Juan Williams: Biden’s big speech must counter GOP’s false narrative

When President Biden delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday night, he will be talking to the 21st Century’s “Two Americas.”

Martin Luther King Jr. coined the phrase “Two Americas” more than 50 years ago in a speech about a nation split by race and income inequality.

Biden’s “Two Americas” are split along the lines of people watching very different realities.

{mosads}Whatever Biden says on Tuesday night, there is a group of Americans programmed to attack him as mentally incompetent, a weakling and a failure. They are soaked in right-wing grievances and conspiracy theories.

These people, Group One, will sit down at their televisions full of contempt for Biden.

Then there is Group Two.

They will sit down at their TV sets ready to listen to a president dealing with war overseas and a pandemic at home. These are the Democrats and independent voters who elected Biden as president.

They consume news based on facts reported in the style of old-school newsmen, like Walter Cronkite of CBS News who concluded his show by saying “and that’s the way it is.”

The “way it is” in 2022 America is that about 25 percent of Republicans believe the wild conspiracies promoted by QAnon, such as that a devil-worshipping cult of pedophiles runs the government. That finding comes in new research from PRRI, which also notes that more than 60 percent of Republicans believe the outright lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

By that logic, those Americans live in a world where former President Trump should be giving the State of the Union address.

Trump and many far-right media figures bad mouth everything about Biden. They speak more highly of Russia’s autocratic President Putin, who just started a war.

These are people who support a convoy of truckers coming to D.C. to protest vaccine mandates. The mandates are already on the way out but fans of far-right media want chaos. They seem to find it more entertaining than listening to Biden talk about the resilience of a nation coming out of a pandemic that has taken nearly a million lives.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) recently warned in a leaked memo that the Republican Party is pursuing a cynical strategy based on the “alarmingly potent” power of grievances about cultural issues.

The memo basically said Republicans have been effective in pushing stories, true or false, that damn Democrats as “preachy,” “judgmental” and “focused on culture wars.”

The DCCC cited the right wing’s false refrain that most Democrats support “defund the police” and “open borders and amnesty.” That is not true. The lies are so potent that some people take them as a given because they never hear any other point of view.

This Biden-hating crowd will have a hard time listening to him.

The best that Biden can do in his speech is respect the far right’s presence but aim his remarks at people who can appreciate facts.

The facts are that the country is emerging from the pandemic and the schools are open.

The fact is that the U.S. economy has had an extraordinary rebound from the pandemic.

The fact is the current unemployment rate is four percent, which is incredible — amounting to full employment, according to most economists.

Despite pandemic-induced strain on supply chains, retail businesses and inflation, the American economy kept going.

And the fact is that Biden and the Democrats made new COVID-19 relief payments available for those Americans most negatively affected. And the Democrats were the driving force behind a bipartisan infrastructure deal.

{mossecondads}There is not much Biden can say about the right wing’s cult-like devotion to Trump, who continues to lie about the 2020 election.

Similarly, what is Biden to say about the fact that most of the states where violent crime is highest voted for Trump and have lax gun laws?

And I don’t know what Biden could say to pierce the paranoia sparked by hateful speculation about white Americans being “replaced” by immigrants. The same goes for the suspicion of Critical Race Theory, which is supposedly scaring white schoolchildren.

In the last month, the Trump cult has been obsessed with a bogus interpretation of a routine filing by Special Counsel John Durham.

They leaped to say that Durham found Trump had been illegally surveilled in the White House by supporters of Hillary Clinton.

This led Durham to correct the record, saying he is not responsible if “third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted facts.”

The sad truth is that some Americans, their brains dizzy from right-wing spin, will never hear facts.

In 1968 when Dr. King spoke about “Two Americas,” he lamented the Americans locked into a “daily ugliness” that transforms “the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.”

Biden faces an America with some preferring “the fatigue of despair.”

That means the chances of positive reviews for his speech from all corners of a divided nation are not good.

But the importance of the speech, with its huge audience of people who can still offer an open mind, is to beat back the prophets of grievance and “the fatigue of despair.”

Biden’s challenge is lifting a nation going through a tough time and preaching about America’s success.

Biden needs to bring his A-game.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.