One speech was never going to turn the country around, but it would have gone a long way in showing America that Joe Biden was willing to. After 13 months of hardship, loss, fear, and uncertainty, there was a lot of talk before the State of the Union that this was the president’s chance to “reboot” his administration, to pivot after a catastrophic year. Instead, the president spent 6,476 words to say one thing: there was never anything wrong to begin with.

There were nods to the political ditch Biden is in — like calls to fund the police. Vows to secure the border and fix immigration. For the first time ever, Biden proved he could give a speech without the words “Black Lives Matter” or assailing half the country as racist, segregationist pigs. He admitted that Americans are “tired, frustrated, and exhausted,” but never once acknowledged his role in their despair — or his policies’ disastrous effects. If people tuned in hoping to hear a realistic plan for adapting to the crises at hand, they went to bed disappointed.

With the exception of the first 12 minutes, when Biden focused on Ukraine, there was nothing to suggest that the White House plans to change anything. Even on the Russian invasion, the tough talk that drew the most sincere applause, the president made no mention of reconsidering his energy policy, defense spending, or hitting the world’s evil regimes where it hurts. Unlike Europe’s leaders, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board points out, Biden has shown no appetite for upending his agenda and meeting the moment. “An anxious world is looking for American leadership in a dangerous new era. Instead, Mr. Biden offered a rehash of his first-year domestic agenda that has brought him to his low political ebb. It’s dispiriting that a White House facing so many daunting challenges could come up with so little.”

In place of political courage, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) argued on “Washington Watch,” what “Putin and all of our enemies see [is] Biden worshipping at the altar of the Green New Deal.” That’s “what funds Vladimir Putin’s war machine in Ukraine,” he shook his head. “[With] the amount of fuel that we’re taking in from Russia every single day — 500 to 600 million barrels coming in… we’re literally paying for [his] war in Ukraine.”

Perry predicted that Biden wouldn’t talk about the “abject failures” of his pandemic policy or economic policy, rising crime rates, and runaway inflation. “It will all be about Ukraine,” he said. And to some extent, Perry was right. The Russian invasion was a helpful prop for a president desperate for distractions from his failed agenda. “It could be the shortest State of the Union ever if he just came to the podium and said, ‘The State of the Union is in awful condition’ and walked out. Because that’s how most Americans feel right now.”

But, as most of the country has come to expect from this president, reality wasn’t on Tuesday night’s menu. (Your fingers will cramp just trying to scroll through all of the things Biden got wrong in his speech.) Almost comically, “he acted as if his first year in office was a smashing success and desperately tried to resell a dead agenda,” NRO mocked. Deaf to irony, Biden said things like, “The pandemic has been punishing” — ignoring the fact that his vaccine mandates have been more so, driving out health care workers and service members from much-needed jobs. He argued, “the watchdogs are back,” a reminder that outspoken parents, the target of his DOJ attack dogs, didn’t need. When he said, “Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies,” most Americans probably wanted to scream at their TVs, “You first!”

There were the eye-rolling lines about “getting prices under control” — while he pimped for his inflation-busting plans like universal pre-K, Build Back Better (you’ll like it now, I promise!), more infrastructure, taxes, and climate change. In one particularly painful segment, Biden talked about his great love for our military and how our “troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have faced many dangers” — many of which, those watching would point out, were a direct result of his botched withdrawal from Kabul. And yet there was no mention of the Afghanistan humiliation that cost 13 U.S. soldiers their lives, stranded thousands of Americans, and put our Afghan friends at the mercy of Taliban death squads.

And while the president claimed, “we can’t change how divided we’ve been,” he did suggest a way to keep America divided in the future: radical abortion and transgender policy. “If you want to go forward, not backwards, we must… preserve a woman’s right to choose,” he insisted. Then, in a slap in the face to girls’ sports, science, religious freedom, privacy, women’s rights, and parents, Biden ordered Congress to pass the most extreme piece of LGBT legislation in history. “And folks, for our LGBTQ Americans, let’s finally get the bipartisan Equality Act to my desk. The onslaught of state laws targeting transgender Americans and their families is simply wrong.”

