Don’t take the word of conservatives that President Joe Biden is governing like a radical — take the word of the liberal establishment media.
Chris Cillizza of CNN and formerly of the Washington Post is known for offering up vaguely center-left conventional wisdom, having spent years doling out daily analytical news wrap-ups that strive for fairness but without any real feel or sympathy for conservative thought. For Cillizza, Joe Biden has long been the “man for the moment,” perfectly suited to today’s political circumstances. And Biden, wrote Cillizza, “should go all in on vaccine mandates,” again reflecting Cillizza’s default position in favor of government command and control.
So when Cillizza, of all people, devotes a column to “the utter radicalness of Joe Biden’s presidency,” maybe it’s time to acknowledge that Biden is trying to implement extremist policies considerably outside the mainstream. Biden’s initiatives, writes Cillizza, amount to a “massive outlay of federal spending” that “will add massive sums to the federal budget deficit.”
With $28 trillion already in national debt, the highest level in relation to GDP in U.S. history, Biden proposes to obligate yet another $7 trillion (after accounting for budgetary gimmicks) in the next decade. The full blow will come just as the Social Security and Medicare trust funds also run out of reserves.
And those are just the numbers. Biden’s policy choices and nominees for top jobs are, if anything, even more radical. Consider his nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova. She graduated from Moscow State University under the old Soviet communists in 1989 using a Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship, and she has proposed that the Federal Reserve “end banking as we know it” by taking over all consumer bank deposits. Also consider that Biden’s nominee for head of immigration enforcement, Ed Gonzales, has spent years in radical opposition to immigration enforcement. Among other outlandish nominees and appointees, one of his most senior advisers, Anita Dunn, had said that Chinese communist tyrant Mao Zedong, who murdered tens of millions of people on purpose and caused tens of millions more to die through sheer incompetence and fanaticism, was “one of her favorite philosophers.” (She later tried, unconvincingly, to treat this comment as a joke.)
Against a fairly broad public consensus in favor of the Keystone Pipeline, Biden canceled the project. Against large majorities of both parties in Congress, though, Biden effectively stopped opposing Russia’s Nord Stream 2 fuel pipeline. Against majorities who oppose critical race theory, the Biden administration strongly supports it (and related, anti-white training and curricula on racial issues) in schools, businesses, and the military.
And then, of course, Biden has pushed (and exceeded) the limit again and again on executive power while threatening an unworkable and probably unconstitutional national vaccine mandate on businesses.
One need not embrace or even countenance the radical subversion of norms by former President Donald Trump to acknowledge and oppose Biden’s extremism. This is not a binary choice. One can oppose the hard Left by standing up for the center while counting on the constitutional system to sustain a reasonable equilibrium.
Biden’s radicalism is dangerous. It must be stopped.
