President Biden delivered a stunning, historically unhinged, breathtakingly shallow, objectively hateful speech last week to the Nation. The speech will be long remembered. It will be studied – assuming the Republic remains free – as one of the darkest moments in an unusually dark political era. Here is why.
Beyond making a mockery of presidential leadership, misstating American history, bathing himself in bizarre red light, using US Marines like nutcrackers at Christmas (disgraceful), and having shivering overtones of speeches given by genuinely fascist leaders in 1930s Italy and Germany, there is more.
This is a study on how to offend and politically disown more than half of the nation you lead, how to chill and cheapen political dialogue, miscast facts, intimidate, and freeze out opposition, casting law-abiding voters as enemies of the state. It is arresting and abnormal for many reasons.
Shiveringly, it is similar in form and content to intimidating speeches given by authoritarians around the world, back to the likes of early Communist and Fascist leaders. Whoever filled the teleprompter – and it surely was not the President – the message more than spreading fear, pandering for votes, intimidating half the nation. It was to miseducate – as Communists do.
Just as modern Democrats are increasingly comfortable with Marxism, political violence to hold power, and spreading sucker-punch hate, something odd resides in this glass-breaking, fear-no-blowback kind of political attack. Those pulling strings set Biden up as a propogandist.
How, you may ask, since those on the political left already see Republicans in a poor light, and those on the right – constitutionalists and traditionalists – were just rebranded as enemies?
The answer is that this speech was more than a political overreach, more than name-calling, or anti-presidential. It was not just a collection of insults to get left-leaning Democrats to vote.
It was an attempt to redefine our Founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and larger Constitution – which all center on liberty. It was an attempt to remake those documents as promotors of federal power in the name of e equality, what Marx calls “equity.”
In other words, rather than restate reality – that our Founders and these documents are about liberty or freedom from an oppressive centralized power, about limited government and the People’s will, Biden and the left tried to pull a fast one, redefining them as about equality.
That is simply not true. While the 5th Amendment assures “equal protection” under law, meaning all citizens are treated equally before the law (something the Biden White House has not abided), and the 14th Amendment applies that same assurance to the States following the Civil War, the Republic was founded to allow self-determination – governance by and for the People – and to preserve individual liberties against concentrated power.
The point of the Founding documents Biden cited was never to bring everyone down to some “lowest common denominator,” not to push equality as a means for punishing, depriving, taxing, diminishing, or controlling the people with powerful government, but the reverse.
One half the nation, in a nation divided into roughly equal political factions since our beginning – some for more government, some for less – was never supposed to be condemned by the other half when in power, made enemies of the state, stripped of legitimacy, liberties threatened.
The opposite was intended by those liberty-loving documents, which set out a constitutional process for keeping ordered liberty – managing political differences without destroying the country – while protecting the core, the Bill of Rights and individual liberty.
The idea was to allow elections to regulate strong differences, controlled at local, state, and federal levels – not to federalize everything, open the door to an all-powerful, one-party government, or turn half the country into enemies, undermining individual rights.
Biden’s speech pays lip service to individual liberties and makes equality the object of the founding documents, which is utterly false. He slams Americans who assert a constitutional right to disagree, making use of freedom of speech, protest, worship, travel, gun rights, and moral and political opposition to federal overreach. That is – by definition – anti-constitutional.
Thomas Jefferson insisted on the right of all Americans to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration. All Founders supported the ten rights we call our Bill of Rights – and they all turn on freedom. Biden recast the documents as just “democracy and equality.”
To be clear, Articles I, II, and II are about how we govern ourselves – “separation of powers” co-equal branches, a vertical balance between states and federal government. But that is just a process for assuring – via elections and fidelity to the constitutional process –individual rights are preserved and the government kept limited. Equality does not trump liberty; the point is liberty with equality.
Main point: On top of being disrespectful, offensive, disgustingly staged, authoritarian and threatening to many Americans, Biden’s speech was a clumsy attempt – in alignment with Communist reeducation – to miscast our Founding documents. Do not let your mind be fooled or heart troubled. Those documents are about liberty, and that shall always be their centerpiece.