During a campaign town hall held in Florence, South Carolina, on October 26, former Vice President – and current Democratic presidential candidate – told the audience that President Trump “said that migrants seeking refuge in America were [sic]‘these aren’t people, these are animals,’” adding that “our children are listening” and “words matter.”
Mr. Biden is certainly correct about the latter part of his statement – the children (and other Americans) are listening, and words do matter. That is why his false and misleading claim is all the more problematic. This holds true regardless of whether it was an intentional lie – an example of Biden choosing his own “truth” over facts – or simply a case of confusion and a typical Biden gaffe. In any case, someone who has been in politics for half a century, and is considered a “moderate,” should know better.
What is even more disturbing is that the former Delaware Senator and Vice President repeated the same claim before. In August, during a campaign event in Iowa, he asserted that Trump, during the 2018 midterm campaign, said “that immigrants would (…) ‘carve you up with a knife.’”
The reality is that, in both cases, the president was clearly referring to members of the violent and blood-thirsty Central American gang MS-13, whose motto is “kill, rape, control.” Many of their victims are illegal aliens. In fact, calling gang-bangers who hack their victims to death with machetes, dismember them, and cut out their hearts is probably an insult to animals! There is also evidence demonstrating that the brutal gang infiltrated the migrant caravans that had repeatedly attempted to enter into the United States.
In a May 2018 poll, a majority of Americans, 56 percent (which, no doubt, included quite a few Democrats), agreed that calling the members of MS-13 “animals” was fair.
Unfortunately, Biden’s comments reflect a larger pattern on the left. Even during the Obama years, leftist politicians, activists, and pundits sought to collapse and render meaningless any distinction between legal immigrants and illegal aliens, and to depict any criticism of illegal immigration as xenophobic hostility towards all immigrants. That is a dishonest sleight of hand worthy of Soviet propagandists.
In addition, ever since Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign and won the election, the Democrats have adopted a knee-jerk opposition to anything he says or does (on immigration or otherwise) – even to the point of defending murderous MS-13 gang-bangers. (Remember Nancy Pelosi’s infamous “sparks of divinity” comments?) Misrepresenting the president’s words in the hope of scaring or angering immigrant voters may seem like a clever electoral strategy to appeal to Democratic primary voters, but it is unlikely to play well beyond that narrow base. So yes, Mr. Biden, “words matter” indeed.
