Biden’s scary, boring, and bizarre address to the nation
On Thursday night, a masked Biden tottered down a long, empty hall to a podium. He then gave the most bizarre presidential address in American history. After a grim recital of “facts” about the last year, Biden emphasized multiple times that Americans had better take the vaccine – and be grateful to him for his amazing ability to get the vaccine to Americans. He also insisted that, vaccines or not, the government’s in control and can lock all of us up all over again.
Here, in no particular order, are the points that struck me:
1. Biden was more alert than he’s been in many months. Given how frail and confused Biden’s been lately, well, let’s just say his verve was suspicious. Even his eyes, which are usually tightly squinted as he struggles to stay alert and read his teleprompter, were wide open, almost scarily so. Still, he got visibly tired near the end, slurring his words and seeming lost.
2. The speech was both bizarre and boring. Despite the teleprompter, it wandered hither and yon, without ever touching clearly on a single point. It was a grim, depressing speech about a miserable year that probably won’t get better even with a vaccine because we must all remain scared and isolated.
3. Biden kept saying that he was going to tell the truth. He quoted a woman he allegedly met who told him her heart’s desire: “‘I just want the truth. The truth. Just tell me the truth.’”
“Tell the truth,” Biden said again.”
“My fellow Americans,” he said, you’re owed nothing less than the truth.”
Later, he added, “I will tell you the truth.”
And then he said, “In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be traveling along with the first lady” and a whole host of others, “to tell you the truth.”
Do you know who says things like that? Someone who’s lying.
4. Biden dragged in, almost randomly, the fact that there is a rash of attacks on Asians of late: “Vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans who have been attacked, harassed, blamed, and scapegoated.”
What he was implying is that people have been so maddened by Trump (whose name Biden never once mentioned) saying that the Wuhan virus originated in China, that it drove maddened white supremacists to attack Asians. As best as I can tell, the attacks against Asians come almost entirely from the Black community – and, more than that, from a segment of the Black community that is not in sympathy with Trump and is therefore unlikely to be influenced by him. What nobody on the left admits is that Blacks have long been hostile to Asians.
5. Biden opened with a nasty swipe at Trump: “A year ago, we were hit with a virus that was met with silence and spread unchecked, denials for days, weeks, then months.”
This was not the truth. In fact, on January 31, Trump stopped travel from China, something every Democrat, from Biden on down, attacked as “xenophobic.” By early March, Trump had swung into action, partnering with the private sector to produce masks, ventilators, pop-up hospitals – and vaccines.
6. Speaking of vaccines, one of the nastiest things about Biden’s speech was his repeated emphasis on how spectacularly his administration had acted with regard to producing and distributing vaccines. This ignored entirely that it was Trump who supercharged their production and distribution. The entire speech was a perfect of example of damnatio memorieae – that is, the cancellation of Trump’s memory as if he never existed.
Trump must have been given a heads-up that Biden would do this for he sent out the following email message on Thursday:
I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful “shot” for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers!
7. The main thrust of the speech was that everyone must get the vaccine (the wonderful Biden vaccine). However, Biden conceded that even with the vaccine, masks and social distancing must continue. Even with everyone vaccinated, by July 4, maybe we can gather with small groups outdoors. In other words, even as we’re all pumped full of a vaccine, nothing will change. But we should trust Biden and remember that we’re all in this together.
8. Here’s the scariest thing Biden said, although he slipped it in so quickly many may not have noticed (emphasis mine): “Fourth, in the coming weeks, we will issue further guidance on what you can and cannot do once fully vaccinated to lessen the confusion, to keep people safe, and encourage more people to get vaccinated.”
The vaccine, rather than freeing us, will bring us even more tightly under government control as the federal government mandates what can and cannot do.
9. When he’d finished reading the teleprompter, Biden ignored a reporter’s shouted question, turned around, and tottered back down that long, empty hall.
If you can’t bear to listen to Biden, here’s a transcript of his speech. Or you can view it below:
IMAGE: John Biden’s address to the nation. YouTube screengrab.
WashPost: Joe Biden’s Deputies to Help Young Migrants Reach U.S. Border
President Joe Biden’s deputies want to streamline the delivery of migrant youths and children in Mexico to U.S. border agencies, according to the Washington Post.
The March 11 article reported:
Biden officials … are also working with advocacy groups to identify minors in northern Mexico who are preparing to cross, so that they can do so safely at a legal port of entry, instead of paying a smuggler to cross the Rio Grande.
Many of the under-18 youth migrants travel with coyotes who negotiate safe passage through cartel-controlled zones near the border. This negotiation process is expensive, but the teenage migrants expect fast-pass access to the U.S. labor market via the “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) loophole.
