During the 2020 election, Joe Biden positioned himself as the Democrat who could win the working class from President Donald Trump. “Joe from Scranton,” as the media affectionately calls him, was bringing normalcy back to the White House. But Joe from Scranton is a fiction and a fake.
Trump may love a good show — “stay tuned!” — but it is Biden who oversees the most inauthentic administration, one that is shockingly divorced from the lives of everyday Americans.
The country is currently facing a massive breakdown in the global supply chain, leading to shortages of goods and increased prices for consumers. My local grocery store boasted large gaps on food shelves Thursday morning. A friend of mine was unable to buy a simple coffee from Starbucks. Others have stumbled across even worse examples of the burgeoning crisis.
Inflation and shortages are no joke for working class families, who spend a larger percentage of their paycheck trying to keep their pantries stocked. The White House’s response, however, has been to deflect from how to fix the breakdown and instead mock Americans who are concerned that Santa may not be stuffing himself down the chimney this Christmas.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki snarked during a briefing this week that the supply chain chaos can be summed up by “the tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.” Chief of staff Ron Klain asserted on Twitter that inflation and shortages are “high class problems.” Psaki previously insisted that families aren’t comparing the cost of goods to pre-pandemic prices, saying, “We all understand the American people are not looking at cost-to-cost comparisons from this year to two years ago; they’re looking at cost-to-cost comparisons to their checkbooks from eight months ago or 12 months ago.” She made a patently false claim that gas prices are “well in line” with recent decades.
Then there was the defensiveness with which the administration responded to backlash over transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg taking two months of “paternity leave” with his newly adopted children while ports are backed up with shipping containers. Those who rightfully pointed out that Buttigieg either should have come back to work early or that the White House should have installed a temporary replacement were accused of not supporting paid parental leave or of being homophobic.
It’s not necessarily a surprise that White House officials might be out of touch with everyday Americans. It is rare, however, that they present this viewpoint to the public with such brazenness, particularly within an administration that claimed to be on the side of the working class.
Even Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan, a massive infrastructure and spending package supposedly intended to boost blue collar America, stalled in Congress because moderate Democrats recognized it as a farce. West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, for example, objects to the plan’s sweeping climate change proposals because he recognizes the massive suffering that would be inflicted on his constituents in coal country. You’d think Scranton Joe would understand this position, but his administration already ended the Keystone Pipeline contract and ceased oil and gas leasing on public lands. Biden’s defense of his war on oil is that green energy will create new jobs, revealing a cruel indifference to the effects that upending an entire industry has on American workers and families in the short term.
Then there’s the border, where illegal crossings have surpassed their highest levels in decades. Far from worrying about the affects that this may have on national security, the economy, the pandemic, and American culture, the Biden administration reacted to news of 15,000 migrants camping under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas by falsely accusing border patrol of whipping Haitians and then suspending horseback patrols in the sector. Earlier in his tenure, Biden ceased construction of the border wall, announced a moratorium on deportations, and promised to explore amnesty in his Build Back Better plan. Again, does this sound like someone who is concerned about the working class?
The issues the Biden administration emphasizes further betray that it is living in a woke fever dream.
Biden weaponized his Justice Department to investigate parents who protest against critical race theory and transgender bathroom policies at local school board meetings. The White House collaborated with the National School Boards Association on a letter that likened these parents to “domestic terrorists,” including a father who was angry that his daughter’s alleged rape was not handled properly by local school officials. The State Department recently celebrated “International Pronoun Day” while Americans remain stranded in Afghanistan. Dr Rachel Levine, a biological man who was responsible for numerous nursing home deaths in Pennsylvania during the pandemic, was honored as the “first female” four-star admiral in the public health corps. Nothing speaks more to blue-collar America, you see, than elevating identity politics over everything else.
The White House is merely a reflection of Biden’s phoniness. They use a fake White House set. Vice President Kamala Harris hires child actors to appear at events and shouts “surprise!” at her own birthday party. Biden cannot answer questions from the press unless they are from a pre-approved list or occur during a tightly controlled town hall. That’s when he’s even pretending to be president — the man spends nearly every weekend riding his bicycle and eating ice cream at his retreat in Delaware. The modern day equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
Democrats refer to allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election as the “Big Lie.” I’d like to officially nominate “Joe from Scranton” for that title.
