Joe Biden has always had a plagiarism problem. Now, he can’t stop stealing the words of one of history’s greatest monsters: Chinese Communist dictator Mao Tse-tung.
Over the last year, Biden has repeatedly quoted the same phrase in numerous contexts without crediting Mao — and the legacy media have had nothing to say about it.
The most recent example of Biden’s Mao reference came at the 140th commencement of the U.S. Coast Guard on May 19, moments after botching a quotation he stole from Ronald Reagan. While alternating between boring and insulting the graduates, Biden told the graduates:
We need to see more women at the highest levels of command. We have to make sure that women have the chance to succeed and th- — thrive throughout their careers. There’s a saying that we use in a different context — a Chinese saying that says, “Women hold up half the world.” It’s an absolutely stupid position not to make sure they represent at least half of what we do.
The “Chinese saying” came from the lips of Mao Tse-tung, whose policies and actions killed at least 45 million people during the “Great Leap Forward” from 1958 to 1962. The remark was reported by Chinese media on March 8, 1973, as:
Times have changed, and men and women are equal, Whatever men comrades can accomplish, women comrades can, too. Women hold up half the sky.
That quotation made an impression on Biden, or his speechwriter, who has included it in the president’s prepared addresses several times.
Biden, whose first presidential campaign 33 years ago derailed over plagiarizing British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock and exaggerating his academic accomplishments, parroted the Mao quote to deep-pocketed donors at a fundraiser in July 2020, as The Daily Wire reported:
“For the first time, an economic crisis is hitting industries dominated by women,” Biden said, flanked by former senior Obama administration advisor Valerie Jarrett, the former vice president’s special guest at the digital fundraiser. “We’ve got to get real economic relief into women’s hands now.”
He then quoted what he called an “old Chinese proverb” about women.
“Women hold up half the sky,” Biden said.
A month later, on August 21, he explained why he chose his vice presidential running mate, Kamala Harris, during the ticket’s first joint press conference with Robin Roberts of “Good Morning America”:
The government should look like the people, look like the country. Fifty one percent of the people in this country are women. As that old expression goes, women hold up half the sky, and in order to be able to succeed, you’ve got to be dealt in across the board.
Mao Tse-tung was history’s most prolific murderer, subjecting the world’s largest nation to a life of economic destitution and political slavery. Why would the president quote him? Why would the media say nothing about the quotation’s revolting origins?
Compare that to the media outrage when President Donald Trump quoted someone who piques the media’s ire, like a conservative columnist.
In January 2019, then-President Trump tweeted a few quotations from a column by Pat Buchanan on border security, and the media pounced.
“Trump tweets op-ed by Pat Buchanan, whom he derided as a ‘Hitler lover’ in 1999,” wrote USA Today.
“Trump cites Pat Buchanan, man he once called ‘Hitler lover,’ to support border wall,” said The Hill.
“Trump Quotes ‘Hitler Lover’ In Latest Attempt To Push His Border Wall Plan,” read the cranky headline at HuffPost.
Not content to draw attention to the quotation, The Washington Post’s Philip Bump dedicated an entire column to dissecting “the multilevel irony” of the moment.
The media treated Buchanan, an advisor to three presidents and a three-time presidential candidate who has sometimes said things considered intemperate, as though he were a tyrant on the order of … Mao Tse-tung.
Yet when Biden quotes the bloodiest despot in history, the legacy media either do not know or keep the secret to themselves. There appears to have been no coverage from USA Today, The Hill, and HuffPost — nor ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The Washington Post, or The New York Times, for that matter.
Nor can they all plead ignorance. The New York Times quoted Biden’s favorite phrase of Mao’s favorably in a September 2017 story called, “For all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big.”
Mao didn’t simply “dream big”; he accomplished “big” things — enormously evil actions on a scale never matched before or since. Perhaps the leader of the free world should be discouraged from looking at his writings as a source of wisdom.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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Source: Dailywire
