A president walks the picket lines

President Joe Biden talks often about inflection points. About how we're in that time of history where the future of humanity will be decided. 

Well. This is one such inflection point.

CNN —President Joe Biden will travel to Michigan on Tuesday and walk the picket line with members of the United Auto Workers union, he announced Friday, a trip that comes after the president faced political pressure to ramp up his public support for the union members.

“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create. It’s time for a win-win agreement that keeps American auto manufacturing thriving with well-paid UAW jobs,” Biden said in a post to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

I don't think I can fully elucidate how monumental this is. As the Daily Beast reports:

But no sitting president has ever walked a picket line with striking workers. They have, historically, been much more prone to extravagant shows of solidarity with companies that are trying to break strikes. In 1894, Grover Cleveland sent 2,000 federal troops to Chicago to break a railroad strike.

And remember that earlier this year Pres. Biden knocked heads together and averted a crippling railroad strike by getting the workers everything they had asked for.

A sitting president of the United States will, for the first time, not be taking the side of employers in a strike but will instead be walking in solidarity with the workers. Again, I cannot fully explain how a BFD this is. In an era where worker action is on the increase, the elected leader of this nation is standing fully with workers. We already knew this from the actions of his National Labor Relations Board, which has made unionization easier. But this is beyond that. This is a symbolic act that the leader of the country is not with the plutocrats and oligarchs, but with the common people. Again, this has never happened in this country's history. I don't have the words or emoticons for this. This. Is. Big.

To those who would dismiss this as merely a photo-op? Well, I don't know what to tell you. If it's a photo-op, it's one in Sensurround, making you feel his empathy and commitment to the workers of this nation. Aside from singing the Internationale, I don't know what else Joe Biden could do to dispel his image on the Left as being "conservative". It's a lazy formulation, based on the idea that the two parties are the same. They are not. And this shows that they are not.

While Donald Trump is giving his speech to scabs, Joe Biden will be walking the lines with union workers. The contrast could not be starker. And yet the Liberal Media will equate the two, showing that both men care for the worker. This is what infuriates me. Our media suffers from two defects. First, it is owned by a billionaire class which loves Republican tax policy which favors it. And secondly, it is staffed by professionals out of tony Ivy League journalism schools who have been taught to, for the love of God, hew to impartiality. And by that, I mean that they excoriate Democrats while giving Republicans a pass. 

My friends, we are fighting a war on so many fronts. But the advantage of that is that we know who the enemy is, and we can mobilize to combat them. Joe Biden is walking the picket lines. That's what we must hammer home.

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