From affirmative action to the safety net, liberals help you so they can tell you to shut up
Opinion by Timothy P. Carney, Washington Examiner, 7/6/23
President Joe Biden’s White House, for the past year, has led a juvenile and misleading line of attack on critics of its illegal plan to forgive half a trillion dollars of student loans.
You see, some of the people who object to Biden’s unilateral handout to the upper-middle class are business owners who partook in a COVID-19-era relief program that allowed them to pay their employees while the government barred the businesses from making money.
The comparison between student loan forgiveness and Paycheck Protection Program is so grossly inapt, that it makes you wonder what is going on in the heads of people who make it.
Likewise, media liberals think it counts as a smart critique of Clarence Thomas’s opposition to affirmative action when they assert that at some point in his career, his skin color helped him. Of course, nobody believes “You once benefitted from X, and therefore you cannot criticize X” is a good argument, and so once again, we have to wonder why liberals keep making it.
Here’s the common thread between these two illogical arguments: The American Left supports special programs that are supposed to help people, and if you ever benefit from those programs, they will use it as a way to attack you if you ever disagree with any of their policies.
Given that PPP was effectively a grant program and was designed as reparations for government-mandated closures, it has no more in common with student loan forgiveness than does the Wall Street Bailout, ethanol subsidies, or food stamps. The essence of the liberal argument here is this: The moment you accepted federal money for any reason, you signed away your right to criticize whatever federal giveaway or aid program we might come up with next.
Once you see that, you see another motive for federal aid programs and for affirmative action: They are ways to buy off would-be critics.
Also, what message does this send to any Republican tempted to compromise with Democrats on anything?: If you side with us on anything, we will use it against you.
This is why I’ve said the Biden line of argument is worse than typical politician dishonesty and crosses into depravity. It tries to use people’s past suffering (from lockdowns or whatever else) as a way to attack them.
It is not surprising Joe Biden would do this. We can only hope that his allies in media and the Democratic Party stop playing this ugly game.