Joe Biden’s Radical Advisers

Tonight Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden will have a fundraiser with Beto O’Rourke – yes, the failed Senate candidate from Texas who has promised to confiscate all of the nation’s guns. As a reward, Biden told O’Rourke he would lead the Biden administration’s control push, because “the country needs you.”

After O’Rourke endorsed Biden at a rally in Dallas in March, Biden said:

“I want to make something clear, I’m going to guarantee you this is not the last you’ve seen of [O’Rourke]. You’re going to take care of the gun problem with me. You’re going to be the one who leads this effort. I’m counting on you. I’m counting on you … the state needs you, the country needs you. You’re the best.”

Yet, O’Rourke isn’t the only radical progressive Biden has sought to bring into his inner-circle. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has signed on to co-chair his campaign climate task-force.

During the primary, AOC strongly rejected Biden’s “middle ground” climate policy, arguing Americans had to fundamentally transform how we produce energy, build homes, drive cars, harvest crops, raise livestock, and manufacture goods – all within 10 years. She’s the co-author of the “Green New Deal” which would cost the average household at least $70,000 in the first year of its rollout, and a cool quarter-million dollars after five years.

It was AOC’s former chief of staff who admitted The Green New Deal wasn’t “originally a climate thing at all,” but a “how do you change the entire economy thing,” – in other words, it’s a transition from our market-based economy into socialism. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that “the Green New Deal represents the greatest centralization of power, in the hands of the Washington elite, in our history.”

Biden’s heralded it as “a crucial framework” to his agenda.

The Green New Deal calls for banning fracking –which would cost nearly 6 million jobs and increase household energy spending by $4,500 a year. Biden himself said he was willing to displace hundreds of thousands of oil and gas workers to transition to a green economy. On the campaign trail he said: “Anybody who learns how to throw coal into a blast furnace or knows how to run a machine is going to be able to learn how to run a machine making solar panels on the floor.”

Goodbye high-paying oil and gas jobs! Biden wants to retrain you to work in an industry which has no demand in the middle of an international pandemic. The Green New Deal would effectively destroy America’s energy industry, and with it, our entire economy.

Newsweek reported Biden plans “the most radical economic overhaul since FDR,” taking pages out of Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s playbook – the later who is on the short-list of his potential vice president picks.

“In an economic address in early May, Biden (who did not respond to several requests from Newsweek for an interview) talked about remaking the country’s unemployment insurance system, providing paid sick leave and child care support, guaranteeing access to higher education and high-quality health care and putting more protections in place to ensure fair wages among other measures. It’s a veritable laundry list of progressive agenda items, New Deal-like in its intent to strengthen the social safety net and revive prosperity. And it’s likely to lead to what many observers are describing as the most liberal platform in the history of the Democratic Party.

The new economic agenda represents a swift, sharp turn for the typically moderate Biden, who during the primary debates scoffed at the impracticality of many of the policy positions he’s now adopting.”

So is Biden a moderate? Hardly. He’s leaning on the most radical progressives in his party to set his presidential agenda.