CORRECTION, Jan. 8, 2024: Valley Forge was the site of the Continental Army’s winter encampment in 1777-78. An earlier version of this article suggested it had a different role.
You have to wonder whether President Joe Biden’s choice of locale for his speech Friday might indicate just a bit of a lack of self-awareness on his part.
For Biden’s first address of the new year, he decided the best site for an address marking the anniversary of the most overblown riot in history is Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
Hopefully, the irony here is painfully obvious.
As reported by CBS News, Biden’s campaign characterized his speech one day before the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion as remarks that would “mark the anniversary of Donald Trump trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob breached the U.S. Capitol at his urging.”
If this is Biden’s attempt to overtake the Republican front-runner in the polls, which even CBS admits are looking grim for the president, he sure has a strange way of going about it.
For one, most people who believe the events of Jan. 6 were an insurrection comparable to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, or an attack on the Capitol comparable to the burning of the White House by the British in 1814, probably already support Biden.
For another, Valley Forge? The president is really going to harangue the multitudes in his first major campaign stop of the new year on the horrors of the Capitol incursion at one of the key sites of the Revolutionary War?
Although CBS reported that Biden “expects the former president to prevail in the GOP primaries and believes he will face his 2020 opponent again in the 2024 general election,” the outlet missed the absurdity inherent in the president’s topic and choice of location.
The Pennsylvania site is eminently fitting, CBS said, as Valley Forge marked “one of the darkest periods in the Revolutionary War,” and “even though soldiers were plagued by unrelenting cold, illness and food shortages, the troops persevered in their pursuit of independence.”
Which is, obviously, the exact same thing as Biden’s political opponent looking like a better candidate than he does.
Valley Forge was the Continental Army’s home base for the winter of 1777-1778. The popular image is that of a downtrodden army arriving in December 1777, plagued with illness and shivering in rags.
However, though there is an element of truth to the popular image, that image is not entirely accurate. The troops may have been exhausted and ill-equipped, but, according to the National Parks Service, they were more cautiously optimistic than downtrodden.
And indeed, Valley Forge proved to mark a crucial turning point in the Revolutionary War for the Continental Army. In Valley Forge, Washington’s soldiers saw firsthand and were inspired by his impressive sense of duty and unwavering faith in God.
It was while stationed in Valley Forge that Washington prevailed upon the Continental Congress to improve the supply chain for the troops, and Prussian general Baron von Steuben helped transform the army there from a ragtag group of volunteers to a unified and well-trained fighting force.
In May 1778, the patriots’ alliance with France was solidified, helping secure their victory.
It should be clear now why Biden’s choice of location is ironic.
Regardless of what the establishment media wants you to think, Jan. 6, 2021, was not an attempt to overthrow the government, but a protest against an increasingly tyrannical government that devolved into something most of the protesters never intended.
It’s interesting that Biden chose Valley Forge, of all places, as the site for his speech decrying that day’s events.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
