Jeff Zients, a top Biden campaign aide tapped to become the new COVID czar, had some “issues” with his Wikipedia page. Apparently, it wasn’t quite woke enough.
So Zients, or someone close to him, hired Saguaro Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm, to scrub his Wikipedia entry of some less-than-stellar nuggets of information about him.
Perhaps most damning of all the information that was deleted was an observation by a chief executive on Obama’s Jobs Council who said that he thought Zients was a Republican.
That, and his quote that he “fell in love” with the management culture at Mitt Romney’s former company Bain and Company, would not have sat well with the radicals who are apparently vetting every nominee for ideological purity.
At the top of the section about Zients’ role in advocating for the Trans-Pacific Partnership which faced left-wing opposition, the firm included Zients’ argument that it was “the most progressive trade agreement there’s ever been.” His amorous quotes about Bain were deleted and replaced with a description of the company as a “management consulting firm that provides advice to public, private, and non-profit organizations.”
They added that Zients left Facebook “over differences with company leadership over governance and its policies around political discourse” although Zients has never said that publicly. The transition team has declined several of POLITICO requests for interviews with Zients about why he left Facebook.
This seems to be a pattern of Biden nominees. Anything that could remotely reflect badly on them is whitewashed from their records.
WestExec Advisors, the firm co-founded by Biden’s nominee for secretary of State, ANTHONY BLINKEN, that has also employed other incoming administration officials, also deleted mentions of some of their China-related work from their website this summer, just before Biden became the Democratic nominee, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Free Beacon found. The deletions come as both parties have become more hawkish on China.
Neera Tanden, whom Biden tapped this week as his Office of Management and Budget director, appears to have cleaned up her Twitter feed in advance of her confirmation hearing, deleting more than 1,000 tweets last month, the Daily Beast reported. “Apparently a lot of people think #MoscowMitch is a threat,” she wrote in a now-deleted tweet using the epithet Democrats threw at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
How bad has it gotten when a nominee for a fairly minor post in a new administration feels the necessity to cleanse their record of anything that might offend someone? For Zients, I find it far more damaging that his record was purified by PR hacks than anything that was in it to begin with.
Loyalty to a cause, a person, or an ideology should not be as important as partisans are making it. The Biden administration is shaping up to be a one-note symphony, a monochromatic pastiche of people carefully chosen for their color, their sex, their gender, or their cultural background. And they all think alike. If they don’t, they ask around to find out how they should be thinking.
Hardly a promising way to begin an administration.
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