Memory currently occupies a large media presence, less as a tool of historical remembrance than as a source of political repression and regressive ignorance and thoughtlessness. In an act of elimination and erasure, far right GOP legislators such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are attempting to whitewash, censor and ban Black history. Memory is now administered, cleansed of its democratic revelations, relieved of the practice of moral witnessing and devoid of lessons learned from the past. The history of Indigenous genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, and a wave of resistance movements extending from the fight for civil rights to struggles for labor rights — which reside in the domain of the unpleasant and repressed — are being systemically removed from schools, libraries, books, curricula and classroom pedagogy. This attack on historical memory brings to mind Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s trenchant reflection: “The most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security; it’s the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.”

Remembrance is under siege as far right politicians work to disintegrate, misrepresent and eliminate its emancipatory possibilities. The absence of critical memory work poses both a crisis of witnessing, the cancelling of moral vision, the destruction of public education and the depoliticization of agency itself. What is particularly disturbing is that this notion of historical erasure is barely acknowledged in the mainstream media as a serious threat to democracy. This is in spite of the fact that when history is erased as a repository of dangerous memories, it becomes complicit with the emerging threat of fascism. Amid this widespread and underreported attack on public memory, the mainstream media has instead chosen to focus relentlessly on another story of memory: President Joe Biden’s alleged loss of memory and his assumed decline in cognitive abilities.

When Republican Special Prosecutor Robert Hur released his lengthy report following a year-long investigation into Biden’s handling of classified materials, he concluded that “no charges were warranted because the evidence wasn’t sufficient to support a conviction.” Hur then argued that another reason he did not convict Biden of mishandling classified materials was because a jury would not convict a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory … of a serious felony” because such a charge “requires a mental state of willfulness.” The mainstream and conservative media seized upon Hur’s claim that Biden was an elderly man with “poor memory,” and by implication, diminished critical capacities.

Ignored here is that both Hur’s and the media’s politically lethal commentary has little to do with the subject of the investigation and served largely to legitimate a partisan right-wing attack that provided red meat for the MAGA crowd. In addition, as Fintan O’ Toole argues, Hur’s report brought into public view a highly dramatized issue of memory. What O’Toole fails to mention is that the report and subsequent coverage in the mainstream media had nothing to say about the much more important crisis of forgetting.

Notwithstanding the fact that Hur is a lawyer who lacks any qualifications to provide a medical opinion, Biden received toxic coverage from major media outlets. Many of them seized upon the claim that Biden was “sliding into dementia” and should not run for reelection in 2024. Judd Legum, echoing the commentary of a host of medical experts, wrote in Popular Information that Biden’s alleged fitness “crisis” lacked any scientific evidence and was nothing less than a partisan hit job by Hur that the media defined as a “major political crisis for Biden and an existential threat to his re-election campaign.” He writes:

A Popular Information analysis found that just three major papers — the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — collectively published 81 articles about Hur’s assessment of Biden’s memory in the four days following the release of........

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