No, Joe Biden Is Not Dead And Neither Is Paul McCArtney
0703blog
Which of the following are false?
1. Joe Biden is dead.
2. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas got into Yale University under affirmative action.
3. Paul is dead.
4. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wants to boycott the new Barbie movie.
5. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., wants all mothers to have guns.
6. Elon Musk supports eliminating voting rights for people without children.
The true statements are 2, 4, 5 and 6. False are 1 and 3.
Much to the chagrin of Republicans and particularly the rabid MAGA crowd, the 80-year-old president is alive and working toward reelection. Paul McCartney, who is even older than Biden at 81, also is active and touring, having never died, yet.
If you play Biden’s latest speech backwards you will not hear “I buried Joe” and there are no photos of Biden crossing a street wearing no shoes, symbolic of death.
But Cruz has come down hard on Barbie, claiming the film is a sop to China. Greene said the answer to stopping gun violence is for all of the “good guy” mothers to strap on their Glocks. While Musk said the future of America may depend on encouraging women to have more children and taking away their right to vote, if they don’t.
Rumors are as common as flies and these days, they spread and multiply with lightning speed on line and can have world-shaking ramifications. A perfect example is the latest rumor of Biden’s death, which, as Mark Twain would have said, is greatly exaggerated.
Hanna Bree, a self-professed libertarian with 4,919 Twitter followers, let out with a doozy last week, tweeting “Wow! Rumors last night Biden had a heart attack. Another was it was an aneurysm. Now what looks like a body bag out the front door. Someone better start talking. #Biden #Whitehouse.”
Talk about wildfire rumors.
This one started with CCTV footage that circulated on Twitter and later Tik Tok on July 2 purporting to show Biden’s dead body being wheeled out of the White House in a body bag on some kind of gurney. The video has gone crazy viral and has been seen 12.1 million times as of today.
The non-profit fact checker, Snopes, dug in and couldn’t precisely say what the CCTV footage documented but it did not show someone wheeling out the body of the president. Biden was alive, as of July 3, 2023. Maybe someone was taking away Biden’s dirty clothes or maybe it was the leftovers from a state dinner, but it was not Biden’s body.
Snopes reported that it was not known who or what agency recorded and posted the footage that appeared to be taken by a security camera directed at the White House’s front lawn, positioned somewhere high in front of the entrance’s gate.
At the very beginning, viewers can see the video’s timestamp: June 23, 2022. That is almost a year ago as an unidentified person can be seen rolling out a long, black object. Another figure follows, pushing a similar-looking black object. After that, a nearby black car can be seen driving away.
Unless there is a Biden clone, the real deal participated in the G7 Summit soon after the video’s timestamp and the NATO Summit in Spain after that.
Furthermore, Snopes wrote that it would be rather unlikely that the body of a deceased leader of the western world would be quietly rolled out in a casket or body bag from a door that appears to be near the White House front entrance. Traditionally, the body of a dead president lies in state for mourners to see as with Presidents Kennedy, Roosevelt and Lincoln. And then, there is the publicity. The likelihood that a president would die without the press’s knowledge is totally unlikely.
But since when does common sense rule in the Twitterverse. One Twitter tweeted that the video showed the “routine replacement of the Biden clone.” The clone conspiracy theory has been circulating since at least 2021. Another claimed that Biden has been replaced by a twin even though the president has no twins.
The Biden hoax is merely the latest in a long line of popular, on-line death hoaxes of celebrities, royalty and sports stars. People have a ghoulish fascination over such rumors. Some are generated by creative people who just like to fool others. Some are used as clickbait to increase income, other times the deaths are linked to an item for sale and others are politically motivated.
There was the outlandish story that the actors Jeff Goldblum and Tony Danza fell off cliffs to their deaths on separate occasions, and that Will Smith, Lil Wayne and Justin Bieber all died prematurely. There was the report that actor Wayne Knight was killed in a car accident. Knight was once dinner for a dinosaur in “Jurassic Park” and nearly burned to death in his mail truck on “Seinfeld” but in real life, he is very alive. And then there was the well-publicized report that Queen Elizabeth II died months before her actual death in September 2022.
Ten years ago, a website, “Fake a Wish,” offered to create celebrity death hoaxes which were attributed to a phony website, “Global Associated News.” The site had a disclaimer stating that everything was “100% fabricated” but it didn’t stop sites like Twitter from repeating the death report, with no disclaimer. It also made a tidy profit for “Fake a Wish” creator, Rich Hoover.
The website, fakeawish.com, notes it is “100% Complete and Utter Rubbish.” It allows users to generate false but realistic-looking news stories designed to go viral. The fake celebrity deaths often involve jet-ski accidents and trips to Australia.
Fake death reports can do more than just draw readers; they can effect the world. One involved an Italian school teacher and writer, Tommaso Debenedetti, who started a hoax in 2012 that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was dead. The news created a global rise in oil prices. Debenedetti also fooled major publications with his fake death reports of authors Cormac McCarthy and J.K. Rowling, the pope and Fidel Castro.
