Joe Biden, both while running for president and since then, has raised eyebrows on the right by quoting Mao Zedong, the architect of Communist China.
Joe claimed the innocuous phrase, “women hold up half the sky,” was just “an old Chinese proverb.” Good. He wasn’t plagiarizing.
Then the right dragged up Biden campaign advisor Anita Dunn, who listed Mother Teresa and Mao as “the two people that I turn to most” when challenging others to blaze their own trail. Dunn claimed (perhaps correctly) she learned Mao’s “You fight your war and I’ll fight mine” from the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater.
The GOP’s attempt to condemn Biden for these Mao quotes fell on deaf ears. But in his State of the Union speech, Biden challenged members of Congress to “Name me a world leader who’d change places with Xi Jinping.”
Perhaps he would?
History suggests the Biden Administration – from the top down – has much more in common with Mao than with Xi – in many ways.
And, shockingly, today’s America is 70 years behind China when seen through socialist (Maoist) eyes. Our “revolution” is just beginning. Theirs is mature.
Mao’s early “success” devolved from the iron fist of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its cadres. Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar says the People’s Republic was perhaps the “best run and most tightly disciplined party-state within the Communist bloc.”
Similarly, Biden’s victories stem from the tight discipline of the Democratic Party. One dissimilarity – Mao and the CCP stamped out rampant inflation; Biden has yet to do that.
MacFarquhar says Mao’s cadres brutally ensured everyone knew who was in charge. Biden’s FBI’s raids and conspiring with big media to suppress damaging news – and the harsh sentences doled out for January 6 “Capitol visitors” – seek a similar result.
Mao seized control of China’s traditional private sector by collectivizing or nationalizing agriculture, commerce, and industry and launching a Five-Year Plan. The Biden White House has shuttered entire industries, threatened others with sanctions (or lured them with subsidies), and demanded they adopt his “Net Zero” vision.
Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was a mass mobilization intended to enable China to become the world’s premier power. But the campaign “was a catastrophe, resulting in the worst man-made famine in history, with a death toll upwards of 30 million.”
Biden’s beloved Green New Deal, thankfully, has yet to be fully implemented. This grandiose plan to eliminate fossil fuels, like other utopian scenarios, suspiciously seems devoid of any practical means of full energy replacement, let alone increasing supply to power an all-electric society. In short, it is a disaster waiting to happen.
Meanwhile, Biden’s COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates (and subsequent firings of key health care and military personnel) cost many American lives and jobs – and in some cases, life savings. The remaking of America is under way.
Biden today is attempting to enforce the Green New Deal to “decarbonize” the United States – the modern-day equivalent of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Can we expect a similar long-term result? Will this devastation of the capitalist U.S. economy (and its concomitant free-spirited culture) succeed in creating a new nation ready and eager for total one-party control?
Biden acolytes are fomenting a “cultural revolution” to replace equality under the law with “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Major criminals roam free, children are pressured to champion genital mutilation, and faith-based institutions and individuals are openly attacked. Biden’s DOJ ignores violence against crisis pregnancy centers, synagogues, and even Supreme Court justices.
Mao’s own Cultural Revolution, enforced by its Red Guard, condemned capitalism as an evil to be eliminated – along with the capitalists. He shuttered academic institutions and forced intellectuals into labor camps. His “Hundred Flowers” campaign encouraged citizens to speak openly, “promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science,” then cracked down on anyone who took the bait.
Today, BLM and Antifa ruffians roam free while academic institutions espouse “woke” critical race theory and its inherent biases. Many actively suppress contrary thought and action. Professors and students alike are forced to “confess” their “sins” and repent – and still face ostracism and little hope of a positive recommendation.
San Francisco celebrates street feces and felons. State governors gloat over how quickly they intend to ban fossil fuels. Government schools focus more on outward appearance and ever-changing correctness than on inward character and academic competency. Chaos is rampant. And through this chaos is emerging the full monte “Biden” radical agenda.
According to MacFarquhar, Mao “became obsessed with the notion that the fate of the Chinese revolution depended on the rearing of a younger generation of truly revolutionary leaders.” America’s youth are well indoctrinated by radical teacher unions, TikTok and other social media, and a woke culture that deplatforms dissenters from the narrative. They are Biden’s hope.
MacFarquhar says Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, “freed” the Chinese economy (but not its politics) from the tyranny of ideology and began the “long march” toward economic domination built on slave labor and the theft of intellectual property. Mao, despite his failings, “had liberated the masses to make revolution.” And then Deng “liberated them to make money.”
Joe Biden, despite his failings, is (perhaps unwittingly) doing his part to “liberate the masses to make revolution,” one to be led by a younger generation that despises the “American experiment” in freedom and trashes all of Western culture. The evidence is overwhelming.
Barring a major reversal by America’s media and educators, Biden’s legacy may well be compared with Mao’s. Both focused on total transformation of a nation and silencing of dissent. Ethics, even honesty, are out the window – the only thing that matters is power and control.
In Biden’s America the socialist revolution is well under way – and with it, a renewed commitment to reindustrialization. If things go as planned, the new industry will be under the control of an American counterpart to the CCP.
Hiring, production, and other decisions will be subject to approval, or directly controlled by, a “woke” central government. Profit will no longer be the measure of success; already success has been redefined as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
If Biden has his way, the “rotting corpse” of American capitalism will soon be replaced with the “glorious” rebirth of an America that emulates the China of Mao, Deng, and Xi. And why not?
China, far more even than Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, has captured the world market for critical minerals needed to power an all-electric future – one that Biden worships. The one that America’s children are told is both inevitable and greatly to be desired.
Yet most “conservative” pundits reinforce the myth that America is still a free nation – that those who support “Bidenism” are just “misguided.” Little has been done to stop the indoctrination of tomorrow’s comrades, though (quite surprisingly to the GOP managers), Black and Hispanic voters are fleeing Biden’s world.
Biden’s Maoist adventure can be stopped. But without addressing academic and corporate rot, without creating youthful soldiers of freedom, who can stop the “long march” towards a totalitarian state?
They say, “He who hesitates is lost.” China sent up a trial balloon, and Biden hesitated. And China laughed.
But freedom is no laughing matter.
Duggan Flanakin is Director of Policy Research with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes about a multitude of issues, innovations, and ideas.