Jake Tapper's Unoriginal Sin

He (and Alex Thompson, his co-author) have just given us all book-length proof of their own uselessness as journalists.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of my first taste of Big Tech censorship: Amazon’s ban of my original Covid Unreported Truths booklet, the precursor to this Substack.

You may know what happened next. Elon Musk spoke out. Amazon reversed course. The pamphlet sold massively and cemented my place as a voice against lockdowns.

But here’s what didn’t happen: legacy media journalists didn’t speak out for me. And by 2021, as I questioned the mRNA jabs, many openly demanded my censorship (which they preferred to call deplatforming, a masterfully Orwellian term).

This sorry episode has been on my mind lately, but not because of the anniversary. I just waded through “Original Sin,” the book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson about Joe Biden’s mental decline and how the White House hid it.

Original Sin is a fascinating book that will tell you a lot you didn’t know.

If you’ve been asleep for the last five years, that is.

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(Awake for the last five years - and the next five too. With your help.)

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I won’t bore you with much of what Tapper and Thompson offer, because they have very little that’s both new and on the record. In the anecdote that has received the most attention, Original Sin details Biden’s inability to recognize George Clooney at a Democratic fundraiser in June 2024. But Clooney publicly called out Biden for his weakness at that fundraiser last July.

The book’s biggest contribution to history may be a few pages suggesting Biden was fading fast during the 2020 campaign - and perhaps as early as 2015, the year his son Beau died of a brain tumor. But those are generally vague and unsourced..

Yet the legacy media has given Original Sin a rapturous reception, treating Tapper and Thompson as a modern Woodward and Bernstein, as if this book came out in 2023 rather than 2025, as if they had broken news rather than regurgitated it.

The reason is easy to see.

Original Sin places all the blame on Biden and his closest handlers for the cover-up. It doesn’t merely exculpate the Washington journo-blob. It barely even asks about the legacy media’s defense of Biden until June 27, 2024, when his debate with Donald Trump exposed his incapacity in a way no one could dispute.

This is not hindsight. Biden’s decline was obvious nearly as soon as he took office. In September 2021, I wrote of his infamous vaccine mandate announcement:

“Good evening,” Uncle Joe told us. Evening? It was 5 p.m. in Washington and 2 p.m. in Los Angeles. Near bedtime for our president, I suppose…

[T]he speech was what we’ve come to know as classic Biden - loud and empty, in the style of Brezhnev or a late Roman emperor whose name no one knows.

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(Don’t take it from me. Take it from a federal prosecutor with a sterling reputation for integrity.)

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In reality, Original Sin ends where it ought to start, and along the way fails to ask the three most basic questions it should.

Along with the issue of why the media failed so badly - did news organizations muzzle their own reporters, or was the groupthink simply that deep? - the other two key questions are:

Was Biden given pharmaceutical aid — amphetamines and other stimulants, anti-Parkinson’s medicine, or even testosterone — to help him in those moments when he seemed more together, such as the 2024 State of the Union address?

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(Thank you for standing for real journalism. For less than 20 cents a day.)

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Most importantly what was the effect of Biden’s incapacity on American policy over the last four years, on the substantive choices his administration made? Again and again, “Original Sin” insists that his problems were mostly limited to his problems speaking clearly and remembering details, that he could still make decisions when he needed to do so.

But the evidence suggests otherwise, particularly on immigration. The White House allowed the southern border to remain unguarded for years after it became clear that doing so was both politically ruinous and an awful policy choice.

By 2022, reporting from places like the Darien Gap made clear the open border was functioning as magnet, with essentially no end to the number of unskilled (and sometimes criminal) migrants who would come.

Even worse, smugglers outside the United States and federally funded aid groups within — sometimes working practically in tandem — were encouraging the flood. The only people who benefitted from this unchecked flow, aside from the migrants themselves, were the aid groups. The only people advocating it were few insane “progressive” groups.

A functioning Democratic president would have seen this disaster and put a stop to it within months.

Joe Biden did not.

Why?

Don’t ask Jake Tapper or Alex Thompson.

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(Those were the days.)

SOURCE

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Journalism isn’t supposed to be easy.

It isn’t supposed to be regurgitating the conventional wisdom back to the powerful, telling people what they already know years after they needed to know it.

Journalists are supposed to ask hard, uncomfortable questions — to chase the truth, even if it means putting their reputations and their rights and sometimes even their lives at risk.

I knew all that even before June 4, 2020. But I learned it again that day.

And I’ll never forget it.

Thanks for being an Unreported Truths reader.

Onward.