TABLE OF CONTENTS to RADICAL NATION: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' Dangerous Plan to Take Away Your Freedoms by Sean Spicer
1. The Most Progressive President in History
Who is Joe Biden? He has always sidestepped key questions about his plans for America. The mainstream media has covered up evidence of his complicity in the Hunter Biden scandal. Is Biden compromised? What does China know about Joe Biden that the American people need to know? Who is the real Joe Biden? How will his policies affect our way of life and our national security?
In Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (2014), Robert Gates assessed Biden as a decent man who would help anyone with a personal problem. "Still," Gates concludes, "I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." During one Situation Room meeting with President Obama's national security team, Gates agreed with something Biden said. Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen later pointed out to Gates, "You know you agreed with the vice president today?" Gates replied, "I realize that-therefore I'm rethinking my position." (page 288).
This chapter will examine Joe Biden's life, his policies, and the extreme Progressives he has brought into his orbit-and it will reveal what we can expect from a Biden presidency.
2. The "Inauthentic Self" of Kamala Harris
Who is Kamala Harris? The media tried to define her as a pragmatic moderate, but GovTrack, a nonpartisan website, analyzed her voting record and concluded that she is the most far-left, socialist-leaning legislator of all 100 senators. She refuses to answer questions about radical Progressive plans for packing the Supreme Court and packing the Senate by adding two new blue states, Puerto Rico and D.C. Given Joe Biden's age and health questions, Harris stands a better-than-even chance of becoming president and imposing her radical agenda on the nation.
It's hard to know who the real Kamala Harris is because-as Gil Duran, communications director for Harris in 2013, observed-she is always "trying to project an inauthentic self."
This chapter examines Kamala Harris, her often-contradictory stands on various issues, her extreme positions as a Senator and candidate, and what she is likely to do if she becomes president of the United States.
3. Team Biden
This chapter examines Joe Biden's cabinet picks, which serve as a road map to the Biden-Harris agenda for America. Biden's choices have been shaped by the Progressive obsession with a superficial appearance of "diversity"-a cabinet that "looks like America," a "cabinet of barrier-breakers," a "cabinet of firsts." The Progressive concept of "diversity" is solely about skin color and sexual preference, not diversity of viewpoint, values, or convictions. It's a cynical exercise in quotas, bragging rights, and virtue signaling.
Each cabinet member will be succinctly profiled in a page or less. Here are a few of the people this chapter will examine:
Biden selected former Obama White House chief of staff Denis McDonough as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. McDonough has no medical background, has never served in the military, and has no discernible experience working with veterans or VSOs (veterans service organizations). What qualifies him to run an unwieldy bureaucracy that is historically unresponsive to the needs of veterans? The only other non-veteran to have served as VA secretary is David Shulkin, appointed by Donald Trump-but he was a medical doctor who had worked at the VA and who understood healthcare delivery and the medical needs of our veterans. What does McDonough bring to the table? Nothing but a likely return to the sad neglect of the Obama-era VA.
For Secretary of Health and Human Services, Biden chose California attorney general Xavier Becerra, a proponent of "Medicare for all" and a radical advocate for unrestricted abortion. According to OnTheIssues.org, as a congressman from 2003 to 2017, Becerra voted to expand human embryonic stem cell research, fund abortions through foreign aid, and permit unrestricted interstate transport of minors to get abortions. He opposed banning partial-birth abortion and opposed criminalizing harming a fetus during the commission of another crime. His voting record is rated 100 percent by the National Abortion Rights Action League. This pro-abortion radical will be in charge of the largest budget of any government department-more than 2 trillion dollars in FY 2021. Senator Steve Daines of Montana said, "Xavier Becerra . . . has made his career aggressively pursuing a radical pro-abortion agenda and attacking the religious freedom of Americans who believe in the sanctity of human life."
As California attorney general, Becerra was a defendant in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra. In that case, Becerra defended California's FACT Act, which mandated that Christian crisis pregnancy centers advertise state abortion services on their premises, in violation of their First Amendment rights. The United States Supreme Court, in a narrow 5-4 decision, ruled in favor of the Christian crisis pregnancy centers. Expect Becerra's HHS to pursue a pattern of restricting free speech and religious freedom in favor of promoting abortion.
