The Biden Administration Has Caused More Vaccine Resistance Than Fox News Ever Did

‘Peddling lies’ is a hallmark of this Biden-led COVID regime. No amount of finger-pointing at Fox News can salvage that lost credibility.

Kylee Zempel reporting for The Federalist

The Biden blame game went into overdrive on Tuesday afternoon during the president’s omicron update and desperate vaccine push because it’s much easier for Joe Biden to point fingers at Fox News and QAnon followers for vaccine resistance than to take a moment of introspection.

“The unvaccinated are responsible for their own choices, but those choices have been fueled by dangerous misinformation on cable TV and social media,” Biden said.

Let’s make sure we get our terms straight here: By “misinformation,” Biden means anything that hurts him and his friends politically (this would be the same type of “misinformation” his administration pledged to flag for Big Tech overlords to censor). By “social media,” he means any ivermectin and natural immunity posts that escape the watchful eye of his administration and Facebook’s far-left “fact-checkers.” And by “cable TV,” he means Fox News.

“It’s wrong. It’s immoral. I call on the purveyors of these lies and misinformation to stop it. Stop it now,” Biden said in a line that sounded like it was lifted straight out of a Brian Stelter monologue.

To find a root source of vaccine refusal, Biden should stop channel-surfing and look in the mirror. The president, his administration, and his bureaucratic allies have spread way more false information and caused far more vaccine resistance than the talking heads at Fox News ever have.

It started before Biden was even elected, with his now-vice president declaring that she wouldn’t get vaccinated if it were then-President Donald Trump’s recommendation.

The federal government’s credibility on COVID-related decisions only nosedived from there. Biden and federal bureaucrats lied so often to accomplish their goals, it’s hard to keep their many deceptions straight.

Anthony Fauci is an obvious place to start. He first said there was “no reason” to walk around with a mask (with the surgeon general also tweeting “seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!”) before Fauci later admitted that his advice was all a deception to ration personal protective equipment for nurses and doctors. He admitted on a separate occasion that he had arbitrarily bumped up herd immunity threshholds not because of scientific evidence but because he thought he could get away with it.

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci reportedly told The New York Times. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

And do you remember when Fauci fiercely denied that U.S. taxpayer dollars had been funding gain of function research in Wuhan, only to then admit in May that there was “no way of guaranteeing” how that money was being used? Or when he admitted that masks for vaccinated people are political theater after vehemently denying that very same thing?

Speaking of which, Biden and the Centers for Disease Control are still pleading with Americans to keep covering their faces, so it isn’t just Fauci. This not only cultivates a distrust of so-called health experts, but it also takes away people’s will to get the jab. After all, if otherwise young and healthy people can’t stop masking and social distancing after getting a COVID-19 vaccine, what’s the point?

Based on the Biden administration’s messaging, you can see why folks might not trust that a vaccine will get their lives back to normal. Two years after “two weeks to slow the spread,” the goalposts have shifted so far that getting vaxxed doesn’t mean getting your life back, it means continuing to mask, proving you’re clean to keep your job, and getting in line for booster shots.

Can you blame people for putting off the vaccine when Biden says backward things like, “We are going to protect the vaccinated“? Can you see why they might hesitate after Biden repeated the obvious lie that the vaccinated can’t contract or spread the virus? How about the fearmongering about protecting children when kids up to age 17 have a 99.998 percent chance of survival from coronavirus?

I’d say it’s natural to distrust a man who threated to get you fired if you disagreed with his risk assessment. It’s normal to buck the swamp creatures now telling you what to put into your body after they robbed your children of an education not because of the science but because of special interests.

Perhaps unvaccinated folks would be more likely to heed the warnings of the president and bureaucrats if they acknowledged the science on natural immunity at all. Or if they stopped calling COVID a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” when it’s clearly not. Threatening death and disease for healthy unvaxxed people while patting the vaxxed on the head for doing the “right thing” isn’t the most persuasive tactic.

“You know, these companies and personalities are making money by peddling lies and allowing misinformation,” Biden said on Tuesday in reference to the aforementioned cable TV and social media.

