Biden Challenges Parents: “We Want Your Kids!”

• 2 years ago

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

“Children belong to the state, not the family” — John Swett, California Teachers Union Founder, 1867.

• + + In April, speaking to a group of public school teachers at the White House, Joe Biden resonated a theme that’s festered among the Left for over a century. Speaking of their students, Biden said, “They’re all our children. . . . They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours when they’re in the classroom.”
  
  Of course, he was speaking to members of the strongest, most radical political force in the country — government school unions. And he wasn’t kidding.
  
  There are a thousand fronts in the Left’s war on America, and our schools are the targets in dozens of ways. Critical Race Theory, Social-Emotional Learning, the racist 1619 Project, surgically deprived males playing on women’s sports teams, sexual perversion classes, the Justice Department’s spying on parents at school boards — these weapons of destruction and thousands more are aimed at our children and our families.
  
  Biden told the teachers that many kids “come from a broken home or a home that has a single parent — and there may be a drug problem or something, from a very poor home.”
  
  What was his solution? Strengthen the family? Dump the federal programs that subsidize illegitimacy, abortion, and drug use?
  
  No way. As usual, strengthen your grip — in this case, get the kids out of the home and away from their family earlier — if “kids go to school at three years old and four years old and five years old,” their chances to succeed in life “increase exponentially,” says Joe.
  
  China Joe Biden is a determined destroyer, and his number one target is the family. He wants to make the country one big re-education camp, just like Mao’s, only better equipped with modern tech and techniques — just like Xi Jinping’s.
  
  Thomas Sowell had a better way to address those kids from poor homes — but of course, Joe ignored it: “If you want to see the poor remain poor, generation after generation, just keep the standards low in their schools and make excuses for their academic shortcomings and personal misbehavior. But please don’t congratulate yourself on your compassion.”
  
  Dr. Sowell had it right, but the applause for Joe and “Dr. Jill” was too loud.
  
  They couldn’t hear him.

Cardinal Sins

Pope Francis has named Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego as a member of the College of Cardinals. This appointment should not come as a surprise, but it should be recognized on its face as an insult to the American Church.

In fact, some commentators have wondered whether the appointment, which came this past week, was a designated hit on Archbishop Cordileone’s remonstrance of Nancy Pelosi the week before. Hadn’t McElroy just written in America Magazine that “the proposal to exclude pro-choice Catholic political leaders from the Eucharist will bring tremendously destructive consequences”? He went on to insist that “the proposal to exclude pro-choice Catholic political leaders from the Eucharist is the wrong step. It will bring tremendously destructive consequences.”

OK, with the Social Justice Warriors, it’s all politics all the time. But the Pelosi dustup will pass — who remembers order by barring pro-abortion Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) from the Eucharist several years ago?

But McElroy’s impact will grow — destructively.

A pro-homosexual, pro-everything LGBT rag known as the “Distorter” fairly gushed with joy on hearing the news: McElroy was one of their own:

“The news that Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego has been named a cardinal is thrilling. The first American to be named a cardinal who was not already an archbishop or a top Vatican official, McElroy has long been recognized as the leading intellectual among the U.S. bishops. He is America’s Newman.”

OK, they lied, what can I say? They just like the guy.

Citing McElroy’s degrees from Harvard and Stanford, America Mag called him “one of the strongest supporters of Pope Francis’ vision of church among the American bishops.”

And they’re right. McElroy’s politics harmonizes perfectly with Pope Francis when it comes to the weather.

The Holy Father addressed the issue last month in an address to a group of volunteers of the Italian National Civil Protection Service. “The climate changes of our time have multiplied extreme atmospheric events,” he said, “with dramatic consequences for civilian populations. The impact is catastrophic for people who lose their homes due to flooding of waterways, tornadoes, and hydrogeological disruptions.”

“The earth cries out! The earth cries out!” he exclaimed. “When we force our hand, nature shows her cruel face and man is crushed, forced to cry out in fear.”

No argument from McElroy on that score. And the appointment to the College of Cardinals of British Bishop Arthur Roche presents further cause for dismay. As head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, he is an ardent enemy of the Traditional Latin Mass.

Then, only two days after that announcement, Pope Francis named Blase Cardinal Cupich as a member of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Cupich has thrown every possible obstacle in front of Chicago’s faithful devoted to the Traditional Mass. And the Pope’s companion appointment of Kevin Cardinal Farrell, the longtime associate of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, to the congregation is equally devastating.

Pope Francis has been transforming Vatican institutions one by one — and radically. He has turned the Pope John Paul II Institute upside down, transforming it publicly from a venerable center of orthodoxy to an echo chamber for Amoris Laetitia. We note that his latest elevations to the rank of cardinal in the U.S. — Eminences Tobin, Cupich, and now McElroy — indicate that he intends to transform the papacy itself, in the person of his Successor.

Some observers have noted the haste with which Francis has countered tradition to elevate several recent Popes to the rank of canonized saints. Was he laying the groundwork for a new tradition that would include his own canonization shortly after his own death?

What We’re Up Against Department

When speaking to the Class of 2022 of the U.S. Naval Academy last Friday, Joe Biden claimed that he could have been their fellow alumnus of the distinguished institution. “I was appointed to the Academy in 1965,” he said. “I didn’t come to the Academy because I wanted to be a football star. And you had a guy named Staubach and Bellino here. So I went to Delaware.”

However, Biden graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965. Was he lying again?

When asked about it, the new White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, ducked. “I did not hear that part” of the speech, she said.

And for the last word, we turn to Cong. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), known to all as AOC. Speaking during a congressional Iftar (the evening meal with which Muslims end their daily Ramadan fast at sunset) at the U.S. Capitol on May 20, 2019, AOC ridiculed the “almost entirely male” Republicans for arguing that the Equality Act would hurt women — to the horror of the Democratic caucus, which, she said, was “60 percent queer, women, people of color, [and] immigrant.”