Biden chose Pete Buttigieg as Transportation Secretary. Currently 38 years old, Buttigieg was mayor of South Bend, Indiana, from 2012 to 2020. To be fair, South Bend (a city of 100,000 people) has a strong mayor system of government, so "Mayor Pete" does have hands-on managerial experience. But it's quite a leap from overseeing the bus fleet of the South Bend Public Transportation Corporation to overseeing the United States Department of Transportation (DOT). The various administrations of DOT oversee aviation, railroads, highways, mass transit, shipping, pipelines, hazardous materials transport, seaways, public safety, and our national defense infrastructure.
Was Buttigieg selected for his depth of knowledge and experience managing transportation systems? No. Judging from Biden's and Buttigieg's own statements, it would seem "Mayor Pete" was chosen so that Biden could check the "LGBTQ" box on his cabinet list. Biden said, "Our cabinet doesn't have just one first, or just two of these firsts, but eight precedent-busting appointments. And today a ninth-the first openly gay nominee to lead a cabinet department and one of the youngest cabinet members ever." In response, Buttigieg thanked Biden "for honoring your commitment to diversity."
Biden selected Connecticut's commissioner of education Miguel Cardona to lead the Department of Education. Cardona's ideas on education are radical and dangerous. He recently implemented mandatory critical race theory courses for Connecticut high schoolers-and he plans to implement these same destructive courses in schools across America.
Cardona has promised a plan with an "ambitious but do-able goal of safely opening a majority of our schools by the end of our first 100 days." For some reason it will take Joe Biden and Miguel Cardona 100 days to figure out how to do what private and parochial schools have already been doing for months. (It will probably take 100 days just to check off all the items on the teachers' union wish list.)
This chapter will go down the roster, with clear, fair, incisive descriptions of the statements and résumés of Biden's cabinet choices. Some of Biden's picks, such as retired four-star Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III as Secretary of Defense, are fairly sound. Others spell trouble ahead for our republic. This chapter will be the scorecard for Team Biden.
4. End of a Miracle: The Biden Post-Pandemic Economy
The American economy under Biden-Harris is our No. 1 concern. The Democratic Party is in denial about how to engineer an economic recovery. Blinded by wrong-headed notions of "equity," identity politics, income redistribution, punishing achievement, rewarding failure, the "Green New Deal," and failed Keynesian economic theory, the Biden-Harris administration fiscal plan will bankrupt America and harm American families.
Expect tax increases on households and corporations, more regulations on struggling small businesses, and an effort to move America toward socialized medicine and "Medicare for all." This chapter examines the leftist/socialist strategy of throwing money at people to dis-incentivize work and keep people (especially minorities and the poor) dependent on socialist Big Government programs. Biden and Harris plan to vastly expand the welfare state through new entitlements, bailouts of bankrupt blue states, and huge concessions to public employee unions.
The national debt already tops an unsustainable $27 trillion. The Biden-Harris plan to further expand the welfare state threatens our domestic stability and national security. As Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, "The most significant threat to our national security is our debt."
This chapter will feature ways grassroots Americans can fight to continue the Trump economic miracle that was derailed by the COVID pandemic and denied by the election of Biden-Harris.
5. The Progressive Assault on Religious Liberty
This chapter will briefly list President Trump's many accomplishments on behalf of First Amendment religious freedom, from the 2017 Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty to his support of Colorado baker Jack Phillips's right to refuse to make wedding cake that violate his religious convictions to supporting the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, and so much more.
The Biden-Harris administration will hit the ground running, seeking to undo all the religious protections the Trump administration has put in place. This chapter will look at the specific restrictions on liberty Joe Biden and his allies plan to impose on people of faith in America- and what grassroots Americans can do about it.
6. Threats to Global and National Security
With a focus on growing threats from China, Iran, the Middle East, North Korea, and Russia, this chapter examines Trump administration accomplishments-and the Biden-Harris plan to roll back those accomplishments, weaken our military, and invite our enemies to test a weak and wrong-headed White House.
At a May 2019 campaign rally in Iowa City, Joe Biden dismissed concerns that China is surpassing the U.S. as a world superpower. "China is going to eat our lunch?" he said. "Come on, man! I mean, you know, they're not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They're not competition for us." The Chinese Communist leaders, with their militarism, slave labor camps, oppression of Hong Kong, and deliberate global spread of COVID-19 are "not bad folks"? It is incredibly dangerous for an American president to be this naïve about the intentions and capabilities of Communist China.
