Yesterday, Joe Biden took a taxpayer-funded trip to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he was supposed to unify Americans behind a “Safer America” agenda to support law enforcement and reduce crime. It was meant to be a layup speech for his Thursday night address about saving democracy and promoting Unity™. Instead, an angry old man divided Americans with an unhinged, hateful, and at times downright threatening message condemning his political opponents. Taxpayers should demand a refund for that disgraceful and decidedly unpresidential demagoguery.

In the last few days Biden has declared: “I respect conservative Republicans. I don’t respect these MAGA Republicans.” He referred to Republican policies as “semi-fascism.” Yesterday was no better.

Let’s start with his implied threats to American citizens.

For those brave, right-wing Americans who say it’s all about keeping America — keeping America as independent and safe: If you want to fight against a country, you need an F-15. You need something a little more than a gun.

Biden has made this veiled threat more than once before by way of “proving” his argument that banning AR-15s won’t really infringe on Liberty. Last time, he added “and maybe some nuclear weapons” while butchering Thomas Jefferson’s remarks about the tree of Liberty.

Well, that’s just the point. The reason the Second Amendment recognizes the God-given right to keep and bear arms is to provide a check on government tyranny. That’s why Americans own an estimated 20 million AR-15s. To say it’s a bad look for the president of the United States to practically threaten millions of U.S. citizens over this right would be the understatement of the century.

As political analyst Margot Cleveland quipped, “So, ‘Safer America’ means, …checks notes: A government threatening its citizens with F-15s.”

It’s beyond ironic that Biden made these remarks on the one-year anniversary of his surrender of Afghanistan, in which he armed the victorious Taliban with billions of dollars in abandoned U.S. military equipment.

Let’s move on to his factual blunders and outright lies.

We’re living in a country awash with weapons of war, weapons that weren’t designed to hunt — were designed to take on an enemy. There — that’s what they’re designed to do. For God’s sake, what’s the rationale for these weapons outside of a war zone? They inflict severe damage.

When I was recently in Uvalde — I almost hesitate to say this, with some of the kids in here — you know what some of the parents had to do? Supply DNA. Supply DNA. Because AR-15s just rips the body apart. Could not identify — could not identify the body. And a 20-year-old kid can walk in and buy one? DNA to say, “That’s my baby.” What the hell is the matter with us? …

Do you realize the bullet out of an AR-15 travels five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun, five times — is lighter — and can pierce Kevlar?

Fact-check: False. Misleading. Missing context.

As stated above, the Second Amendment doesn’t protect only hunting rifles, Joe. Damage from gunshot wounds depends far more on the ammunition used than the velocity of the rounds, and AR-15s are not uniquely dreadful on either count. Whether bullets can “pierce Kevlar” is determined by the level of protection offered by that Kevlar. Thicker plating can indeed stop 5.56 rounds fired from an AR-15.

Given the foolish advice about shotguns and the whoppers Biden tells regarding gunshot wounds and the like, he’d do well to stop relying on Hollywood for his information on guns and armor.

We have to act for all those kids gunned down on our streets every single day that never make the news. There’s a mass shooting every single day in this country in the streets of America — every single day.

Most “kids” gunned down in the streets are members of gangs in Democrat-run inner cities, and the definition of “mass shooting” depends less on commonly understood terms than on the immediate rhetorical needs of Democrats and their propagandists in the press.

Now for his plan to ban “assault weapons.”

My plan also takes commonsense action to reduce gun violence and violence overall. It builds on the progress we made this summer when I signed into law the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the most significant gun safety law we passed in 30 years. It took 30 years.

And we beat the NRA. We took them on, and we beat the NRA straight up. You have no idea how intimidating they are to elected officials. The NRA was against it, which means the vast majority — the vast majority of Republicans in Congress couldn’t even stand up and vote for it because they’re afraid of the NRA. …

We took on the NRA, and we’re going to take them on again. And we won. And we will win again. But we’re not stopping here. I’m determined to ban assault weapons in this country.

The NRA spends less money on lobbying than do anti-gun zealots on the Left. And the reason Republicans tend to line up with the NRA isn’t because they’re scared; it’s because — we know this may be hard for Biden to understand — both Republicans and the NRA value the U.S. Constitution and the fundamental rights it recognizes.

