Joe Biden vs. We the People

It is difficult to recall the last time a U.S. president acted so contrary to the interests of the people he took a constitutional oath to protect and defend.

The Biden Administration last June unveiled its “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” Despite its anodyne-sounding name, the “national strategy” was anything but anodyne. The pamphlet represented the logical culmination of the Left’s cynical use of the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot as a means of ginning up large-scale, nationwide anti-Republican/anti-Trump voter sentiment.

The result, evinced again by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s disgraceful October 2021 memo directing the FBI to intrude on local school board meetings and crack down on anti-critical race theory parental revolts, has been a roiling cold war waged by the ruling class against us “deplorables” and our political “wrong-think.”

Now, seven months after Garland’s infamous October 4 memo, the better question to ask is not whether Joe Biden is engaged in a cold war merely against the “deplorables.” We know the answer to that is yes. Instead, the more relevant question is whether the Biden Administration is now engaged in a cold war against a broader target: the entire American citizenry.

Let’s review.

Most obvious and perhaps most important, inflation—which the Federal Reserve finally recently conceded is not “transitory” but here to stay for a while—is now the highest it has been in four decades. The Consumer Price Index increased 8.3 percent in April on an annualized basis—slightly lower than March’s 8.5 percent clip but still painfully above the Fed’s 2 percent target. Biden has recently declared fighting inflation to be his top domestic priority, but he shows no appetite for curbing the mass inflationary deficit spending that has characterized his presidency. Nor has Biden communicated to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell that he is prepared to accommodate the drastic interest rate hikes that are now necessary to bring inflation back under control.

Biden is also looking to “fight” inflation—a de facto regressive tax that eats away everyone’s savings, but hits lower- and middle-class earners the hardest—in all the wrong places. The traditional economic definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, but Democrats seem wholly uninterested in working with Republicans on the sort of industrial policy measures needed to revamp domestic production immediately. On the contrary, Biden’s priorities are completely backward.

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