Biden plans to revive the Obama-era nuclear deal that would permit Iran to possess nuclear weapons within a decade. In 2015, the Iranians out-negotiated Obama's team and won relief from U.S. and international sanctions, without being deterred from their strategic objectives. Those objectives include the destruction of Israel by any means necessary, including nuclear war. The deal's sunset provisions remove restrictions on Iran's nuclear ambitions and pave the way for Tehran to become a legitimate nuclear power.
Will a Biden-Harris administration build on the amazing progress Donald Trump has made in the Middle East-or scuttle the Trump legacy and appease Iran? Will Biden continue the Trump policy of making NATO nations pay for their own defense-or return to making American taxpayers foot the bill?
7. The Radical Education-Indoctrination Agenda
The Biden-Harris-Progressive agenda for American education spells disaster for generations to come. That agenda has been largely written and shaped by the teachers' unions, whose sole focus is soaking up taxpayer dollars, not educating and caring for our children. The webpage on Biden's education page at JoeBiden.com/education reads like a teachers' union press release: "We have witnessed educators around the country-in states from West Virginia to Arizona to Kentucky-heroically organize walk-outs and other actions."
Another plank in the Biden education platform: "Defeat the National Rifle Association-again-in order to make our schools safer. . . . Biden knows that arming teachers isn't the answer; instead, we need rational gun laws." America already has rational gun laws, but Progressive politicians won't enforce them. Instead, they empty the prisons, turn dangerous people loose on society, and hamstring and defund the police.
On February 14, 2018, a student gunman killed 17 fellow students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed in the attack, called it "the most avoidable mass murder in American history." Despite a violent past, the killer was able to commit mass murder because of a lenient diversionary program that shielded potentially dangerous students from the criminal justice system. That diversionary program was the result of a 2014 Obama administration directive that was rescinded by the Trump administration after the Parkland killings. The Biden-Harris administration plans to restore such programs in the name of "social justice."
Expect Progressives in the Biden-Harris education establishment to double down on the teaching of dangerous ideologies such as critical race theory, along with revisionist history from the New York Times' corrosively anti-American 1619 Project.
American universities have become training grounds for violent radicals, including Antifa and Black Lives Matter. The rise of the "woke culture" and "cancel culture," and the rising hatred toward the Constitution, American history, the Founding Fathers, and our First Amendment freedoms can all be traced to radical indoctrination in institutions of higher learning. Meanwhile, employers complain that universities are churning out people with no competency in oral and written communication, math, or logic. In short, universities are dumbing down our young people and leaving them embittered toward America.
Why are tuition costs are rising much faster than the cost of living? Because the more taxpayer money the government pumps into student grants and loans, the more steeply these institutions hike tuitions-which drives students deeper into debt. The Progressive "answer" to the crisis they have engineered is "student loan forgiveness." The universities will continue indoctrinating our students, the lending institutions will get paid-but the taxpayer will be stuck with the bill for "student loan forgiveness."
8. The Green Raw Deal
This chapter will deal with the Biden-Harris agenda to solve "global warming" by bankrupting businesses and crippling the economy.
In May 2019, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, admitted that the Green New Deal was not devised as a solution to climate change, but as an agenda for a socialist takeover of the American economy. According to the Washington Post, Chakrabarti told Sam Ricketts, climate director for Washington governor Jay Inslee, "The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn't originally a climate thing at all."
This chapter delves into the truth about climate change, the Green New Deal, the Biden-Harris climate agenda, and what grassroots Americans can do to stand up against it.
9. The Open Borders Agenda
President Trump made enormous strides in securing the border, completing 265 miles of border wall (despite fierce Democratic opposition), protecting American workers from foreign worker admissions, suspending travel from nations where COVID-19 was rampant, cracking down on "birth tourism," enforcing the "safe third country" asylum rule, enforcing the legal responsibilities of immigrant sponsors, cracking down on "catch and release," and much more. After deploying 5,200 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in October 2018, the Border Patrol reported a steep decline in the number of encounters with illegal immigrants.
Acting Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner Mark Morgan told me, "[President Trump] has understood the problem, he's listened to the experts who risk their lives every single day on the front lines protecting this country, and he's given us the tools, policies, and initiatives to address the threat, to address the crisis. . . . He's given us Title 42, that allows us to apprehend and return people right at the border within two hours. That is what is been successful."
