Fox News host Sean Hannity is working on a new conspiracy theory about President Joe Biden and this one’s centered around a lie to his viewers.
On Wednesday, he said Biden was using his stutter to cover up some other much more sinister form of decline.
Hannity’s proof?
Biden, he claims, has never stuttered before.
“The only problem is, he didn’t have it in 2016 or 2012,” Hannity said. “And when did this problem start to emerge?”
The real problem: As Hannity certainly knows, Biden has been open about his childhood stutter for years, and references to it go back decades, including a 1992 Washington Post profile that referred to his childhood as “stuttering Joey Biden.”
In 1999, then Sen-Fritz Hollings (D-S.C.) paid tribute to Biden as he cast his 10,000th vote.
“One story I recall in particular is that Sen. Biden used to practice ‘speechifying,’ as some of our predecessors in the Senate would have said, in front of his classmates to overcome a stuttering problem,” Hollings said in comments on the Senate floor.
In 2008, an NPR profile of the then-senator ― and vice-presidential candidate ― went into detail about his childhood battle with stuttering, which included comments from Biden himself speaking about his struggles.
In 2010, Biden called stuttering “God’s gift” to him because it made him stronger and more empathetic.
And in 2015, Biden sent a letter to the Stuttering Foundation of America lauding the organization and discussing his own struggles.
Biden said he no longer thinks of himself as a stutterer and that many of his verbals slips are just old-fashioned gaffes. Yet he has also admitted that he still catches himself stuttering, especially “when I find myself really tired.”
So when Hannity claimed Biden never had a stutter before, his critics on social media called him out for it: