Joe Biden's frequent plagiarism has cost him his chance for the presidency before. History seems to be on the verge of repeating itself yet again.
As is well-known by now, Biden has plagiarized speeches from other politicians many times during his career, appropriating passages from the likes of Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.
The deceitful practice began at least as far back as law school, and continues to this day, with Biden’s campaign just recently releasing a list of policy proposals, many of which were stolen word-for-word from the platform of Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden’s fiercest opponent during the primary campaign.
Undoubtedly the most famous instance of the former vice president “borrowing” material, of course, is the incident that forced him to drop out of the 1988 presidential race: his shameless appropriation of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock’s heartfelt and personal story about his and his wife’s ancestors who struggled to make a living in the coal fields of South Wales. Biden shamelessly repeated the story almost word-for-word, simply changing the setting to Pennsylvania.
Today, Joe Biden finds himself in much the same political position that Kinnock once did: the leader of an increasingly radical leftist party charting a course for electoral annihilation.
Despite his tireless campaigning and moving public addresses, Kinnock lost handily to the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher in 1987, and then again to John Major in 1992. He lost because the British people recognized that Neil Kinnock stood at the head of an army of left-wing extremists he could not possibly restrain.
Now, more than 30 years later, the hapless Joe Biden is likewise letting a disorderly mob lead him around by the nose.
When he became leader of the Labour Party in 1983, Kinnock inherited a dispirited organization that had suffered two embarrassing defeats in 1979 and 1983. Like Joe Biden’s Democratic Party of today, Labour took exactly the wrong lesson from their humiliation and drifted further and further to the left.
Kinnock, a supposed “moderate,” had to contend with the fact that the most vibrant and energized section of his party was the openly communist “Militant” faction, a tight-knit group of Trotskyite activists and intellectuals who took over the Labour Party apparatus and demanded complete subservience to their program. After its defeat in 1979, the Labour Party tried to appease the far-left with a 1983 manifesto that is still fittingly known as “the longest suicide note in history.” Labour lost the 1983 election even worse than it had lost the last one.
Like the British voter of the 1980s, we ought to be cautious about electing a man who would give free rein to his party’s left-wing fringe — exemplified in our case by extremist politicians such as Representative Ilhan Omar and her “dismantle America” rhetoric, as well as the activist-driven bursts of manic energy such as the “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police” movement.
This radical, anti-American movement is unofficially led at the national level by Sen. Sanders, a lifelong apologist for repressive communist dictatorships such as Cuba and the Soviet Union. Instead of relegating Sanders and his frenzied followers to the back bench, Biden is studiously copying their policy notes, faithfully reproducing their proposals — such as replacing police officers with social workers — verbatim.
Joe Biden’s latest plagiarism is arguably far worse than his past indiscretions. This time, he’s lifting passages straight from the bible of the militant far-left fringe of the Democratic Party, amplifying and empowering a movement that holds the United States and everything this country represents in undisguised contempt.
Nick Adams is a best-selling author and the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness (FLAG).