Will Biden’s Campaign 2.0 Just Be Like 1.0?

Commentary

Watching the cliché-laden video announcing President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign—which is devoid of policy specifics other than “continuing the job”—you knew that Biden’s campaign 2.0 would be exactly like 1.0.

In other words, back to the famous “basement”—or, as seems to be happening now, endless foreign trips, i.e. Ireland and soon, Japan. Don’t we love our sushi?

Hey, it worked once; why wouldn’t it work again?

No wonder the Democratic National Committee has gone full Bolshevik and said “Nyet” to the possibility of any Democratic primary debate that might pit Biden against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In an immediate response to the video, outsider Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy had an accurate characterization of what is going on:

“It’s a myth that Joe Biden is actually running for President. He’s not. It’s just the managerial class using Joe Biden as a front to advance its own agenda. To them, Biden’s cognitive impairment isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. The administrative state more effectively controls its puppets when they are hollowed-out husks of themselves. The fact that it’s elder abuse is just a cost of doing business for Biden’s handlers.”

True enough, but let’s examine briefly some of the policies that were put in place since 2020 by Biden or the “managerial class,” in Ramaswamy’s term that seems more apposite than the cringeworthy “elites” most often used.

I have a top four in no particular order. (I rehearse all this in the spirit of clarifying what the vague “continuing the job” might mean.)

Let’s start with energy. Biden has a devotion to so-called climate change that borders on, actually crosses the border into, religious fanaticism. This led, on the first day of his administration, to the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline that signaled to the world, those supposed allies (Germany) and our adversaries (Russia), that the United States would no longer be a net exporter of fossil fuels.

The result, for Germany and other Europeans is a new devotion to alternative sources nowhere near sufficient to their purpose (heating and cooling), which only means outrageous energy costs to its citizens, not to mention ours, with concomitant inflation that reached every sector of the economy.

Yet more importantly, to Vladimir Putin, the U.S. retreat on energy was an almost unbelievable gift. That meant oil- and gas-rich Russia would see exports increase, financing Putin’s long-sought Ukraine invasion that is still going on with no end in sight. Those who worry about an imminent, most probably nuclear, World War III—and it should be all of us—can look at that Biden moment as the casus belli.

Moving on (I told you this would be brief) to the open Southern border. No one has any idea how many illegal aliens have poured into this country during the Biden administration, though it’s in the millions, enough to fill one or more new states.

More to the point, no one has any idea how many are drug dealers, human traffickers, or terrorists.

The Mexican drug cartels are already in virtually every American city flogging fentanyl, sourced in communist China and dressed up as candy, to our children. Fentanyl deaths are now running at 100,000 a year, heading for 200,000.

In the human trafficking department, the exploitation of young females, largely ignored by a party that pretends to be “feminist,” has reached mammoth proportions. It’s also under the control of the cartels that now have, because of us, the wealth of most countries along with the weaponry to prove it.

Biden’s open border, in collusion with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, is essentially a murder weapon.

So, on to health policy. Former President Donald Trump may have started lockdowns and the vaccines, but Biden took it to new levels, even as scientific evidence was coming from across the globe (including Switzerland of all places, the home of Big Pharma) that the methodologies weren’t just unsuccessful, but also often detrimental.

Again, we can look to our children for evidence of that. Either unable to go to school or forced to wear masks that are now shown to be useless, they have had educational setbacks in nearly every state in our country. The children were further unnecessarily vaccinated, with consequences—reproductive and otherwise—not yet fully known.

Democratic Party hypocrisy is particularly strong in this regard since minority communities have been most greatly affected.

Finally, there’s the president’s (and again his managers’) bizarre support for “gender-affirmation” surgery among the young that has reached, under his administration, hitherto unimaginable epidemic proportions.

It’s as if suddenly, after the roughly 300,000-year existence of homo sapiens, it was decided that the answer to the developmental issues most of us face was to switch our sex.

Looked at that way, this policy seems virtually insane (except, of course, to the medical institutions profiting from it), yet many in his party seem to go along with this, at least tacitly.

That leads to my last point. Given this brief recitation, it’s easy to see why Biden’s announcement was so opaque and why a “basement policy,” or its equivalent, will again be followed in his reelection campaign.

Roger L. Simon’s latest books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction).

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.