Biden warns against ‘defund’ push before Georgia Senate runoff
President-elect Joe Biden raises concerns that the ’defund the police’ movement will cost Democrats the election in Georgia; Army veteran Jeremy Hunt reacts on ‘Fox and Friends Weekend.’
That didn’t take long.
Now that Black Lives Matter activists have served out their useful purpose for Democrats – energizing Black and White liberals voters to turn out for Joe Biden – they have apparently been dumped by the president-elect.
Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, sent Joe Biden and Kamala Harris a letter shortly after the election, requesting a meeting. She argued, “Without the resounding support of Black people, we would be saddled with a very different electoral outcome. In short, Black people won this election.”
In return, she wrote, “We want something for our vote.” So far, she has not heard back from the incoming administration.
Most recently, BLM was excluded from a meeting Biden and Harris hosted for civil rights leaders.
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The BLM crowd is not happy, posting on Instagram, “…we demand a seat at the table. To ignore us – and the 64,000 of you who have signed our petition – is to ignore our generation’s most pressing demands for transformative justice.”
Don’t they get it? Don’t they understand that Democrats will do exactly the minimum necessary to assure the continued fealty of Black voters, but nothing more?
Biden happily rode BLM’s coattails, backed ad campaigns that unjustly portrayed President Trump as a bigot, and made anodyne promises to tackle “systemic racism” and appoint an administration that “looks like the country."
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But Biden’s actual platform to help the Black community is, like Uncle Joe himself, an empty shell.
Already, Biden has been upbraided for falling short of even meeting those modest goals. The NAACP met recently with the president-elect to complain that he had chosen too few people of color for his Cabinet.
Shortly thereafter, and at the urging of Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., who secured Biden’s nomination by delivering South Carolina to the then-failing candidate during the primaries, Biden tapped Marcia Fudge to head Housing and Urban Development, the first Black woman in decades to lead the department.
Appointing people of color to high positions may please Black Americans, but it won’t improve their lives. The reason that more African Americans voted for Donald Trump in the recent election than in 2016 is because that enlightened 12% understands that lip-service does not put cash in their pockets or food on the table. And providing lip service is what Biden, and Democrats generally, are best at.
Like all Americans, the Black community needs jobs, higher wages, opportunity and security, essentials that were delivered by Trump and that will not be the priority for Biden.
The worst offense of the Biden administration against Black Americans, however, will be the president-elect’s obsequious kowtowing to the teachers’ unions.
Take jobs. Democrats don’t care about jobs. If they did, self-glorifying New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo would not be banning indoor dining for New York City restaurants. Cuomo’s edict will put hundreds more firms out of business and specifically hurt Black and Latino workers. There is no justification; New York’s contact tracing indicates that only 1.5% of COVID cases have resulted from eating inside.
Cuomo is acting out of self-preservation, trying to avoid blame for a rising COVID case count. But how about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, D-N.Y., who opposed, along with fellow Democrats, the opening of an Amazon headquarters in New York, which would have brought 25,000 high-paying jobs to her district. What does she care? Representing a solidly blue district, AOC has employment for life.
Biden thinks that opening our borders to a flood of people entering the country illegally is perfectly OK. People competing with those undocumented workers know better. In a Harvard-Harris poll taken in 2018, 63% of Black respondents said they favored a presidential candidate who backed protecting our borders. That would not be Biden.
What about security? Black Lives Matter doesn’t just want a meeting with Biden. They also want to defund the police. Establishment Democrats agree: while blasting policing as racist worked to rally voters, the “defund” message was politically poisonous, even with some Black voters.
In a Gallup poll taken in August, 80% of African Americans said they wanted the same amount of policing in their neighborhoods, or more.
How will Biden thread this needle?
First, by cynically ignoring BLM.
Second, by promising to create a federal commission in the White House to study excessive use of force by cops. That is the kind of feel-good response that, in D.C., will produce exactly nothing.
But Democrats do not actually want to address police misconduct, which was the cause of so much disruption and passion this past summer.
Witness the shameful vote by Senate Democrats to kill a bill proposed by (black) Republican Sen. Tim Scott, of South Carolina, that contained numerous popular reforms, effectively shutting down any chance of passing legislation any time soon.
The worst offense of the Biden administration against Black Americans, however, will be the president-elect’s obsequious kowtowing to the teachers’ unions, who over the past six months have vividly displayed their utter contempt for our country’s children, and especially our minority kids. Union leaders have adamantly refused to reopen our cities’ schools, despite overwhelming evidence that in-person classes can be safely managed.
Educators are horrified by the backsliding of children being schooled online, noting that few are keeping up and in certain cities, like New York, some are not being taught at all. Many have predicted a growing education gap between children attending charter or private schools and the inner-city kids that are falling behind, which threatens to become a lifelong earnings gap.
And yet, Biden has toyed with making Randi Weingarten secretary of education. Even suggesting putting the head of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers, which staunchly opposes all reforms, in charge of our failing schools should infuriate any American who cares about our children or our country’s future.
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Some 89% of Black primary voters favor school choice, and yet allowing parents to access the best education option for their kids is vigorously opposed by the Biden administration.
Tell me again … considering that Joe Biden is on the wrong side of so many issues important to African Americans, why did he win 90% of their vote?