Gaffe Machine: Biden Wrongly Claims 40 Students Were Shot at Kent State in 1970

The problem with Joe Biden isn’t that he’s a leftist. Every single Democrat is. No, the real problem with this guy is that he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about. Politics, history, race relations… it doesn’t matter. Imagine a subject and realize: Biden has little to no knowledge about it.

That would be perfectly fine if he were, say, a truck driver. Sadly, however, Biden is a) a former senator, b) a former vice president and c) the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

As we reported yesterday, Biden was in New Hampshire on Friday to promote his campaign. Sorry: to talk to voters. Ha. During that campaign stop, he made a couple of gaffes, among which was him saying that premiums would go up under his health care plan and him wondering what it would have been like if Barack Obama had been assassinated in 2008.

That wasn’t all, however. As the Washington Examiner explains, he also claimed that over 40 students were shot during an anti-Vietnam War protest at Kent State University back in 1970.

Now, although we can all agree that every death of a protestor is one too many, Biden is rather exaggerating the numbers. In fact, four students were killed when the Ohio National Guard opened fire. Nine others were injured, but they survived the ordeal.

Let’s be clear: that’s certainly terrible, but there’s a significant difference between 13 students shot and forty.

Biden’s gaffes are often compared to those of President Trump, but there’s a significant difference between them. Somehow, Biden’s gaffes always make America look worse than she actually is. Sure, the current occupant of the White House may exaggerate his own accomplishments — as Biden does too — but when it comes to gaffes about the United States, in contrast to Trump, Biden somehow always finds a way to depict America as a racist banana republic. That’s bad enough, but what’s even worse is that those who attend his rallies don’t realize he’s distorting the truth. So they accept his disinformation and it, in turn, shapes their worldview and their opinion of their country.

An earlier version of this article stated that Biden claimed 40 students were killed at Kent State. In fact, Biden claimed that 40 students were “shot,” not killed.