Since 2011, Debenedetti also wrote many fake interviews, with personalities such as Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama and Pope Benedict XVI. The interviews were published for decades in Italian regional newspapers.
Debenedetti said he made up deaths and interviews, “to show how easy it is to fool the press in the era of social media.” He was right.
And then there’s Jar’Edo Wens, an Australian aboriginal deity, the god of “physical might” and “earthly knowledge.” There is even a mask carving of “Jar’Edo Wens” by the French artist Noyo.
Except there is no such figure in aboriginal mythology. The story of Jar’Edo Wens is the mother of all hoaxes and the longest running hoax in Wikipedia history. Jar’Edo Wens dropped into Wikipedia nine years ago by an unknown and anonymous Australian. By the time editors found Jar’Edo Wens, he had leaked off Wikipedia and onto the wider Internet. At nine years, nine months and three days, Jar’Edo Wens is the longest-lived hoax found on Wikipedia, and that is saying something because anyone can edit Wikipedia and more than 130,000 readers have done so in the past 30 days.
People have been making up stuff for eons and in the era before the written word, there is no way to separate fact from fiction.
For example, in 3200 BCE, Menes, an Egyptian pharaoh and unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt, was carried off and then killed by a hippopotamus.
The Athenian lawmaker, Draco of Athens, died in 620 BCE after he was reportedly smothered to death by gifts of cloaks and hats showered upon him by appreciative citizens at a theater in Aegina, Greece.
In the 6th century BCE, Milo of Croton was an Olympic champion wrestler whose hands reportedly became trapped when he tried to split a tree apart and he was then either devoured by wolves or lions, depending on the version.
According to Valerius Maximus, in 455 BCE, Aeschylus, the eldest of the three great Athenian tragedians, was killed by a tortoise dropped by an eagle that had mistaken his bald head for a rock.
In 401 BCE, Mithridates, a Persian soldier embarrassed his king, Artaxerxes II, by boasting of killing his rival, Cyrus the Younger. Mithridates was then executed by scaphism, an ancient Persian method of execution that entailed trapping the victim between two boats, feeding and covering them with milk and honey, and allowing them to fester and be devoured by insects and other vermin over time.
And more recently, in 1998 16-year-old Jonathan Capewell from Oldham, England, died from a heart attack brought on by the buildup of butane and propane in his blood after excessive use of deodorant sprays. He was reported to have been obsessed with personal hygiene.
And who could forget the death on July 2, 2005, of Kenneth Pinyan, who supposed died from injuries caused by anal sex with a stallion. And just as hard to fathom was Peng Fan, a chef in Foshan, China, who was bitten in 2014 by a cobra’s severed head, which he had cut off 20 minutes earlier while preparing soup.
And finally, everyone heard of the “Paul is dead” urban legend and conspiracy theory that Beatle Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike. The rumor began circulating in 1966, gaining broad popularity in September 1969 following reports on American college campuses.
According to the rumor, McCartney died in a car crash, and to spare the public from grief, the surviving Beatles, aided by Britain’s MI5, replaced him with a McCartney look-alike, subsequently communicating this secret through subtle details on their albums.
Tens of thousands of Beatles played the White Album track “Revolution 9” backwards to hear the supposed message “Turn me on, dead man” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” which ends with the words “I buried Paul.” Except that John Lennon later said he never wrote “Turn me on, dead man” but that backwards or forwards, the words were “number nine, number nine.” And as far as “Strawberry Fields Forever,” John Lennon later said the words were actually “Cranberry sauce.”
And finally the mysterious interpretation of the Abbey Road album cover as depicting a funeral procession: Lennon, dressed in white, is the heavenly figure; Ringo Starr, in black, is the undertaker; George Harrison, in denim, is the gravedigger; and McCartney, barefoot and out of step with the others, is the corpse.
Kind of like Joe Biden.
To summarize, it is true that a 1991 New York Times reported how Yale University officials said future Supreme Court Justice Thomas was admitted to its law school “under an explicit affirmative action plan with the goal of having blacks and other minority members make up about 10 percent of the entering class.”
And yes, Elon Musk said in a discussion on a right wing social network, “The childless have little stake in the future.” He said that “a collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far” and agreed with a tweet that “democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents.”
And Sen. Cruz came down on the side of Vietnam which has banned the upcoming Barbie movie because it features a map showing the nine-dash line that Beijing uses to represent its territorial claim over much of the South China Sea.
“I guess Barbie is made in China…,” Cruz tweeted in a message that was viewed more than 122,000 times.
And Rep. Greene made clear that she believes more guns are the answer to preventing civil unrest. She referred to an attempted kidnapping of a child from his grandmother in New York City that was caught on camera and remarked it was “another reason shy mothers should be armed.” She also said she believes that “children should be trained with firearms. I definitely do. I think that’s very important.”