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After a half-century in public service, one might have expected President Joe Biden to exit the stage with a speech urging Americans to remember him fondly for the productive legislative record his administration compiled, or his work shoring up alliances and bringing two new members of Nato into the now 32-member bloc.
But he opted not to use the coveted prime-time air time to brag. Instead, he delivered a surprisingly sharp warning.
Biden added another chapter to his long-term legacy with what many progressives would consider a timely alert to the rising threat to American liberty from the uber-wealthy technology “barons” surrounding his successor.
His words were crafted to echo the warning delivered by then-president Dwight Eisenhower, the one-time five-star Army general turned grandfatherly Republican politician, in his final remarks to the nation more than 60 years ago after the end of an eight-year period during which he had come out of retirement to become America’s civilian leader.
Eisenhower, the soldier’s soldier and a logistical mastermind who had spearheaded the invasion of Europe that brought an end to the Nazi terror, cautioned the nation to be on guard against what he called “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” because it could portend “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
The old soldier, who like Biden was speaking at the end of more than 50 years in his country’s service, told Americans that they “must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes” and pushed them to “take nothing for granted.”
Only an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together,” he said.
Biden, who would have been a teenager when Ike delivered that warning, may not have paid attention back then, but he appears to have studied them in recent months.
The 46th president said the powerful rise of social media and the Trump-fueled end to fact-checking efforts by those platforms represent an existential threat to the “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” that Eisenhower spoke of as he prepared to leave office in January 1961.
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power,” warned Biden, who called out Meta’s decision to stop working with third-party fact-checking organizations as letting the truth be “smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”
In the more than six decades since Eisenhower’s warning, America’s defense industry has become more and more entrenched thanks to the raw power of money in politics. But those industrial titans have been recently eclipsed by the rise of wealthy, Trump-backing tech barons, most prominently Elon Musk.
Ike would be horrified to learn that the South African-born SpaceX founder is not just the biggest single donor to the most recent Republican president-elect, but also the founder, CEO and controlling shareholder in one of the country’s most important defense contractors.
He would also be equally dismayed to find that not only was he proven right, but that in the end, those in government didn’t much care about curbing the power of the ultra-wealthy as long as those entities and people did their part to keep them in government.
That’s a lesson that Donald Trump, who spent years as a wealthy developer and political donor before entering politics himself, learned early on.
Biden may well be proven right, but his populist warning may have fallen on deaf ears because he didn’t deliver it until it was too late.