Amidst all the attacks on Republicans, Biden did offer one significant, albeit veiled, rebuke of his own side:

You know, I call it the Safer America Plan, and … it’s based on a simple notion: When it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not “defund the police,” it’s “fund the police.” Fund the police.

“Defund the police” is a movement exclusive to the radical leftists who control the Democrat Party. It’s part of an insane, race-baiting backlash against cops after a handful of belligerent black thugs were killed by police. And that Democrat-led backlash unleashed a deadly crime wave across the country over the last couple of years. It’s swell of Biden to take the other side now, but he ought to explicitly acknowledge which side created the problem.

Finally, there was the anti-MAGA business, in which Biden predictably dredged up the January 6 Capitol riot, including implying some gross falsehoods about it.

Let me say this to my MAGA Republican friends in Congress: Don’t tell me you support law enforcement if you won’t condemn what happened on the 6th. … For God’s sake, whose side are you on? …

Look, you’re either on the side of a mob or the side of the police. You can’t be pro-law enforcement and pro-insurrection. You can’t be a party of law and order and call the people who attacked the police on January 6th “patriots.”

First of all, enough with all the Insurrection™ nonsense. That said, people who attack police — whether during the Capitol riot, the countless Democrat-supported “Black Lives Matter” riots all over the country, or in individual circumstances — deserve to be locked up. Enough with the Democrat double standard.

Later, Biden relayed one of his famous anecdotes about how other national leaders had welcomed his presidency.

And one of them said to me, “Imagine, Joe, if you turned on the television in Washington, DC, and saw a mob of a thousand people storming down the hallways of the parliament, breaking down the doors trying to overturn an outcome of election and killing several police officers in the meantime. Imagine. Imagine what you’d think.”

Think about what the world saw. Not what we saw — what the world saw. Did you ever think, in the United States, that would happen?

Police lost their lives as a result of that day. Police lost their lives.

If the Leftmedia “fact-checkers” weren’t so busy lying about January 6 themselves, they’d bust Biden for this egregious lie. No police officers were killed in the Capitol riot. Officer Brian Sicknick, whose casket Democrats disgracefully used as a podium for their cynical Insurrection™ charade, died the next day of unrelated causes — not, as Democrats and the media insist, from being struck in the head by a rioter wielding a fire extinguisher.

No, Joe, the only person killed on January 6 was an unarmed Trump supporter named Ashley Babbitt, who was shot in the neck by Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd.

Biden moved on to defend the FBI and law enforcement more generally.

It’s sickening to see the new attacks on the FBI, threatening the life of law enforcement agents and their families for simply carrying out the law and doing their job.

Look, I want to say this as clear as I can: There is no place in this country — no place for endangering the lives of law enforcement. No place.

Again, though there are always unhinged folks on the fringes of any political movement, it is primarily thugs in Democrat-run urban centers who kill police officers.

But it’s worth noting that Biden likely feels a particular affinity for the FBI because without it he would not be president today. Having learned all the wrong lessons from Hillary Clinton’s email fiasco, the FBI led the cover-up of Joe Biden’s pay-to-play corruption involving his son Hunter’s business dealings. By falsely smearing Hunter’s laptop as “Russian disinformation,” the FBI even gave Big Tech all the cover needed to suppress stories about it before the 2020 election. Had voters known that the Bidens presented a corrupt national security threat, it’s unlikely that Basement Joe would be in the Oval Office.

The Associated Press found it curious that Biden would defend the FBI, though its scribes mentioned only that “his son Hunter faces a federal investigation for tax evasion.” For good measure, they add, “He has not faced any charges, and he’s previously denied wrongdoing.” Well that’s a relief!

Joe Biden began his presidency with an Inaugural Address about Unity™. “To make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies,” he said then. “They are not our enemies, they are Americans.” We didn’t believe him then, given that he’s a man who has spent his entire half-century career in Washington sanctimoniously berating his opponents and critics and who had just won the election by fomenting division and hatred all over the country. Nineteen months into his first and only term (29 long months to go), his divisive anger and repeated “F-15s” threats continue to prove our skepticism to be well deserved.