulate Americans’ media consumption.

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” he asserted. “Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.” Biden strongly implied this threatened democracy and cries out for federal regulation. “We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power,” he said.

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg recently announced he would transform Facebook’s “fact-checking” program into a community notes system akin to that employed by Elon Musk on X. Any Facebook post hit with a fact-check would lose 80% of future views, yet social media fact-checkers have a long history of promoting misinformation and disinformation. 

PolitiFact dismissed the notion that the novel coronavirus originated in a lab as a “debunked conspiracy theory,” and FactCheck.org (which is funded by Google, Facebook, and the taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation) called it “baseless.”

Twitter forbade users from sharing Miranda Devine‘s New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and Meta Policy Communications Director Andy Stone, a former employee of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and staffer for the late liberal Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), declared that Facebook would begin “reducing its distribution on our platform” before it had been fact-checked.

Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that Biden administration officials regularly contacted him about his content moderation policies, and government officials maintained an official portal to flag posts and accounts for suppression or deletion from Twitter.

Biden Calls for Resistance 2.0 and Radical Realignment of the U.S. Constitution

Biden obliquely concluded his address with a call for Americans to engage in massive resistance to the Trump-Vance administration. Like the Statue of Liberty, he said, “We sway back and forth to withstand the fury of the storm” in a “constant struggle against the forces of darkness. "Now,” on the eve of the second Trump administration, “it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame.”

Biden promoted the Left’s plan to dominate every branch of government via a radical reorganization of U.S. government away from its constitutional order. “We need to enact an 18-year [term] limit … and the strongest ethics reforms for our Supreme Court,” he said. The proposed term limits, which Biden made last year, would affect three of the court’s center-Right justices: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito. The ethics package, which he proposed at the same time, would allow the government to wage lawfare against Supreme Court justices.

The Founding Fathers designated lifetime tenure for federal judges to insulate the justice system from political pressure. Alexander Hamilton wrote lifetime appointment was necessary “to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals” from “the arts of designing men” and “dangerous innovations in the government.”

Biden further demanded that voters “need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no president, no president is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office. The president’s power is not limit — it is not absolute.” The Supreme Court case in question merely recognized the president’s immunity from acts undertaken in his official capacity as president, not private crimes. And the Constitution provides impeachment as the proper way to deal with official acts that cross into illegality.

Biden appeared to target a former Democratic ally, as well, during the speech. “We need to ban members of Congress from trading stock while they are in the Congress,” said Biden. The reference likely aims at House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a decades-long former friend who played an instrumental role in pressuring Biden to exit the 2024 presidential race, whose stock-trading prowess has outperformed the S&P 500 by nearly 200%. Pelosi made 20 times her salary in a single stock trade last summer. Critics have frequently accused her and the many others in Congress who trade stocks of insider trading.

Biden, Champion of the Dark Money Oligarchy?

Much of Joe Biden’s farewell address focused on an impending dark-money-driven “oligarchy,” an oligarchy critics say he has empowered. “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,” said Biden without naming names. He likened the situation to the Robber Barons of the late 19th century — who made their fortunes by collusion with the government — and invoked President Dwight Eisenhower before warning of “the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex.” Yet Biden recently awarded the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to George Soros. The Hungarian-born billionaire’s Open Society Policy Foundation spent $138 million on political causes in 2021 alone.

Biden further urged, “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.” Yet the left-leaning campaign finance watchdog Open Secrets noted, “The 2024 election cycle is on track to be the fourth consecutive cycle where Democrats benefit from more dark money than Republicans.” The largest dark money spender in the 2024 election was Kamala Harris’ Future Forward USA PAC, which spent at least $517.1 million.

Who Pays America’s Taxes?

To prevent the rise of a new Robber Baron class, Biden said, “We must reform the tax code, not by giving the biggest tax cuts to billionaires, but by making them begin to pay their fair share.”

Yet the wealthiest Americans already pay their fair share and that of a lot of other Americans, as well. The top 1% of income earners paid 40% of all U.S. income taxes and the top 10% footed 72% of the U.S. tax bill in 2022, the most recent year for which data are available. The bottom half of income earners paid 3% of tax revenues. The federal income tax rate for the top 1% was six times higher than that of the bottom half of Americans.

Critics noted the irony of Biden demanding the wealthy pay “their fair share” in taxes after pardoning his son, Hunter, for tax evasion, among other crimes.

America Is a Multicultural Idea?

Amidst his remarks, Biden claimed that “the idea of America” was “built not by one person but by many people, from every background, and from around the world.” In fact, 98% of colonists at the time of the American Revolution were Protestant Christians. Another 1.9% were Roman Catholic Christians. The remainder were Jewish. More than 100 years later, the Supreme Court declared the entire body of American laws, customs, and statements of the Founding Fathers amounted to one “mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation” (Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892).

Curiously, for an administration laser-focused on abortion and LGBTQ advocacy, he mentioned neither issue during his farewell address. Instead, his administration touted those accomplishments in a separate fact sheet.

Biden also insisted that “democracy must defend, and be defined, and be imposed,” presumably on other nations. By definition, democracy cannot be “imposed”: If democracy is imposed without the consent of the governed, it is not democracy but imperialism.

Biden left office by erroneously blaming natural disasters “from California to North Carolina” on “the existential threat of climate change.” Rather than take note that American voters rejected the Green New Deal agenda in 2024, Biden told his fellow liberals, “We must keep pushing forward, and push faster.”

Biden said that his administration deserved praise for “bringing violent crime to a 50-year low.” Official statistics for the crime rate (which has been falling for decades) in 2024 are not yet available — but previous statistics have proven unreliable. In 2022, the Biden administration announced violent crime had fallen by 1.7%, but last fall the FBI announced it had actually increased 4.5%. The original statistics omitted 80,029 additional rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults in 2022. His administration has also take the odd step of continually revising the number of murders committed during his administration downward, while raising the number of murders under previous administrations dating back to George W. Bush.

Biden Claims Credit for ‘Decades’ of the Next Administrations’ Successes

Biden’s farewell address seemingly demanded credit for future successes in the second Trump administration and potentially its successors for “decades” to come. While Biden has insisted Americans are better off under his administration’s policies, he said during his televised speech that “it will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together. But the seeds are planted, and they’ll grow, and they’ll bloom for decades to come.”

The real Biden-Harris record is an administration run by nameless staffers presiding over managed decline, say his critics.

“The American people know his legacy … The wide-open border and the catastrophe that that will be for years to come, the skyrocketing price of living, the average American family spending $13,000 more annually just to stay afloat, weakness on the world stage, a terrible, catastrophic foreign policy in every metric. We had the weaponization of the DOJ, lawfare, the undermining of our entire system and then the cover-up of his cognitive decline,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Sean Hannity on Fox News. “That’s why we have the ushering in of a new golden age that begins in five days.”

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.