But those who have been paying attention know that “peddling lies” and “misinformation” is a hallmark of this Biden-led COVID regime — and no amount of finger-pointing at Fox News can salvage any of that destroyed credibility.

Wokeness is Dangerous

The critical question concerning the future of wokeness is to what extent it remains useful as an instrument of power.

by Paul Gottfried for American Greatness

In a widely noted analysis of wokeness at The American Conservative, Scott McConnell indicates that there’s good news ahead. Woke culture may soon be a spent force. It may be following the paths of other attempted revolutions like communism and Jacobinism, which reached a high point in power and popularity and then precipitously declined. According to McConnell, these periodic eruptions “seem to have a natural lifespan,” of about five years, only to peter out. If we show enough “will power” and presumably patience, that will happen in this case.

An End to Wokeness

A reaction is supposedly already setting in with the woke ideas of American educational and media elites. It seems these zealots have pushed their weird notions of white systemic racism, gender fluidity, and anti-Westernism beyond the point of public endurance. Pushback has supposedly begun; and most of McConnell’s detailed commentary is an attempt to flesh out how this perhaps inevitable reaction to wokeness is unfolding. 

Asian and Hispanic voters are breaking from the woke-intoxicated Democratic Party; and in the Virginia gubernatorial race in November, a Republican candidate who ran against critical race theory shocked the cultural Left by winning. Moreover, Glenn Youngkin’s Democratic opponent, rather than proudly identifying with the anti-white instruction of the teachers’ unions, simply denied that CRT is being taught in Virginia’s schools. Since Democratic politicians no longer publicly declare their support for the entire woke agenda, we may assume that it’s losing resonance. 

McConnell further notes the appearance on the scene of Asian and black media personalities, who are changing the image of their groups by taking emphatically conservative stands. This development renders the Left less attractive to anti-white political coalitions, for good reason. It is hard not to notice that these coalitions are drawing funds and advocates from white elites, while vocal opposition to wokeness is featuring more and more non-white representatives.

Cherished Illusions

Although I wish Scott (who is a friend) were right, I disagree profoundly with his conclusions and believe that he overstates the significance of certain changes. Youngkin only won in Virginia by two points in what was supposed to be an electoral off-year for Democrats; and if my colleague Pedro Gonzalez is correct, the incoming governor has been reaching out feverishly to the Left while putting together his staff. 

Black support for the Democratic Party and by implication, the cultural Left, remains at about 90 percent. Half of Hispanic voters and most college-educated youth under 30 will likely continue to vote for the side that McConnell (and I) dislike. As far as I can tell, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris continue to appeal shamelessly to the anti-white Left, and their disapproval of the acquittal of “white supremacist” Kyle Rittenhouse in a trial that should never have taken place was entirely in keeping with their perpetual appeal to racial hostilities. Both leaders continue to favor the right of male athletes who have redefined themselves sexually to compete in women’s sports events. 

Although one can multiply such examples to underscore that McConnell mistakes small changes for cosmic ones, a more critical factor needs to be addressed. There is a globalist ruling class in this country with its counterparts and links in other Western countries, and these rulers are not about to surrender power. The important thing is not that some soccer moms in Loudoun County, Virginia are less keen on CRT than they were last year. Wokeness is still the ideological tool through which the powerful hold together their coalition.

A swing of two to three percentage points in a state gubernatorial race, or the TV appearance of a non-white reciting conservative talking points, will have no impact on who rules us. Indeed, those who are in a position of control can deal with unwanted contingencies as they did in 2020, by closing the media to anti-Democratic information in the final weeks of the presidential race. These powerbrokers also effectively used government surveillance operations against a populist president who quarreled with the deep state.

There is also a real possibility now of a federal election law that would reduce to utter insignificance any opposition to our elites. Our elections would then abound in harvested and late arriving votes and would look like similarly hollowed-out rituals in Third World kleptocracies. At this moment, the Democrats in Congress are moving with executive approval toward such a step. 

