https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/22/joe-bidens-unity-that-crushes-truth-that-lies/
Joe Biden gave one of the most terrifying inaugural addresses in American history. For friends of constitutional government, it is far more disturbing than Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural.
Clothed with clichés and disguised in dull language, the 20-minute speech bristles with arrogance. What it lacks in charisma it makes up for in its cultish Karenism. Moreover, the force of Biden’s words came to life in the 17 executive orders and memoranda he signed shortly after the inauguration.
Every American should read the speech and read it warily—that is, with a politically skeptical eye. The smooth-talking demagogue from Delaware is open in his intentions, which he stated earlier in his campaign speeches (such as they were). Even as he and his campaign blasted Donald Trump (and implicitly his supporters) for “racism” (the “most offending president ever,” Biden contended in his campaign), he proposed to increase race consciousness throughout the government and society.
The Cure for What Ails America?
His speech is readily summarized: My election shows that “democracy has prevailed.” To escape the “dark winter,” we need to unify to confront the virus, the hobbled economy, racial injustice, and the dying planet, and stand against “political extremism, white supremacy, and domestic terrorism.” Our sick, fragile, frightened nation needs unity, and, quoting Abraham Lincoln from his announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, our democratically blessed St. Fauci declares: “my whole soul is in it.”
Dr. Joe Biden prescribes unity as the cure for what ails America. But that unity requires truth. “We face an attack on democracy and on truth.” And Dr. Biden somehow personifies the truth that produces unity against lies. America now will be united against the liars. Otherwise, we cannot be secure. Biden does not need to plagiarize FDR. Fifty years in public life have taught him the technique. All this, as images of (mostly) armed troops and symbols of COVID-19 deaths and absent crowds and a damaged (and deliberately unrepaired) Capitol assaulted viewers.
It is all too clear that Biden is engaging in the demagoguery that has marked his public career, going as far back as the notorious Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. By making “unity” his goal and “truth” his defense, he can label his opponents as liars and threats to democracy. These threats constitute the “domestic terrorism” he denounced along with “political extremism” and “white supremacy.” The Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Defense, Treasury, and Health and Human Services, along with the FBI and IRS, have to be unleashed against enemies of the state. They are the domestic arm of the global war on terror. Compare FDR’s closing lines to his 1944 State of the Union Address, where he likened 1920s Republicans to fascists.
Biden further bolsters his argument with resources other Democratic politicians lack. First, he has his vice president, sufficient just as a racial-immigrant prop. (Wouldn’t her role be more effective had her Jamaican father, the Marxist economist, been with her?)
Abusing Augustine
Second, he quotes St. Augustine, in what appears to be the high point of his speech. After all, “History, faith, and reason show the way, the way of unity.” His occasional speechwriter, historian Jon Meacham, used a quotation he often cites in his own writing, “Saint Augustine, a saint of my church, wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love.”