Of course, it wouldn’t have been an official speech if Biden hadn’t reiterated his obsession with gender identity. To “our younger transgender Americans,” he wanted them to know, “I’ll always have your back as your president, so you can be yourself and reach your God-given potential.” It’s another example of Democrats grossly misreading the room — to devastating consequences. While states are racing to protect children from a life of irreversible suffering, parents are at war with local school boards to stop the indoctrination, and professional athletes are speaking out to protect girls’ trophies and scholarships, the president of the free world is telling vulnerable, mixed-up kids, “I have your back” — instead of the truth about the pain they’re pursuing.

But then, truth isn’t a frequent visitor at this White House, as anyone tuning in to the State of the Union could attest. Most Americans who braved the president’s fiction eventually turned off the TV and returned to the hard realities we wish he’d address. Until then, we find our hope elsewhere — in parents’ voices, trucker convoys, and all leaders who understand that our rights come from God. May Tuesday night serve to remind us that our trust is not — and never will be — in Washington, D.C. but in the King of Kings. “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses; But we will remember the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7).

Originally published here.

Zuckerberg Delivers Ballots of Cash

If it looks, swims, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. On Tuesday a Wisconsin Office of Special Counsel reported a “bribery scheme” discovered in the 2020 election, in which the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) unequally funded “get out the vote” (GOTV) efforts in heavily Democratic counties. They conclude, despite Democrats’ refrain about “no evidence of widespread voter fraud” (at least in elections where they win), that “security gaps… tend to enable bad actors to operate in the shadows,” as shown by their catalog of “numerous questionable and unlawful actions of various actors in the 2020 election.”

The CTCL got much of its cash from tech-baron Mark Zuckerberg, hence the nickname “Zuckerbucks.” It then began doling out the cash to stimulate absentee and in-person voting — but only to Democratic areas. Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha, and Green Bay all received $10,000 grants, but that quickly grew into “a joint operation.” When all was said and done, those five Wisconsin urban centers had received $8.8 million to get out the vote. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went to locating ballot drop boxes in “targeted neighborhoods,” which the report said violated Wisconsin election law. The report contended that the grants and local election offices violated the law “by not treating all voters the same in the same election … a bedrock of principle of election law.”

To be clear, the report does not allege widespread voter fraud. There was no violation of the “one citizen, one vote” principle. What the report does show is a well-funded effort by government-run election boards to systematically turn out more votes in regions known to lean towards one political party. Political parties and candidates are allowed to do this; in fact, GOTV efforts are essential parts of every modern political campaign. What is illegal here is that election administrators put their thumb on the scale for one political party. In the words of the report, they “crossed the line between election administration and campaigning.”

The Zuckerbucks program wasn’t limited to Wisconsin. In Georgia, CTCL had “average grants of $1.41 per head in Trump areas and $5.33 in Biden ones.” In total, Mark Zuckerberg bankrolled the non-profit organization to deliver $350 million to nearly 2,500 election departments across the country. Laundered as this money was through an ostensibly non-partisan non-profit to local election administrators, it bypassed the rules governing campaign contributions from private individuals.

How many votes can you buy with $350 million? Possibly enough to swing a close election. But to know for certain, we would have to prove how many votes would not have been cast if the money had not been spent, and that’s impossible. The money was spent unfairly, but this is one wrong that can’t be righted retroactively — at least, not by human judges.

But we don’t have to stand for such ongoing abuse of our election system. Legislatures in several states are moving quickly to block private sources of funding from election administration. The Senate elections committee in Minnesota yesterday took up a bill to do just that. Several states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio, already have laws against private funding in place. Your state legislators can hear from you, too.

Then again, money isn’t everything in elections. During the 2018 “blue wave,” Democrats failed to defeat Senator Mitch McConnell with $90 million or Senator Lindsey Graham with $57 million. If the other side has an unfair advantage with funding, we shouldn’t abandon the electoral process. We the people must fight back harder and take our revenge at the ballot box.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.