The critical question concerning the future of wokeness is to what extent it remains useful as an instrument of power. If it leads to the escalating violence we saw during the “Summer of Love,” or to the disruptive influx of illegals, who may eventually cause more backlash than aid to the Democratic Party, our elites may change course. But such an about-face will not happen for the reasons Scott offers in his commentary. Instead, it would be an expediential adjustment made by those in high places. Structural, not cosmetic changes are necessary to overcome the ruling class and its favorite political tool  

X22, On the Fringe, and more-Dec 23

 

Had a much better day today. Here's tonight's news:

Please—Stop the Coup Porn ~ VDH

Military officers should quit all their coup porn talk—either to remove a president they don’t like, or to project their own reckless, insurrectionary behavior onto their political opponents.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, three retired generals, Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba, and Steven Anderson warn of a supposedly impending coup should Donald Trump be elected in 2024. 

The column seemed strangely timed to coincide with a storm of recent Democratic talking points that a reelected Trump, or even a Republican sweep of the 2022 midterms, would spell a virtual end of democracy. 

Ironies abound.   

From Election Day in 2020 to Inauguration Day 2021, we were told by the Left that democracy was resilient and rightly rid the nation of Trump.    

The hard Left, for one of the rare times in U.S. history, was now in complete control of both houses of Congress and the presidency.   

Spiking inflation, supply-chain shortages, near record gas prices, open borders, the flight from Afghanistan,  multi-trillion-dollar deficits, and polarizing racial rhetoric all followed. 

In response to these events, Joe Biden’s popularity utterly collapsed. His own cognitive challenges multiplied the unpopularity of his failed policies.  

In reaction, the Left again pivoted. It suddenly announced that should it lose congressional power in 2022 or the presidency in 2024, democracy was all but doomed. 

Apparently, what changed Democrats’ views was that democracy was working all too well in expressing widespread public disgust . . . with the Left. 

Even more ironies followed. 

The three retired generals shrilly write of the dangers of insurrection and coups. Yet the FBI found no such insurrection or conspiracy in the buffoonish riot on January 6. 

Only serial media misinformation and lies turned a ragtag band of misfits into an existential threat to the nation. 

Almost every media talking point turned out to be untrue. No Capitol police officer died at the hands of the mob. (Early reports that Officer Brian Sicknick had been beaten into a coma by protesters were incorrect. The Washington, D.C., medical examiner ruled Sicknick died the next day of a stroke.) The media all but ignored the lethal police shooting of a military veteran and unarmed petite female trespasser, for the apparent crime of trying to enter Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office through a broken window. There were no gun-toting “insurrectionists” arrested inside the Capitol. 

Another irony. The three retired generals say nothing about the Russia collusion hoax in which Obama Administration officials at the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA helped to seed a fake dossier—paid for by candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Ex-British intelligence operative Christopher Steele’s made-up opposition research was designed first to derail Trump’s campaign, then to disable his transition and finally sabotage his presidency. All that seems rather coup-like. 

In truth, coups were regularly discussed during the last four years—but only in the context of a by-any-means-necessary way of deposing Donald Trump extralegally before his term ran out. 

In August 2020, two retired officers John Nagl and Paul Yingling, urged Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley to remove Trump from office if Milley felt it necessary after a contested election.

Both officers knew that the law forbids Milley from interfering in the chain of command, given his mere advisory role to the president. 

Yet Milley himself had dangerously violated his purview at least twice. He once ordered subordinate officers to report to him first should Donald Trump consider any nuclear action against China. And  Milley additionally called his Chinese communist counterpart to warn him that he would tip the Chinese off about any preemptive American strike on China.  

Earlier, Rosa Brooks, a former Obama Pentagon legal official, wrote a now infamous essay in Foreign Policy, listing the choices available in removing Donald Trump from his less than two-week-old  presidency. Among the possible means, she listed a potential military coup.  

Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice forbids even retired military officers publicly attacking or disparaging their current commander-in-chief. Yet several retired generals and admirals serially did just that during the last administration, smearing their president in every imaginable way, from being a Mussolini-like fascist to a veritable Nazi. 

The officers published in the Washington Post are clueless as to why the military is now suffering its most dismal public approval ratings of the modern era—with only 45 percent of the public registering trust and confidence in their armed forces. 

