Biden and AOC are hopelessly out of touch with Americans

In an interview with Vice, AOC laments President Trump's assertion that Americans should all go back to normal as soon as possible. Turns out that she was never in favour of normal in the first place.

“There’s a lot that we could be doing right now, but ultimately, I think when we talk about this idea of ‘reopening society’ y’know, only in America does the president, when the president tweets about liberation, does he mean ‘go back to work.’ When we have this discussion about ‘going back,’ or ‘reopening,’ I think a lot of people should just say ‘no, we’re not going back to that, we’re not going back to working 70 hour weeks just so that we can put food on the table and not even feel any sort of semblance of security in our lives.”

In her view, Americans who are unable to feed their families or pay for their housing should refuse to enter into employment that would allow them to do those things. She is confused by the idea that people want to work, people want to be useful, to feed their families as a result of their labour. From her home, where she is still employed and working for the American public, and her constituents in the Bronx, she suggests that the lives from which we have been forcibly separated were just no good to begin with.

The US has lost over 26 million jobs, that’s 26 million people who no longer have an income, whose lives were forcibly upended by a pandemic they did not cause, yet bear the brunt of its calamity. The US is at a 20 percent unemployment rate, and many of the lost jobs are in the service sector. Working Americans who were already living paycheck to paycheck are now without any income at all, other than unemployment.

And she’s not the only one who sees a need to upend an already decimated economy. Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden is equally as clueless about what’s important to the majority of Americans right now. Speaking to Al Gore, climate change activist and Vice President under Bill Clinton, Biden said that he would rejoin the Paris Climate Accords, and would gather all the world’s polluters in Washington, DC, to get them to change course on fossil fuel consumption and pollution from that.

Biden insists that we need to change the direction of industry to wind farms, electric vehicles, and solar panel installation, that we need to retrofit buildings.

“You hear politicians talk about addressing climate change and that they can create real jobs and that we can turn this [pandemic] from a very big negative into a potential positive. Is that true do you think?”

“Let me frame it up this way,” Gore replied, “We’ve had a lot of discussion about the similarities between the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis and the biggest similarity is we see with the pandemic the danger of ignoring the scientists warnings until it’s almost too late, and that’s the exact parallel with the climate crisis.”

Biden went on to demand that industry change its ways, and that the US needs to take the lead on getting other nations to make those changes as well.

“If we don’t organize the world, who organizes it? Who organizes it? And so there’s so much. Look, one more question here is it too late to address the climate change in a meaningful way, can we still make the meaningful kind of impact in time to save the environment and to make sure that our kids and our grandkids and our great grand kids are gonna see blue sky, breathe clean air, and in fact be in a situation that is fundamentally different from the direction it’s going now?”

However, the climate is currently recovering from decades of fossil fuel use and the emissions and pollution it has caused. Around the world, as people have gone inside, turned off their cars, powered down their factories, air has cleared in otherwise heavily polluted areas, like New Delhi and Los Angeles. Climate change activists have long been encouraging world industrialists to shut down, change course, and consider the climate before their economic interests.

Turns out that doesn’t look so great. The coronavirus pandemic has forced industry to shutter, businesses to close, and humanity to stop working, and the effects of that are mass unemployment. Yet climate activists like Biden and AOC are managing to use this pandemic to continue to insist that disrupting the economy to save the planet is the right thing to do.

We have now seen what an economic shutdown looks like. Petroleum storage is full. Oil is not being used because there is no demand. Fossil fuel consumption is not the problem. Americans working hard to feed their families is not the problem. The problem is that the people who want to lead us don’t seem to care even a little about the priorities of most Americans.

Perhaps AOC and Biden believe that there is a perfect society that we can achieve if everyone stops working, the government diverts a once successful economy into creating both supply and demand for sustainable energy resources, and no one has to worry about feeding their families. But if so, they have sorely underestimated the American people, who prefer to work hard, take care of their families, and engage in an economy that rewards American industry instead of squashes it.