The Biden Presidency Makes Sense If You Think Of Him As An Elderly Crime Boss

americanconsequences |  In fact, in his September 9 speech outlining the new plan to get the virus under control, President Biden made clear his intent to steamroll any states’ rights opposition… 

If they will not help, if those governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way. The Department of Education has already begun to take legal action against states undermining protection that local school officials have ordered. Any teacher or school official whose pay is withheld for doing the right thing will have that pay restored by the federal government, 100 percent. I promise you, I will have your back.

Get them out of the way, Biden said, in a line that seemed to tell the American people more than he intended about the lack of limits on his power. During the early months of the pandemic in 2020, the same voices who are backing Biden’s authoritarian maneuvers now were claiming that – with stronger legal backing – state governors have extensive plenary powers to deal with health emergencies, including some mandatory quarantine practices.

Now that some states – most notably Florida, though Texas has begun to mirror the pro-freedom approach of Governor Ron DeSantis – refuse to do the Biden administration’s bidding on COVID policy, the federal bureaucracy steps in as an unconstitutional super-legislature. On the school masks mandate issue, in particular, the Democrat-Fauciite position has become: We will find a way to have it our way.

Biden’s September 9 declaration of COVID total war had no shortage of ire directed toward those who have thus far made the choice not to get the vaccine, one they had been previously told they were legally and ethically entitled to make. That has suddenly changed. Biden made it clear that the unvaxxed are public health enemy No. 1…

We still have nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot. And to make matters worse, there are elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against COVID-19. Instead of encouraging people to get vaccinated and mask up, they are ordering mobile morgues for the unvaccinated dying from COVID in our communities. This is totally unacceptable.

As many commentators have pointed out, Biden seemed to be much more agitated with Americans who have chosen not to get a COVID vaccine than he ever was toward the Taliban during his chaotic, incompetent withdrawal plan. This parading of partisan animus is unsettling, to say the least, as it is meant to convey a message to American people (or at least the Biden voters among them) that anyone who is unvaccinated is a reckless, selfish menace to public health.

But there’s cognitive dissonance at the heart of this thinking from Biden and his supporters. First of all, when one breaks down the demographic data, the highest proportion of eligible but unvaccinated individuals in America is young Black and Latino males, who have received at least one shot at 43% and 48%, respectively. While there’s certainly a group within those categories of Republicans and Trump voters, the data tells us that most young minority males are not MAGA-hat-wearing, anti-vax Right-wingers… But the Democrat narrative ignores this reality.