The nation is clearly not blaming the courageous soldiers in the enlisted ranks. But it has had enough of the Pentagon’s loud top brass who seem more interested in stirring up political divisions at home than adopting winning strategies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, or deterring China and Russia. 

The officer corps too often broadcasts its woke credentials, calibrated for career advancement. Top-ranking officers upon retirement too predictably head for corporate defense contractor boards and procurement lobbying firms. 

To restore the military’s reputation, officers should eschew politics to focus on restoring strategic deterrence and military readiness. They should keep clear of divisive domestic issues. They should stop virtue signaling to the media and influential members of Congress. 

But most importantly, officers should quit all their coup porn talk—either to remove a president they don’t like, or to project their own reckless, insurrectionary behavior onto their political opponents. 

Can A Struggling America Afford Costly Climate Hysteria?

Is climate religion worth the destruction of our society?

by John D. O’Connor for American Greatness

Spiraling inflation and COVID’s economic dislocations threaten America’s wobbly economy. Yet the Biden Administration, to fight “climate change,” has imposed significant new regulatory costs, committed itself to massive spending increases, and seeks even more spending and new taxes, which together could bring us to an economic tipping point.

But rather than acknowledge the irreparable damage that onerous climate policies will certainly wreak, the administration forecasts untold devastation if the country does not buy its prophecies of environmental cataclysm. 

The public is left to choose between unsustainable costs or existential climate doom, supposedly proven certain by “science.” But what does noncontroversial “science” really prove? 

First, there is no doubt that greatly increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, absent extreme amounts of negative feedback, will elevate temperatures. No reasonable scientist disputes this bland statement. 

But three questions are generally avoided, or dishonestly addressed, by demagoguing politicians and the credulous media. First, how great a temperature increase will be caused by doubling CO2? Second, even if we accept massive, debilitating costs to fight CO2 increases, will bearing those costs actually help us avoid the environmental Armageddon predicted, or, will the status quo persist in any event? Third, are there significant benefits from increasing CO2 that will substantially improve life for billions of impoverished individuals worldwide, with negligible costs?

If overbearing costs produce miniscule benefit, while less onerous, sensible regulation would yield bounteous benefit, then the country should jettison the sky-is-falling narrative. 

There is sound data to address these issues, easily accessible to any curious, moderately intelligent reporter. However, this noncontroversial science yields several truths inconvenient to climate activists and their dupes.

Let’s start. Without our “greenhouse” atmosphere, the “black body” temperature of the earth would be 255° kelvin, with all warming radiation from the sun (394W/m²) escaping untrapped into the atmosphere. This is a basic, accepted calculation. 

With our present greenhouse gas atmosphere, approximately 150 W/m² are blocked by the absorption of the escaping heat, leading to an increase of about 33° K (also 33° C), for an average global temperature at equilibrium of about 288° Kelvin. Out of this 33 degrees of greenhouse “trapping” effect, about 20 percent comes from CO2, absorbing about 30W/m², resulting in about 6.6° K and C of this greenhouse effect. Except for trivial tweaking to these numbers, they are not controversial. 

CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas at lower concentrations. The present CO2 atmospheric concentration is rounded to be roughly 400ppm. The first 50ppm of CO2 produced 75 percent of the CO2’s total present heat absorption. Why so much? Because the absorption effect of CO2 decreases logarithmically. Why is it that the effect decreases so dramatically? Because the heat leaving the earth does so in various infrared wavelengths. Only the wavelengths from about 13.5 microns to 15.5 microns are powerfully absorbed by CO2.

This primary absorption band is essentially saturated at 400ppm, and CO2 is then left to compete with H2O, weakly, for other bands, with little effect. This is acknowledged science, easy to demonstrate through absorption band analysis in widely published studies. 