The loophole in border law was passed unanimously by Congress in 2008 to prevent labor trafficking. Coyotes now use the law to hand off their young customers to federal agencies, who then use taxpayer funds to finish the delivery of the migrant youths to their relatives — and jobs — throughout the United States.
The expanded federal role could reduce the cost for foreign youths to get into the U.S. labor market, even as more than 15 million Americans struggle to find jobs. White House leaks suggest that officials want to be ready to welcome 117,000 young migrants this year.
An elite-backed pro-migration group is supporting the help program for the foreign migrants:
“The Biden administration is rightly saying it’ll take time to reconstruct the system in a humane and appropriate way,” said Wendy Young, president of the advocacy group Kids in Need of Defense, which is helping with the effort. “And they’re digging themselves out of a hole right now.”
The Kids in Need of Defense group was cofounded by Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft. The group has a huge list of corporate backers, and it claims that it helped deliver roughly $450 million in pro-bono legal services during 2019.
The Washington Post report spotlights the determination of Biden’s pro-migration deputies to extract migrants from Central America and to pull them through U.S. immigration loopholes into the U.S. labor market, regardless of the popular federal laws or the public’s deep opposition to wage-cutting labor migration. On March 10, for example, Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s border policy chief at the White House, told reporters that “going forward, we will continue to look for ways to provide legal [migration] avenues in the region for people needing protection.”
There is much evidence that the migrant youths are looking for jobs in the United States, partly because low-wage U.S. jobs can generate money for families at home, even when the sent-home money is quietly taxed by local gangs.
“Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the [migrant] teens are coming to work and send money back home,” Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, told a reporter for ProPublica. “They want to help their parents,” she told ProPublica for a November 2020 article.
ProPublica cited the case of Garcia, a Guatemalan youth who used the UAC loophole in 2018:
He was 15 and he had debts to pay, starting with the roughly $3,000 he owed for the “coyote” who guided him across Mexico from Guatemala. To finance the trip, his parents had taken out a bank loan, using their house as collateral. If he didn’t repay it, the family could lose its home.
…
Within a week of arriving, Garcia accompanied his aunt and uncle to the factory where they worked making auto parts. He got hired on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift, cleaning newly made screws and bolts with an air blow gun. Workers wore safety goggles to protect their eyes from the shards of metal that blew in their faces. It was a dirty job. “I didn’t like it, working with so many oily parts,” he recalled. “And it was dangerous.”Garcia was not directly employed by the factory. Instead, he got the job through an “oficina,” the word Spanish-speaking immigrants use to describe the dozens of temporary staffing agencies that employ hundreds of thousands of workers in Illinois. In some cases, the [migrant] teens interviewed by ProPublica — all but one of them male — say they don’t even know the name of the staffing agency that employs them; it’s just the place where someone told them they could find work.
The Washington Post article quietly recognizes that many of the so-called “Unaccompanied Alien Children” are male teenagers looking for work in the United States:
Some are fleeing violence, poverty and gang recruitment in their hometowns, risking the dangerous trip north in hope of finding safety or maybe a job that will pay exponentially more than they could make at home.
…
The latest statistics show the average length of time a minor spends in an HHS shelter is 30 to 40 days, and the government has been wary of speeding the process. In one 2014 incident, teenagers released by HHS ended up with traffickers who sent them to work at an Ohio egg farm. Lawmakers were furious, and HHS officials say their obligation is to err on the side of caution.
More than 70 percent of the migrant youths are male, and more than 75 percent claim they are older than 14 but younger than 18.
So far, the GOP has had a scattershot response to the growing federal support for Central American labor trafficking into Americans’ jobs. For example, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy has complained that the border rush is a “crisis” — but without mentioning the damaging impact on Americans’ right to a national labor market and good wages.
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to legal immigration, to illegal labor migration, and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that both legal and illegal migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Estb. media is posting many stories about migrant"'children" crossing the border — but 70%+ are teenagers, many of whom are (rationally) seeking jobs.
IOW, Biden's DHS & estb. media are waiving in huge numbers of Latino child workers. #CharlesDickenshttps://t.co/cfWf1Bz9ic— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) March 5, 2021
Critics: Joe Biden’s $4 Billion Promise Is ‘Fig Leaf’ to Hide Extraction Migration
President Joe Biden’s deputies say he is trying to repair Central America’s migration-crippled economies with $4 billion in financial aid for the next four years.
But “The $4 billion is a fig leaf to conceal the fact that the real policy is to allow everyone to come in,” responded Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. The aid “is a prop to give the public the impression that they are dealing with the problem,” even though they continued to extract valuable young migrants from Central America for use in the U.S. economy, she said.
The U.S. is “strip-mining” the Central Amerian countries of their young people, in tacit cooperation with the cartels and coyotes who traffick the migrants in exchange for a share of their wages, she said.
