The unraveling of the Biden presidency is nearly complete. In the last weeks, two of the chief enclaves of antisemitic protests on college campuses, Columbia and UCLA, in two of the bluest states in the country, New York and California, have seen police move in to clear out encampments and arrests scores of misguided Marxist student protesters. Joe Biden has been silent.
The feckless American president, after his initial response to the October 7th massacre in Southern Israel by Hamas, has tried to manage this entire crisis looking through an Electoral College lens. Both with regards to the war itself in the Middle East, and in polling domestically after several weeks of campus protests, this strategy is nothing short of catastrophic.
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Two days ago, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass appeared on Morning Joe, and declared that the protest was peaceful, and this would all work itself out into an acceptable conclusion.
10 hours later, Jews were being hunted in Westwood by the antisemitic mob. A Jewish female counter-protester was beaten unconscious. By nightfall, Jewish students had just about enough, and the direct confrontation took place, becoming an all-out riot. Police were called in to separate the sides, hoping they would both disburse. But they were not allowed to clear out the encampment. The antisemitism was allowed to fester.
The antisemites, of course, did not disburse. They fortified. Somehow, a bunch of college kids had the wherewithal and outside support to bring in E-Z Up tents, truckloads of 4 X 8 sheets of plywood, wooden pallets tied to metal barricades, and umbrellas to use as shields. In the pre-dawn hours of Thursday morning, California Highway Patrol, L.A.P.D., and what looked like L.A. County Sheriff deputies all converged in numbers, and told the protesters the time had come. We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way. The antisemites, naturally, chose the hard way. The clearing out of debris – physical and human, commenced.
Joe Biden is still silent.
After several months of threatening, cajoling, and then going back to threatening the Israeli government some more to accept a ceasefire no other country with citizens still being held hostage would ever tolerate, Secretary of State Antony Blinken boasted of the Egypt solution, which he claimed was as generous of an offer as Israel could ever want.
What Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and President Joe Biden can’t seem to grasp is that Hamas, the terrorist organization that has never shown an ounce of willingness to end this war on Jews, is never going to accept any ceasefire. They rejected the offer. The Israeli government now has no other viable path in front of them other than to finish the job in Rafah, and take on Hezbollah and Iran directly, if necessary, after that. Biden foreign policy has failed spectacularly again.
Young voters are part of Democrats’ natural base of support, but Biden is actually 11 percentage points behind Trump among young voters 18-34 in a head-to-head match in a CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released over the weekend.
That ain’t all…
Biden is under water in every issue asked about in the CNN poll, according to Jennifer Agiesta, CNN’s polling director. Agiesta writes:
And his worst issue approval rating – for his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza – yields 28% approval to 71% disapproval, including an 81% disapproval mark among those younger than 35 and majority disapproval among Democrats (53%).
Asked whether they view Biden’s presidency as a success or a failure, 68% of younger Americans said it’s a failure, more than other age groups – and despite his high-profile efforts to address other issues of importance to young voters, including student debt relief.
And still, Joe Biden is silent.
At the White House, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the only person speaking for the president on camera over the last two weeks of campus uprisings, offered this analysis to a question from regime media about whether college campuses have gone off the rails.
So how many antisemites have to be arrested on campuses from coast to coast before we’ve reach off-rail status? How many Jews have to be chased, harassed, or beaten unconscious before this administration recognizes that there may be a problem in higher education? How many buildings have to be hijacked and vandalized?
She can’t admit there’s a problem, because Joe Biden’s White House is still paying sunk costs into a voting cohort they’ve already lost and are not ever going to get back. Joe Biden remains silent.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said pulling federal funding from colleges that can’t provide security to all their students is on the table. Joe Biden has yet to comment.
If there’s any good news for the beleaguered and enfeebled President, it’s that he finally is able to claim successful delivery on the campaign promise of uniting the country.
At the University of Alabama, where there were pro-Hamas and pro-Israel protesters alike, there was one point of clarity on which both sides could agree.
At the University of Alabama, both the pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters are chanting “fuck Joe Biden.” https://t.co/TdHm3OqxcH
— Anthony LaMesa (@ajlamesa) May 1, 2024
When the President is so bad that antisemites and friends of Israel alike reflect the same sentiment towards his job performance, there’s really no coming back from that. Joe Biden remains silent.
In the aftermath of the vacuum of leadership on the growing antisemitism on display, voices of clarity are filling the void. Here’s Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton:
Joe Biden, however, remains silent. The person who actually should be silent, lest more people realize she’s an idiot, is the President’s press secretary. But in the wake of the President’s deafening silence, Karine Jean-Pierre is the face and voice of Joe Biden’s stance on antisemitism.
This is simply untrue. The only time Joe Biden addressed the recent wave of antisemitic protests was two weeks ago, when he morally equivocated.