What would be the effect of future increase from 400ppm to the unlikely high level of 800ppm, for example? Even according to the highly biased political arm of the climate-hysterical Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the increase in solar absorption would be about 3.7W/m². Physics Professor William Happer of Princeton University claims this will be somewhere between 2.5 and 3.0W/m², a difference only marginally significant. If we accept 3.5 W/m² for illustrative purposes—a very mainstream hypothesis—such would amount to only an .8° C rise at this stunningly high concentration level. Again, this math is not difficult or, in substance, debatable. 

The Paris Accords acknowledge, as do other climate fretters, that the world’s goal should be keeping greenhouse gas temperature increases below 2° C. Therefore, shouldn’t a .8° future rise show that there is no cause for alarm? Even if we count from the 290ppm “pre-industrial” concentrations, doubling from that number would still get a temperature rise of only 1.1° C or 1.2° C, much of which has already occurred at 400ppm. 

So, unless these rises of either .8° C or 1.2° C cause enormous positive feedbacks, there are no worries. (By “positive feedbacks” we mean that the temperature rise with these feedbacks, will result in a higher temperature rise than that solely caused by CO2.) Without proof, climate Cassandras predict a disaster of 3° C to 5° C warming from these rises. Indeed, most pro-hysteria computer programs assume a positive feedback of approximately four times what the non-feedback math otherwise provides. Thus, a rise of .8° C with feedbacks, will ultimately result in a temperature increase of 3.2°. 

This enormous feedback effect, however, is exactly what “science” has not yet come close to proving. This positive feedback is not premised on any unique characteristic of the CO2 molecule but is simply based on the heat (.8 – 1.2° in our analysis) caused by doubling, which in turn allows the atmosphere to hold more water vapor and clouds, which are the strongest contributors (50 percent for vapor, 25 percent for clouds) to the greenhouse gas effect. 

This sounds good, but momentary reflection should cause us to ask: By this reasoning, why wouldn’t all heat increases generate positive feedbacks and runaway warming? The answer is that this feedback hypothesis would indeed cause runaway heat amplification no matter the cause of the original temperature increase. Yet, earth’s weather system has displayed a design and a history of modulating heat increases, not amplifying them. The earth, after all, has seen CO2 concentrations as high as 6000 ppm!

But, in any case, the core truth is that the amplification hypothesis is embarrassingly unproven. A minor negative, or minor positive, feedback is more likely and in accord with modern measurements. Indeed, the net conclusion of IPCC studies of water vapor and cloud formation is that they are admittedly very poorly understood.

If heat increases from CO2 cause increases in low clouds, which cool the earth, or cause equatorial “chimney” cloud concentration, as hypothesized by MIT professor Richard Lindzen, allowing even more heat to escape, the feedback would be net negative. But again, feedbacks are poorly understood.

Further, if we assume that there is strong positive amplification from any minor temperature increase caused by CO2, even John Kerry admits that full compliance with the Paris Accords would have virtually no significant effect on the earth’s temperature. Moreover, China (37 percent of CO2 global emissions) and India (15 percent) are not signatories, and are instead absurdly assumed likely to follow the “good example” of America and the EU. Lots of luck on that.

If CO2 concentrations were decreased, food production for marginally nourished populations would decrease, because CO2 is a significant plant food. Greenhouses customarily induce CO2 in order to greatly increase plant growth. 

Then there is water, a scarce global resource. Increasing CO2 causes less lengthy stomata openings, and over time less stomata, in plants seeking to inhale CO2 as their food. Fewer stomata, or less time opened, conserves water, which is otherwise lost through open stomata. Accordingly, increasing CO2 would dramatically increase the water available to the earth’s population, otherwise lost through plant respiration. Thus, CO2 as a greenhouse gas is proven to be highly and increasingly ineffective as concentrations increase, while global food and water are clearly increased. 

The idiocy of climate hysteria is consistent with religious belief posing as scientific truth. But at least when Galileo was persecuted for claiming the earth was heliocentric, religious leaders were not paralyzing society. As the brilliant duo of Joe Biden and John Kerry go to war on fossil fuels at a total cost likely far north of several trillion in coming years, we should ask whether this religious war fueled by their priestly scientific assumptions is worth the destruction of our society. 

