I am often apt to angrily declare that Twitter is one of the worst things that has ever happened to our constitutional republic.
Everything from the way it has weaponized and grossly dumbed-down political discourse to the progressive corporate censorship to the digital hoards of modern-day versions of Hitler’s brownshirts or Mao’s Red Guards, nearly everything about Twitter is terrible for society, the free exchange of information, and the very definition of truth as we know it.
Nearly everything.
I have to say that one small silver lining is the fact that it’s never been easier to call out politicians for their own outrageous hypocrisy.
Gone are the days where political critics had to sift through hours of boring CSPAN footage or media interviews to find the point when politician A criticized politician B for doing what politician A would go on to do a few years later once the collective memory of the American public had lapsed a bit.
No. These days, digging up recent comments takes just a few clicks through a digital archive of public statements politicians willingly keep for themselves on Twitter so as to better signal their virtue to the masses and increase their popularity and reach.
Of course, while the vast majority of President Joe Biden’s long, long career in politics has certainly been cataloged via more old-fashioned means than Twitter, his team has made sure he’s stayed hip with the times and he does manage a Twitter account (or at least, someone does for him).
And in 2020, when he was running to replace then-President Donald Trump, “Biden” tweeted out some canned criticism of the administration’s move to restrict travel from countries experiencing a COVID-19 outbreak which has now come back to haunt him.
The claim that banning travel from nations experiencing coronavirus outbreaks was “racist” was a common trope at the time. It prompted Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to go as far as to visit San Francisco’s Chinatown to encourage residents to forsake alleged xenophobia — and social distancing — to celebrate Chinese New Year, for example.
Biden, meanwhile, declared that a travel ban would “not stop the virus.”
That’s the quote:
A wall will not stop the coronavirus.
Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it.
This disease could impact every nation and any person on the planet — and we need a plan to combat it.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 13, 2020
Biden also declared in February 2020, the day after Trump imposed travel restrictions on China over the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, that the president’s “xenophobia” made him unfit to respond to the pandemic.
As Fox News has noted, Biden has since tried to walk back these statements and say that they were just general comments about Trump’s broader “racism,” as if that had anything to do with the virus at all. I don’t know about you, but I highly doubt that.
Just read what he said:
We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) February 1, 2020
Biden’s speechwriters had almost verbatim language in a speech he gave the day before that Twitter post. On Jan. 31, 2020, in Fort Madison, Iowa, according to Reuters, Biden accused Trump of “hysterical xenophobia.”
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This is hypocritical on its face. Not only is it outrageous, considering the far-reaching pandemic restrictions that Biden would go on to impose once he took office, but because this very week he’s now imposed his own travel restrictions.
On Friday, Biden said in a statement that after being briefed by White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and the members of the COVID response team about the so-called “Omicron” variant of the COVID-19 virus, that he was “ordering additional air travel restrictions from South Africa and seven other countries” as a “precautionary measure until we have more information.”
The restrictions take effect Monday.
Joe Biden vs. Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/3qsX4ooBU5
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) April 30, 2021
Whether it was Trump administration policy seeking to protect our country from a virus or from immigration fraud and potential national security threats, no matter how you slice it, Biden characterized as “racist” any Trump moves that restricted travel from other countries to protect American citizens.
Now Biden is doing some of the same things.
You simply can’t have it both ways.
Either it was racist for Trump to put the travel bans in place, making the Biden administration’s travel bans racist, or it wasn’t ever racist for Trump to put the travel bans in place.
If it was the latter, Biden was unfairly criticizing the Trump administration by leveraging, and thus cheapening, claims of racism, reducing a grievous, un-American sin to mere political pandering.
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Again, either way, this displays not only the sheer hypocrisy of the Biden administration but his and the left-wing establishment’s disgusting tendency to cry “racism” only when it suits them, which couldn’t possibly be more counterproductive when it comes to actually fighting racism in its true forms.
Twitter may be the epicenter of faux outrage over racism, but at least it’s allowing blatantly hypocritical, pandering politicians like Biden to leave bread crumbs of their insincerity every time they virtue signal to the digital outrage mob.
As long as they keep doing this, they’ll only be able to maintain their façade for so long.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