The aid promised by Biden’s people is very limited. It is far less than the taxpayer spending migrants trigger among U.S. state and local governments, and far less than the money sent from the United States by migrants back to their home countries.
Biden’s aid would total $4 billion over four years for the 33 million in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The works out to $121 per person, or $30 per year, while huge numbers of young people exit those countries to accept open-borders invitations, jobs, and the hope of U.S. citizenship from Biden and his deputies.
In contrast, the three countries received roughly $10.3 billion in remittances in 2019 from their emigrants, the vast majority of whom are now living and working in the United States, according to Pew Research Center. The flow of remittance is 10 times Biden’s promised flow of aid.
The promise of $30.22 per person was sketched out by Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s “Special Assistant to the President & Coordinator for the Southern Border.”
The President has committed to seeking $4 billion over four years to address the root causes of migration, including corruption, violence, and economic devastation exacerbated by climate change. As part of that plan, we will address the causes that compel individuals to migrate, including improving governance and providing a foundation for investment and economic opportunity, strengthening civilian security, and the rule of law … Only by addressing those root causes, can we break the cycle of desperation and provide hope for families who clearly would prefer to stay in their countries and provide a better future for their children.
Yet the U.S. government still will welcome migrants from those countries and will even fly them from those countries directly to the United States, she said.
“Working across the whole of [U.S.] government, we will look at access to international protection and refugee resettlement and rethinking asylum processing to ensure fair and faster consideration … Going forward, we will continue to look for ways to provide legal avenues in the region for people needing protection while we continue to enforce our laws.
And the aid program will be hands-off, with very little pressure on the local governments, she added:
We can’t make the changes. We can [just] encourage them. We can help support them with resources both technical assistance and funding, but we can’t make those changes. The changes have to come in the Northern Triangle countries … The president really wants to move forward on this, but he won’t unless he feels he has those commitments from the local governments] on an ongoing basis.
The $4 billion will go to low-impact projects, according to Jacobsen:
There are myriad people in organizations who are trying to make those changes. And part of what we want to do is empower them … [by giving] economic support, whether it’s training for young people, whether it’s anti-gang programs, whether it’s mothers’ clubs and empowering local communities, all of that gets done through people on the ground, not by the United States … We [could] deliver new lighting facilities that reduce violence and crime, you know.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform scoffed at Jacobson’s comments:
The administration [has an] utterly unrealistic plan to end the crisis they created. Rather than take immediate steps to actually restore effective enforcement policies they have dismantled, the White House continues to suggest that $4 billion to fight ‘corruption, violence and economic devastation’ in a region that has experienced generations of corruption, violence and economic devastation is going to solve all of their problems and ours.
The one word that can be applied to the administration’s response to the full-blown crisis they have created, and to their feeble attempt to explain it to the American public is “pathetic.”
Estb. media is posting many stories about migrant"'children" crossing the border — but 70%+ are teenagers, many of whom are (rationally) seeking jobs.
IOW, Biden's DHS & estb. media are waiving in huge numbers of Latino child workers. #CharlesDickenshttps://t.co/cfWf1Bz9ic— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) March 5, 2021
If Jacobson and Biden were seriously trying to stop the northward migration, they would offer to spend more money, Vaughan said. “It would take a lot more than $4 billion to fix all of the civil society and economic problems in these three countries — because first of all, they have to be motivated to fix it,” she said.
But the Central American governments are corrupt, and are not motivated to fix the root cause of migration because they favor the migration, said Vaughan. The current U.S. extraction migration policy vacuums away all the young people who might demand political change and then returns migrants’ wages back to fund the government and keep the population quiet, Vaughan said.
“What’s going to stop this [migration] crisis is changing [U.S.] policies and ceasing the practice of letting those who get here come in and stay,” she said.
But Biden’s deputies have zero intention of stopping the extraction migration that endangers migrants and cripples the Central American countries, Vaughan noted. For example, Jacobson blamed the current crisis on President Donald Trump’s low-migration border policies, which created a “pent-up demand” by migrants to enter the United States:
We’ve seen surges before surges tend to respond to hope, and there was a significant hope for a more humane policy after four years of, you know, pent up demand. So I don’t know whether I would call that a coincidence, but I certainly think that the idea that a more humane policy would be in place may have driven people to make that [migration] decision. But perhaps more importantly, it definitely drove smugglers to spread disinformation about what was now possible.
Progressives (& biz) cheerlead the 'Hunger Games' obstacle-course trail that delivers migrants to the US, despite Americans' expectation for a capped & orderly immig system.
The trail inflicts much damage & death, but progressives demand diversity first.https://t.co/90s5dnQQ4l— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) January 11, 2021
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