The Biden-Harris administration will take us back to the bad old days when illegal immigrants crossed the border in droves, sanctuary cities sheltered criminals, Americans lost jobs, and taxpayers shouldered skyrocketing social services costs so that Democrats could expand their base.
The Democrats' open border strategy is exemplified by Biden choice of Alejandro Mayorkas to head the Department of Homeland Security. According to a DHS inspector general report, Mayorkas facilitated the improper issuance of EB-5 visas for wealthy immigrants from Communist China, acting at the behest of powerful Democrats-Ed Rendell, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton's brother Anthony Rodham, and Terry McAuliffe. The EB-5 visa program grew rapidly in the Obama years as China worked hard to infiltrate the U.S. economy with Chinese money. As Senator Tom Cotton observed, this visa scandal is "disqualifying" for Mayorkas to lead DHS. But Biden wants Mayorkas on his team because Mayorkas is on board with the Biden-Harris open border plan.
10. Defunding Our Defenders
After the May 26, 2020, death of George Floyd, waves of protests, punctuated by violence and looting, spread across the nation. With agitation by the radical movements Black Lives Matter and Antifa, these protests gave rise to the "Defund the Police" movement, bent on abolishing police organizations and prisons. Many in the media could not believe the protestors literally wanted to abolish the police. But when interviewed, the radicals repeatedly insisted that's exactly what they wanted.
The notion of abolishing the police goes back to Black Reconstruction (1935) by W. E. B. Du Bois and 1960s Communist activist Angela Davis. The abolition of the police is a serious goal of American radicals. Progressive policymakers in New York, L.A., San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and Minneapolis have already adopted dangerous defunding measures.
This chapter will examine race relations, the decay of our inner cities, the sources of civil unrest, the consequences of the anti-police and reparations movements, the rise of Antifa and other anarchist movements, the siege of the suburbs, and the imperiled Second Amendment. Most important, it will show the reader how to get involved and make a difference.
11. An Assault on the Court and the Constitution
This chapter exposes the Progressive plan to reshape America by radically restructuring the court system, especially the United States Supreme Court. For example, Dana Remus, Biden's pick to serve as White House counsel, recently asked Democratic senators to recommend candidates for judicial nominations and to prioritize candidates who had served as public defenders and civil rights lawyers-left-wing activists who will enforce Progressive ideology, not the law.
12. Truth on the Scaffold: The American Media Disgrace
Every media outlet from the New York Times to the Washington Post to the alphabet networks colluded in a total news blackout on the Hunter Biden scandal prior to the election. It was one of the biggest news stories in American political history. Hunter Biden's emails suggested that his father, the sitting vice president, might have been skimming millions from Hunter's corrupt business dealings in Communist China and Ukraine. If you didn't read the New York Post or watch Fox News or NewsMaxTV, you probably never heard of the scandal.
Two honorable liberal journalists-Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept-were shocked and dismayed that their media colleagues were covering up the scandal. When Glenn Greenwald wrote an article on the Hunter Biden scandal for The Intercept, his editors censored it. Greenwald resigned in disgust from The Intercept-a news organization he had co-founded, but which had been taken over by "woke" radical journalists. Matt Taibbi responded, "The American left has lost its mind."
The news media will not ask Joe Biden any tough questions and will not tell the truth about Biden's possible involvement in Hunter Biden's corrupt schemes in Ukraine and China. For the first time in the history of American politics, the entire media establishment has decided that its primary responsibility is not to uncover the truth but to suppress it.
A prime example of the current corrupt state of the media was the questioning of candidate Joe Biden at a September 2020 press conference. It was an embarrassing softball game without a single challenging question about Biden's policies, his gaffes, his age, or the Hunter Biden scandal. The pro-Joe bias in the room was so blatant that even liberal media critics cried foul.
Because Biden rarely took questions from the press during the campaign, reporters should have been eager to seek meaningful policy-related answers. Instead, the media focused on attacking Trump, primarily over a disputed story in The Atlantic claiming Trump had disparaged fallen WWI soldiers while in France in 2018. Knowing Mr. Trump, I can tell you the claims in that story are completely out-of-character and wildly unbelievable.
