LIZ PEEK: Joe Biden crushes Democrat agenda. This is his legacy
In six days, President Joe Biden will leave the Oval Office, a beaten man. Not only is he responsible for his party’s loss in November, but he has also presided over the slaughter of Democrats’ most sacred cows, the ideological I-beams supporting their progressive agenda.
DEI, a destructive mandate which blew up into a multi-billion-dollar industry, is being abandoned. ESG, the woke global investment directive, is being tossed overboard. "Gender-affirming care," polite words to describe the mutilation of young bodies, is being challenged by people who actually care about children. Illegal and unlimited immigration is under attack, lax law enforcement is under fire and censorship, the Left’s ultimate weapon and sin, is on the run.
Meritocracy is making a comeback, common sense prevails and we have elected a president, Donald Trump, who is on the right side of these issues. This is Joe Biden’s legacy.
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Biden will go down in history as an immeasurably vain and pretentious man of middling intellect who planned on being a great president and failed to be even a mediocre one.
Two months into his term, Axios reported he convened a secret gathering of presidential scholars to discuss, in effect, what made presidents consequential and how he could scale those heights. He reportedly said to Doris Kearns Goodwin: "I'm no FDR, but … " Imagine the pomposity.
It wasn’t just the president who had delusions of grandeur. So did his inner circle. The West Wing reportedly embodied a "think-big, go-big mentality." The session with the historians, Axios wrote, involved a "discussion of how big is too big — and how fast is too fast — to jam through once-in-a-lifetime historic changes to America." Biden hoped "to jam through what could amount to a $5 trillion-plus overhaul of America, and vast changes to voting, immigration and inequality"; he was willing to destroy the senate filibuster to get his way. Thankfully, many of the damaging measures adopted by this reckless and unpopular president will soon be overturned.
Democrats pretend, still, that Joe Biden has been a successful president. They applaud the big spending bills he signed, not because they resulted in tangible benefits to the American people, but because they drove trillions of dollars to Democrat-friendly coffers and causes. The embarrassing failures to build out charging stations or expand broadband access showcase the incompetence of his White House; the pile-up of an incremental $8 trillion in debt, 30% of the total outstanding, is the bill he leaves behind.
Democrats must reckon with the aftermath. Biden has not only taken the Left off the political grid, he leaves the grid in ruins.
BIDEN KEEPS INSULTING AMERICANS WITH LAST MINUTE MOVES. REPUBLICANS CAN STOP IT
Corporations are scaling back DEI programs dear to liberals that were widely adopted in the wake of the George Floyd riots in 2020. Walmart, Ford, Meta, McDonald’s, Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s and John Deere are among the many companies either dumbing down their DEI efforts or abandoning them altogether. Some companies are changing the terms. McDonald’s, for instance, has rightly dropped the "E" for equity, instead emphasizing inclusion and diversity. Equity promises everyone an equal outcome, anathema to those who prefer to reward talent and effort.
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Corporations are responding in part to last year’s Supreme Court ruling against Harvard’s race-based admissions policies; firms are concerned that their DEI programs could also be deemed illegal.
But they are also listening to their employees, and especially those who perceive in the DEI programs a reverse bias and the scuttling of meritocracy.
Financial firms are simultaneously dropping ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) guidelines, which required investors to look not only at financial results but also to grade corporations by various liberal yardsticks. The fast growth of ESG investing, which aligned trillions of dollars with Leftist ambitions, was driven by the demands of woke clients and by claims that companies which took ESG goals into account would outperform those that did not. That was false; in years when oil prices and stocks went up, for instance, ESG funds underperformed.
The courts have played a role here, too. Just recently, a judge in Texas said American Airlines violated federal law by making investments for its employee retirement plan based on ESG factors rather than prioritizing high returns. In 2023, the Biden administration adopted a rule allowing certain types of retirement plans to consider ESG values in making investment choices under some circumstances; Trump will overturn that regulation.
Meanwhile, major investment managers, including Blackrock, run by the uber-woke Larry Fink, have quietly exited the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, while the nation’s leading banks have all terminated their commitment to Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a similar climate initiative.
Elsewhere, 26 states have now banned or limited what liberals call "gender-affirming care" for teens and children, blocking treatments which can do permanent harm. These restrictions follow similar measures in Europe, where authorities are concluding that the science does not support radical treatments for young people.
Unlimited immigration, another Holy Grail of the Left, is also under attack in the U.S., and in Europe. In throwing open our borders and allowing millions to enter our country illegally, Biden has angered the country -- not only at Democrats who encouraged this unwanted flood of new arrivals, but at the newcomers themselves. Illegal immigration makes a mockery of our rule of law, has overwhelmed the finances and infrastructure of numerous cities and states, allowed the devastating importation of deadly fentanyl and undermined our national security. At the top of Donald Trump’s agenda is overturning Biden’s lawless approach.
Finally, Democrats’ efforts to censor Americans (remember the Disinformation Governance Board?) are now kaput. With Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing his social media platforms will no longer "fact-check," a euphemism for banning non-conforming expression, the game is up. Joe Biden and others on the Left are horrified; they so want to control our discourse.
A majority of the country looks forward to Donald Trump’s inauguration, an end to Joe Biden’s failed presidency and to a return to common sense. January 20 cannot come soon enough.