Jean-Pierre was peppered by several questions in the regime media White House Press Corps. Another response by the Press Secretary:
This is perhaps the worst thing she could have said. He’s monitoring the situation. That’s not condemning what 80%-plus of the country finds repulsive. As Joe Biden has said a thousand times in repeating the Charlottesville lie about Donald Trump, “Silence is complicity.” Monitoring the situation is silence. Monitoring the situation is complicity.
Next week, according to the White House, Joe Biden will finally break his silence. He is set to deliver a keynote address at Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum’s days of remembrance commemoration. Now just ask yourself if the President can actually deliver the address off the teleprompter without inadvertently inciting further antisemitism, which is a big if these days. What is it that Joe Biden could actually say?
He could take the Sister Souljah route. He could recognize that continuing to invest in fruitless electoral political strategy of coddling potential antisemitic progressive voters is morally reprehensible, and state he can’t do this anymore. He can bring in Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and fully support Israel’s existential war, and restore the policy of “Never Again.” I would wholeheartedly applaud Joe Biden if he were to do that. If he did, however, there are enough antisemites within the rank and file of the Democratic Party that the convention, and the fall campaign, would fracture. Regime media voices that are encouraging the President to turn away from support of Israel would revolt at this betrayal.
What is much more likely is that Joe Biden will use this address to repeat the Charlottesville lie a few times, and attempt to inject partisan politics into the subject by blaming what’s happening on campuses on Donald Trump. I hope he doesn’t go down that road, but it seems almost inevitable he will. If he does, you’ll know that antisemitism, so long as it’s coming from the political left-wing, is alive, well, and implicitly endorsed by the President of the United States.
Until Joe Biden breaks his silence and offers either a mea culpa, reclaiming the moral high ground, or doubles down on a failed policy of appeasement to antisemites here and abroad, this is what swing state voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, and North Carolina are seeing.
The state of antisemitism in this country is mixed. On one hand, support of Israel has risen in this country over the last 40 years. The vast majority of Americans are disgusted with what is playing out on college and university campuses. You know the internal polling has to be horrible, because 21 House Democrats wrote a letter to the Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, demanding the university end this now.
On the other hand, this flare-up of antisemitism is due to one man, and one man only – Joe Biden. Without President Joe Biden, Iran does not have sanctions lifted and access to hundreds of billions of fungible dollars restored in order to fund terrorism. Without Joe Biden, Iran doesn’t have an agent inside the West Wing advising how to deal with Iran on the nuclear deal. Without Joe Biden, the bully pulpit isn’t MIA when Marxist progressive students engage and traffic in this ancient hatred. Without Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer would be much more outspoken. Instead, he’s just as silent, because he has to support the policy of the leader of his party, not what’s in the best interests of this country and Israel.
All of this, every slur, every ethnic epithet, every call for Jews to return to the gas chambers, it only has public airing due to the provocation caused by Joe Biden’s weakness.
Update: At 10:30am Thursday morning, the White House announced the President would give a statement on the antisemitic uprisings on campuses. 45 minutes later, once the State of the Union cocktail had been dosed and the patient was awake and alert, Joe Biden spoke for just a few minutes in a very carefully-worded statement in the Roosevelt Room. He took no questions from the press, but grumbled a couple “No’s” to a very small group of regime media stenographers before shuffling out of the room. He didn’t mention the word antisemitism until the final paragraph of his statement, and only then in the context of moral equivocating it with other instances of hate speech that aren’t going on at present.
It was the bare minimum Team Biden felt needed to be said without alienating his own political base. There are no hateful protests of Muslim-Americans occurring on college campuses. There are no anti-Palestinian protests occurring. It’s a straw man gaslight of fox to not shine the light on what actually is happening – antisemitism. Jew hatred. Jew hunting. Educational pogroms. Brown shirt reenactments.
Joe Biden promised no punishment or justice to be meted out of any kind. In short, today’s remarks were an extended “Don’t” policy. It didn’t work with Iran, it didn’t work with Russia, it didn’t work with Israel, and I don’t believe it’s going to work with antisemites running amok throughout large swaths of academia.
If the Biden Administration treated the antisemitic college protests like January 6th rioters who broke into the Capitol, do you think the vast resources of the Department of Justice would be idle, and not called into service by this President?
The remainder of my column is just as current after the address as before. Joe Biden remains silent on what’s happening on campuses. He did not identify who and what the perpetrators were. He didn’t say what he plans to do about it as president. He didn’t say the federal government was going to prosecute the criminals for hate crimes. He didn’t call out the professors or the administrators for letting protests spin out of control, and in many cases, enabling the violence we saw.
The disgusting part about Biden’s statement? He seemed more angered by the fact he had to be goaded into making a statement than he was by the criminal activity and antisemitism taking place. He doesn’t get it. His moral compass no longer has a north with which to point.