Atlantic staff writer Edward-Isaac Dovere cited the story and asked, "When you hear these remarks-'suckers,' 'losers,' recoiling from amputees, what does it tell you about President Trump's soul and the life he leads?" CNN's MJ Lee also focused on attacking Trump instead of interrogating Biden, this time on the issue of COVID-19 and masks: "I wonder if you worry that this kind of language that comes from the president of the United States can deter some Americans who are tuning into him to not wear masks?" And CBS News correspondent Ed O'Keefe lobbed an attack on Trump joking that his supporters should vote twice, adding, "You said today is the angriest you've been as a presidential candidate, but you said you're trying to restrain yourself. Aren't there a lot of people out there who are supporting you or inclined to not vote for the president, who would say why isn't Joe Biden angrier about all of this?" These reporters were not engaged in journalism, but in fawningly partisan PR for Joe Biden and the DNC.
In October 2020, Biden visited an ice cream stand-one of the few times he emerged from his basement in view of the press. Reporters had a rare opportunity to ask him any question they wanted-so, of course, they asked him what flavor of ice cream he was buying. His reply was carefully crafted to avoid offending anyone: one scoop of chocolate and one scoop of vanilla.
Only one reporter, Bo Erickson of CBS, dared ask a serious question: "What is your response to the New York Post story about your son, sir?" A visibly annoyed Biden snapped, "I knew you'd ask it. I have no response. It's another smear campaign, right up your alley. Those are the questions you always ask." As the other reporters laughed at the only serious question of the encounter, Biden turned and walked away.
The media aided the Biden campaign by covering up Joe Biden's gaffes and verbal difficulties. For example, on December 8, 2020, Joe Biden stood before the news cameras and read an announcement from the TelePrompTer that he was naming Xavier Becerra as Secretary of Health and Human Services-yet those were not the words he spoke. Instead, Biden said, "For Secretary of Health and Education [unintelligible], I nominate Xavier Bockaria. You know- Xavier Besherra, excuse me." He went on to talk about Becerra's government experience, slurring his words so badly that it was impossible to follow what he was saying. He never did get Becerra's name right, and he named him to head a department ("Health and Education") that doesn't exist. This is not a criticism of Joe Biden; it's not unusual for people to experience these kinds of problems at age 78.
The target of my criticism is the mainstream media's conspiracy of silence around Joe Biden's gaffes and verbal chaos. Compare the media's cover-up of Biden's verbal flubs with the howls of derision when I referred to Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull as "Mr. Trumbull" in a press briefing. That was my mistake, and the Prime Minister was very gracious about it, but the American press still brings it up to this day while Biden's gaffe disappears into a memory hole.
If "democracy dies in darkness," as The Washington Post pompously proclaims on its masthead, why does the American media keep pulling down the shade?
This chapter will also deal with the parallel role played by Twitter, Facebook, and Google in squelching the Hunter Biden story and putting a high-tech thumb on the scale to elect Biden and Harris. Tech companies run by arrogant millennials have silenced the President of the United States, de-platformed the conservative-friendly app Parler, and hidden conservative sites like Human Events, Breitbart, and the Daily Caller from search engine results. As Marco Rubio observed, "We are now living in a country where four or five companies, unelected, unaccountable, have the monopoly power to decide, we're going to wipe people out, we're going to erase them from any digital platform."
The American people must keep the pressure on Congress to remove Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and require social media platforms to take responsibility for their selective and partisan suppression of information.
13. The Future of Elections
The Progressive mantra throughout most of the Trump administration was that Russia had hacked the 2016 election and was going to do it again in 2020. After the November 2020 election, when Biden was declared the winner, the Progressives abruptly flipped the script. Suddenly, Progressives wanted us to believe that the voting machines were 100 percent secured, the mail-in ballots were all legitimate, and there was no possibility of voter fraud whatsoever.
A Quinnipiac University poll finds that a third of Americans don't believe Biden's victory was legitimate, and 77 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of independents believe there was widespread voter fraud. Regardless of whether these perceptions are accurate, our democracy cannot endure if large segments of the voting population believe the election is rigged.
Voter confidence is undermined by rule changes that stripped the 2020 election of all the traditional safeguards again voter fraud. People need to believe that their vote counts if we are to unify American and restore confidence in our democracy. We must return to a system where we wait until the debates are over, the candidates have had their say, and we all go into the polls and cast our ballots, which are then collected in a secure, locked ballot box. When a large portion of the voting population feels not only disenfranchised but cheated, the result can only be a breakdown of the social order. Election reform is in the best interests of all Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike.
