We all know that travel bans are racist; Old Joe Biden told us so himself. He tweeted on February 1, 2020: “Trump further diminished the U.S. in the eyes of the world by expanding his travel ban. This new ‘African Ban,’ is designed to make it harder for black and brown people to immigrate to the United States. It’s a disgrace, and we cannot let him succeed.” Now that Biden’s handlers, possibly even including the wonk who actually composed that tweet, are in charge, all that systemic racism is being swept away, and for that we can all be grateful. Or at least we could be until Friday, when Biden’s handlers announced a plan to follow in Trump’s footsteps and ban travel from eight countries in Africa in order to fight what is being presented as a dangerous new variant of the coronavirus.
Politico reported Friday that the ban was announced “just hours after a new coronavirus variant was deemed a highly transmissible virus of concern,” and would go into effect Monday, banning travelers from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique and Malawi from entering the United States.” Politico noted that Biden’s handlers made this move on advice from none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Left’s untarnished guru of Covid prevention.
And that makes it all right. We can learn from this that the problem with Trump’s travel bans was not that he imposed them, but why he imposed them. In February 2020, Biden lambasted Trump’s racism over the extension of the travel bans to Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania, as well as Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar. This was after Trump had previously imposed travel bans upon Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf explained at the time that “the countries hit by the new measures failed to meet US security and information-sharing standards.” The countries from which Trump banned travel could not or would not provide adequate information to American officials about the people who wanted to enter the country. Trump reasoned that in light of that, the risk of admitting anyone from those countries was too great. His travel bans were motivated by concern for the safety of the American people.
Biden and the Democrats, however, knew better. They knew that Trump’s expressed concern for safety was just a ploy, a fig leaf to cover his racism. They knew, or claimed to know, that Trump’s travel bans were actually motivated by “Islamophobia,” and derided it as a “Muslim Ban,” even though Tanzania, Myanmar, North Korea and Venezuela aren’t exactly Islamic Republics. Biden promised during his campaign: “On day one, I’ll end Trump’s unconstitutional Muslim ban. My administration will look like America with Muslim Americans serving at every level.” As soon as he entered the Oval Office, Biden followed through on this promise, ending Trump’s travel bans in a flurry of executive orders on January 20, 2021.
Related: The ‘Muslim Ban’ Is Gone. Now Come the Reminders of Why We Needed It.
But now Biden has imposed travel bans of his own. His, however, weren’t imposed for national security reasons: every good Leftist knows that the jihad terror threat is minuscule compared to the threat from “white supremacists.” Joe Biden has told them that, too, and he wouldn’t lie to us, would he? Since the terror threat comes from MAGA-hat wearing white guys, there is no need for security-based travel restrictions.
Instead, Biden’s travel ban is meant to fight Covid. Every good Leftist knows that Covid, with its survival rate of around 97% for most age groups, is far more deadly a scourge than Islamic terrorism, and thus Old Joe’s travel ban is not like Trump’s. No one will charge Biden with having secret racist motives for imposing it, or claim that he wants to “make it harder for black and brown people to immigrate to the United States,” because only Democrats get that dirty and deceptive when they play the political game.
In fact, it is likely that many of the same people who were enraged at Trump for being so racist as to try to keep jihad terrorists out of the country will applaud Biden’s handlers for doing exactly what Trump did, except to fight Covid. Biden, after all, is confronting the real threat, the one that serves the authoritarian Left’s purposes wonderfully by justifying the curtailment of civil liberties, the imposition of ever more onerous and intrusive government restrictions, and more. Old Joe’s travel ban shows that his heart is in the right place: fighting against the American liberties that the Left despises with such passion. Or as Orwell might have put it, some travel bans are more equal than others.
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