The Corporate Media Freakout Over The Omicron Variant Isn’t Normal, It’s Psychotic

Twitter blue checks across the Northeast are utterly divorced from the reality of pandemic life in the rest of the country.

by John Daniel Davidson for The Federalist

Omicron is here, and with it comes death and destruction — unless, that is, you cancel Christmas, hide in your homes, get all the boosters, double mask, and demand to see negative Covid tests and proof of vaccination for anyone who darkens your doorstep. Any precautions, no matter how seemingly outlandish, are seen as justifiable to protect yourself from this new and terrifying variant.

So it is, anyway, with a disturbingly large number of reporters and commentators in the corporate press, whose coverage and individual responses to Covid have become increasingly divorced from that of the rest of America. To watch CNN or read The New York Times, you’d think omicron was the most deadly strain of the virus to date, poised to overwhelm hospitals and leave a trail of death behind it.

The reality, which most Americans have readily grasped, is just the opposite: omicron appears to be the least dangerous strain of the virus yet. After five weeks of omicron’s spread in South Africa, where the variant first appeared, the news is encouraging: mild to nonexistent symptoms, hospitalization rates nine times lower than previous surges, and extremely low rates of severe illness and death even though only about a quarter of the population is vaccinated. Here in the United States, only one person has died from the omicron variant thus far, even though omicron cases accounted for nearly three-quarters of new infections nationwide last week.

Rather than return to lockdowns and school closures — to say nothing of canceling holiday gatherings — there’s every reason to believe we’ll be able to weather this surge with minimal disruption.

Unless you’re a member of legacy media. In that case, you’re probably going to cancel your own birthday party like The Atlantic’s Ed Yong did, even though all his birthday guests were vaccinated and boosted, and probably would have been tested before showing up at his house. But no, it was just too great a risk.

Yong, you see, covers science. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Covid. He’s written too many stories about the pandemic to be dissuaded by mere data about omicron. For him, isolation, masking indoors, and eating outside are normal and necessary, and really what everyone should be doing.

He’s not alone. Former GOP communications director and CNN contributor Tara Setmayer blurted out on Twitter last week that she hadn’t been on a plane or gone to a movie since March 2020, and has only eaten indoors twice this entire time, even though her family is vaccinated and boosted.

This isn’t a healthy or sane response to the pandemic, especially not after nearly two years of Covid. Judging by how busy airports and movie theaters and restaurants are across the country, it’s also not normal. It’s borderline psychotic. Only people who have convinced themselves that the worst thing that could happen to them is get Covid would go to these absurd lengths.  

Yet that’s exactly what many Twitter blue checks have done. CNN’s Chris Cillizza confessed on Twitter last week that the omicron surge has really hit him hard because it made him realize, for the first time, that “the vaccines don’t, really, prevent you from getting the virus,” and that they “can never do what I had hoped: Ensure no one I loved will become infected.”

Imagine being so impervious to reality — to say nothing of science and data, or even just stories about Covid in the news — that you’d still think, in December 2021, that the Covid vaccines could prevent all your loved ones from getting infected. I know we all joke about how bad Cillizza’s takes are, but come on.

It would be one thing if this insanity were confined to the Acela corridor, but it’s not. Thanks to the hysterics of our media elite, a certain segment of the American people have lost their minds over Covid and essentially become some version of the mask-sealed-with-surgical-tape, “Shitton of Xanax” lady:

Now, where would this poor woman get the idea that all this is necessary to protect her from the omicron variant? Maybe she read Washington Post health reporter Dan Diamond’s latest column, in which he warns his readers not to expect a mild case of Covid from the omicron variant, to “brace yourself” for a positive test even if you’re vaccinated, to “expect hospitals to be pushed to their limits,” and to “upgrade your mask and think twice about taking risks.”

Understand that none of this advice has much to do with the science or data we have so far on omicron. Indeed, the South African doctor who first reported the omicron variant wrote earlier this month that she was “astonished by the extraordinary worldwide reaction” to the new strain of Covid, which she says is “out of all proportion to the risks posed by this variant.”

