The Battle for America’s Soul Biden is on the wrong side. Joseph Klein
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/battle-americas-soul-joseph-klein/
Joe Biden has often said during his presidential campaign that we are in a “battle for America’s soul.” A nice soundbite, but Biden is already conceding this battle to globalists who disdain American sovereignty. Indeed, Biden is an extreme globalist himself. And Biden has for the most part been AWOL in the battle being waged for America’s soul over the founding ideals of our nation, which are under attack by the far-left progressive base of the Democratic Party. After weeks of silence, Biden finally spoke out on June 30th in favor of protecting the statues and monuments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. But Biden’s political correctness prevents him from standing up strongly for American exceptionalism against the mobs in the streets and the mainstream media.
As we honor our nation’s independence on July 4th, we should reflect on the timeless words in the Declaration of Independence penned by Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
Joe Biden garbled these words in one of his typical gaffes, declaring instead: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created, by the, you know, you know the thing.” However, even when Biden was more articulate in restating America’s founding ideals in his 2017 New York Times op-ed article, he (or his ghost writer) went off the rails by trying to characterize President Trump’s America First policies as antithetical to those ideals.
To the contrary, America First policies to protect America’s sovereignty are critical to protecting Americans’ liberties and rights that America’s constitutional system of self-government is designed to secure. As George Washington warned, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
The International Criminal Court (“ICC”) is a prime example of the threat that globalist institutions pose to the American people’s system of self-government. The United States is not a treaty member of the Rome Statute that established the ICC. Thus, the ICC has no jurisdiction to investigate, prosecute, or put Americans on trial, which is the province of America’s own law enforcement and judicial institutions. Nevertheless, the ICC’s Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, is intent on commencing a formal investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity by U.S. soldiers and intelligence officers linked to the conflict in Afghanistan. The Trump administration vigorously opposes this intrusive attempt to override the U.S. judicial system under some fuzzy interpretation of “international law.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has denounced the ICC as a “kangaroo court.” He said that “we oppose any effort by the ICC to exercise jurisdiction over U.S. personnel. We will not tolerate its inappropriate and unjust attempts to investigate or prosecute Americans. When our personnel are accused of a crime, they face justice in our country.”
Back in 2018, President Trump said during his address to the United Nations General Assembly: “The ICC claims near-universal jurisdiction over the citizens of every country, violating all principles of justice, fairness, and due process. We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.”
President Trump is battling for the “soul of America” when he protects American citizens from the ICC’s grasp. Without an America First president standing up against the ICC, the American people would be thrown back to the intolerable circumstances from which our founding fathers broke free, as described in our Declaration of Independence: (1) subjected “to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws”; (2) “depriv[ed] of the benefits of Trial by Jury”; and (3) “transport[ed] beyond [the] Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”
Joe Biden is a big supporter of globalist institutions. He has been silent regarding the ICC’s outrageous intrusion on America’s national sovereignty and its threat to the liberties of American citizens.
The rule of law in this country depends on robust law enforcement. The police must have the resources they need to maintain law and order. But the police are increasingly under attack by leftist politicians who blame the police for their responses to rioters and looters. These politicians want to eliminate or sharply reduce police department budgets. As the police are prevented from doing their jobs, homicides and other violent crimes go up. It is already happening in New York City and other cities around the country. The victims of homicides are often blacks whose lives should also matter.
Joe Biden was once an avid supporter of the police. Not anymore. While Biden has not yet called for the complete defunding of police departments, he has criticized law enforcement’s responses to the recent spate of looting and violence. To combat what he claims is systemic racism within police departments across the country, Biden wants to expand the Obama-Biden administration’s policy of federal oversight of local police departments, including vowing to create a police oversight commission in his first 100 days as president.
There is no systemic racism embedded in police departments across the country. The good police officers who put their lives on the line every day far outnumber the tiny percentage of rogue cops. Actual data, rather than polemics, tell the story. According to data for 2019 as compiled in a “mapping police violence” database, police killed 28 unarmed blacks. In 2015, during the Obama administration, the number of police killings of unarmed blacks had reached 78, which is 2.78 times the 2019 number. The number of unarmed whites killed by police in 2019 was 51. In 2015, the number was 91, which is 1.57 times the 2019 number. The trend line since 2015 is down for police killings of unarmed blacks and whites, but the downward trend for police killings of unarmed blacks is more pronounced. Also, it is worth noting that, according to statistics reported to the FBI, nearly six times as many white law enforcement officers (40) were killed as a result of felonious acts in line-of-duty incidents in 2019 than black officers (7). But despite the facts, Biden panders to the far-left America bashers he wants to vote for him.
Joe Biden has also bought into the far-left progressive notion that America has yet to grapple with, as he put it, “the original sin of slavery, brought to these shores over 400 years ago.” The United States has grappled with slavery and ended it after a civil war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Those lost lives mattered too.
Though serving for two terms with an African-American president who was elected with the significant support of white voters, Biden is regurgitating the far-left progressive lie that there is systemic racism in every facet of American life. Biden claimed that “it’s not just in law enforcement, it’s across the board. It’s in housing, it’s in education, and it’s in everything we do.” In a bow to political correctness and the left’s thought police, Biden said that in order to eradicate the racism that has been “a fixture in our society for hundreds of years” we must all “examine our own conduct, our deeply ingrained habits and our own thinking.” What about Biden examining his own conduct and thinking during his decades in public service when he did nothing to solve the problem that he is now laying at President Trump’s feet?
The far-left progressives are already infiltrating the curricula of our public schools, rewriting American history to fit their sick dogma of “racial capitalism,” which finds “systemic racism” and “oppression” inflicted on people of color in every part of American society. The 1619 Project materials, debunked by notable historians and heavily slanted in a Marxist fashion against capitalism, are being increasingly used in classrooms to indoctrinate K-12 students across the United States to hate their own country. This is not only a battle for America’s soul today. It is the battle for the souls of America’s future generations and America’s future identity as a nation. Joe Biden is showing that he is on the wrong side of these battle lines.
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