The Biden Administration continually calls to mind the old expression “and the band played on,” typically used to describe the masking or downplaying of an impending calamity.
When a number of large banks went under a few months ago, horror stories began surfacing as to how they and other sectors in the economy are being held hostage to the woke agenda. There was widespread pressure from the Biden Administration to move away from priorities like maximizing profits and productivity and focus instead on promoting things like racial diversity in the workplace, economic advancement of minorities, combating climate change, eliminating reliance on fossil fuels, and turning our criminal justice system away from a focus on law enforcement to the welfare of the accused.
While the bank failures made many of us sit up and take notice of the dangers of wokeism, the tumult surrounding the National Defense Authorization Act recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives caught the attention of many more.
As the New York Post reports, the House approved $860 billion in defense spending for the next fiscal year by a 219-210 vote. The bill included some Republican-backed measures banning U.S. military funding for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, the teaching of critical race theory, and green energy programs.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy explained their point:
Radical programs that are forced on our troops at the expense of readiness are now eliminated. Cutting edge technology that is essential for the future of this country, and to protect freedom in a world that is seeing a rising China and Russia, will receive more investment than we’ve seen in the past.
According to the Washington Examiner, President Joe Biden’s push to make all military vehicles electric was particularly concerning: “We’re going to start the process for every vehicle in the United States military, every vehicle is going to be climate friendly,” Biden was quoted as saying. “I mean it. We’re spending billions of dollars to do it.”
It is one thing to make it harder for most people to own and operate an automobile, which will be the major consequence of an electric car mandate, but it is quite another to jeopardize American troops by making them rely on access to infrastructure to plug in electric vehicles – significantly, the President did not provide a status update on getting that technology in place. Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the Biden Administration set a 2030 deadline to switch all non-tactical military vehicles to electric, a tacit acknowledgement of the special risks and unpredictability in a combat zone.
Ironically, China is on track to control a third of the world’s lithium by 2025 because the Biden administration continues to make it harder to develop the rare earth minerals to build electric vehicle batteries, according to the Examiner. Switching to electric military vehicles would make us even more dependent on China, a frightening thought in light of all the talk about a probable military confrontation between the U.S. and China over Taiwan sometime soon.
Perhaps it is time for Biden to concern himself more with how to properly equip our fighting men and women and less with his obsession with climate change.