That reaction is being pushed by a small cohort of elite journalists and talking heads who live in large cities in the northeast, and whose entire approach to Covid and the pandemic are way out of step with the rest of the country. What’s more, their fear-driven approach hasn’t yielded better outcomes. Places that have imposed draconian lockdowns and school closures have fared no better (and sometimes worse) than places that have remained mostly open.

It’s time — long past time — to stop listening to these people.

Fake Unifier-In-Chief Ends First Year In Office The Same Way He Began

When he entered office, Biden promised to be a unifier. After what we’ve seen this year, it’s undeniable he’s only been a divider.

Tristan Justice reporting for The Federalist

President Joe Biden is closing out his first year in office the same way he opened it: with a divisive message to two Americas under the guise of a crusade for unity because the messenger isn’t Donald Trump. After Biden wrote off a large portion of the nation as white supremacists at his inauguration, he’s writing off the unvaccinated as responsible for the pandemic.

On Thursday, the White House released a briefing with COVID response coordinator Jeff Zients thanking vaccinated Americans for having “done the right thing.”

“For the unvaccinated,” the White House said, “you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.”

Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like a message to scapegoat the unvaccinated as responsible for all the nation’s pandemic ills regardless of natural immunity, which 140 studies affirm is just as good, if not better than vaccine-given immunity.

Never mind that the idea that unvaccinated people are responsible for the continuation of the pandemic is based on a false premise. COVID-19 became an endemic virus long before the development of effective vaccines under the Trump administration, then spreading even among those who took the shots.

“Rapidly waning vaccine efficacy and COVID-19 surges in countries and regions with high vaccination rates – including Israel, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and now Europe, as well as high-vaccination U.S. states like Vermont – are evidence that vaccinated individuals can spread COVID-19 at rates comparable to the unvaccinated,” Drs. Harvey Risch, Robert Malone and Byram Bridle, three leading experts in epidemiology and immunology, reported last week for The Federalist. “Multiple studies have shown that viral load in vaccinated individuals with COVID-19 is the same as in the unvaccinated.”

In other words, the vaccinated are just as culpable for the pandemic as their unvaccinated neighbors, who have been tarred as disease-ridden parasites who warrant being ostracized in a two-tiered society. One doesn’t need to be a historian to understand that scapegoating the latter has never led to anything but dangerous consequences, and yet it’s become a central mission of the Democrat Party, with Biden leading the effort.

In January, Boston will ban unvaccinated people from indoor dining, nightlife, fitness, and entertainment. Los Angeles has already been enforcing similar rules for nearly a month, and Chicago will soon follow suit.

On Monday, congressional Democrats demanded that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) implement a vaccine mandate for air travel.

“On a flight now to Bay Area and it is one-hundred percent batty that the unvaccinated are allowed to fly,” wrote California Rep. Eric Swalwell the day before signing a letter to the CDC making his vaxx demands. “It’s unsafe in the cabin and we are transporting the virus.”

CNN’s Ana Navarro was more explicit in her contempt for the unvaccinated.

“Unless you have a LEGITIMATE medical reason,” she wrote on Twitter. “[I]f you’re not vaccinated, I don’t want to see you, talk to you, work w/you, socialize w/you or know you. It’s enough. Your ‘personal freedom’ is holding the rest of us hostage. It’s selfish and stupid.”

A genuine unifier in the White House would decry the overt hostility toward the unvaccinated that is driving the nation’s split into the COVID-caste system. He wouldn’t lead the charge with vindictive statements because his popularity has nosedived, and he needs someone to blame.

What, if anything, has the president done to unite the country over the past 12 months? Was it unifying for Biden to open his presidency by writing off half the nation as white supremacist at his inauguration? Was it unifying when the president signed pink slips for the thousands of workers connected to the Keystone Pipeline? Was it unifying when he mandated that universities allow men to compete in women’s sports or when he reinstated taxpayer funding for abortion? Was it unifying when he ignored a judge’s admonishment against witness intimidation in the politically sensitive trial of Derek Chauvin? Was it unifying when he vented about Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal in a case that was demonstrably political?

When he entered office, Biden promised to be a unifier. After what we’ve seen this year, it’s undeniable he’s only been a divider.