AMERICAN FREE PRESS • ISSUE 3/4 • JANUARY 20 & 27, 2025 • AMERICANFREEPRESS.NET MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR
Farewell Joe Biden, and Good Riddance
by Paul Angel
Over the course of our nation’s
long history, only 45 men have assumed the office of the president,
and only 12 have chosen to give
a farewell address. Washington, in his
farewell address of Sept. 19, 1796, presciently warned of the dangers of political
parties and the threat they posed:
They may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of
time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and
unprincipled men will be enabled to
subvert the power of the people and to
usurp for themselves the reins of government. …
He also warned of the importance of remaining neutral in global affairs, insisting,
“A passionate attachment of one nation for
another produces a variety of evils.”
We have seen the bitter fruits of ignoring our first president, especially when it
comes to America’s one-sided Middle East
foreign policy and our “passionate attachment” for Israel. It has led America to
fight no fewer than 14 wars on behalf of
that nation since its founding in 1948.
Andrew Jackson, in his farewell address
of March 4, 1837, also gave us some valuable words of wisdom. Besides voicing his
fears a civil war was on the horizon, he
warned of the power of banks and lobbyists, explaining:
It is one of the serious evils of our
present system of banking that it enables
one class of society—and that by no
means a numerous one—by its control
over the currency, to act injuriously
upon the interests of all. …
The men who profit by the abuses and
desire to perpetuate them will continue
to besiege the halls of legislation in the
general government as well as in the
states, and will seek by every artifice to
mislead and deceive the public servant.
It was many years later that another
president gave an official farewell address. Harry Truman, on Jan. 15, 1953, explained that most of his actions were to
counter the expansion of communism:
I’ve talked a lot tonight about the menace of communism—-and our fight
against it—because that is the overriding
issue of our time. … The whole purpose
[was to] prevent World War III. Starting
a war is no way to make peace.
On Jan 16, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower
gave his oft-quoted and consequential
farewell address warning:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. … In the councils of government,
we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought
or unsought, by the military-industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous
rise of misplaced power exists. …
Jimmy Carter, on Jan. 14, 1981, told us
we should be mindful of the state of the environment, but also:
Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press
and the public are an important part of
our democratic society.
Ronald Reagan, on Jan. 11, 1989, offered
these words:
We the People tell the government
what to do; it doesn’t tell us. We the People are the driver; the government is the
car. And we decide where it should go,
and by what route, and how fast.
Reagan also insisted that “We’ve got to
teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important.” Proponents of
divisive racial theories take note.
George H.W. Bush, in his address of Jan.
5, 1993, gave us some really bad advice
about forcing nations to accept democracy, inevitably at the point of a gun:
Our objective must be to exploit the
unparalleled opportunity presented by
the Cold War’s end to work toward
transforming this new world into a new
world order. … It’s got to be built.
This philosophy has been the basis for
U.S. interventionism ever since, and a blatant disregarding of Washington’s advice
two centuries earlier.
I do wish someone had listened to Bill
Clinton when he said, on Jan. 18, 2001:
America must maintain our record of
fiscal responsibility. Through our last four
budgets we’ve turned record deficits to
record surpluses, and we’ve been able to
pay down $600 billion of our national
debt—on track to be debt-free by the end
of the decade for the first time since 1835.
George W. Bush, on Jan. 15, 2009, reminded of what he saw as his greatest accomplishment:
Over the past seven years, a new Department of Homeland Security [DHS]
has been created. The military, the intelligence community, and the FBI have
been transformed. Our nation is equipped
with new tools to monitor the terrorists’
movements, freeze their finances, and
break up their plots.
Unfortunately, U.S. presidents since
that time have turned this surveillance system against everyday U.S. citizens.
And let us not forget Barack Obama,
who became the first president to interject
divisive racial and climate-change rhetoric
into his farewell address of Jan. 10, 2017:
We’re not where we need to be [on
race relations]. … [T]hose brown kids
will represent a larger and larger share
of America’s workforce. … [O]ur children
won’t have time to debate the existence
of climate change. They’ll be busy dealing with its effects. …
Donald Trump’s farewell address of
Jan. 19, 2021, was short and sweet. Besides
voicing his “horror” over the events of Jan.
6, he did stand up for free speech, saying:
Shutting down free and open debate
violates our core values. … In America,
we don’t insist on absolute conformity or
enforce rigid orthodoxies and punitive
speech codes. … America is not a timid
nation of tame souls who need to be sheltered and protected from those with
whom we disagree. …
And this brings us to Joe Biden’s hypocritical and forgettable address of Jan. 15,
2025. Joe focused on the Statue of Liberty quite a bit, and that makes sense, as
“Lady Liberty” is one of America’s most omnipresent symbols of mass immigration. He
said that, “Her foot literally steps forward
atop a broken chain of human bondage.
She’s on the march.”
On the march she is, that massive foot
crushing Border Patrol and ICE agents, legal immigrants and American citizens in her
wake. But Joe rightly warned of an emerging “tech industrial complex”:
[There is a] concentration of power
in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy
people, and the dangerous consequences
if their abuse of power is left unchecked.
Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in
America of extreme wealth, power and
influence that literally threatens our entire democracy. … We need to get dark
money—that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaign contributions—
we need to get it out of our politics.
Joe’s correct here, but he didn’t care
about those tech oligarchs when they
were throwing hundreds of millions at
shadowy super PACs dedicated to getting
him elected. Nor when they censored
news harmful to his election chances.
Nor was he worried about Democratic
donor George Soros when his organizations
threw “dark money” at the Biden/Harris
campaign and soft-on-crime Democratic
candidates. Joe loved these “oligarchs”
then. But suddenly, not so much.
If only Joe had read (or remembered)
the words of previous presidents, he might
have realized that he represented exactly
the kind of threat many of them were warning us about. So I say, “Farewell, Joe Biden,
and good riddance.” ★
—Paul Angel, Managing Editor