The Clueless Academics of the Biden Administration

Half of Americans have been struggling to fill up their cars with gas, and a fifth of Americans have not been able to buy all the groceries they put in their grocery carts. The academics of the White House, largely from the non-profit sector, have tried to explain away all these things. They’ve rarely shown empathy, instead basically saying, “You poors just need LED bulbs and battery powered cars and you’ll be fine.”

It is a stunning lack of empathy that first truly became pronounced during the Afghanistan retreat as soldiers died and Americans got left behind.

Now, in a Politico Playbook story about Bill Melugin of Fox News, White House staff are complaining that Melugin is doing too much on the ground reporting of numbers and not enough to put the numbers in context. Get this from some undoubtedly non-profit academic:

One administration official who used to work on immigration issues told West Wing Playbook that the Biden team has complained about the lack of nuance in the network’s coverage of the topic, which focuses more on the number of migrants rather than explaining the root causes of the situation.

The White House needs to understand what Bill Melugin does — the end result of whatever the root cause has manifested in large numbers at the American border with Mexico. Regardless of why they are coming, they are coming and overwhelming border towns. Melugin is reporting on that.

Melugin’s job is to focus on the effects, not the causes. The effects are pronounced. From Politico:

But Melugin has helped usher in a new style of coverage of the issue by the network. He is part of a more technologically savvy generation of Fox reporters and producers whose work leans more heavily on on-the-ground reporting augmented by soaring aerial drone footage of migrants crossing the border.

If the White House doesn’t like what Melugin is showing, there’s a very easy way to fix it — build the damn wall. Or at least reinstate Trump era policies that kept the flow of migrants in Mexico.

It is really remarkable that no one in the press wants to ask the basic question — why is Biden setting records no President before him set? The problems in Central America have not deteriorated that rapidly. What happened was Biden campaigned on telling these people they were welcome here. They all believe it and Biden has done nothing to dissuade them or deter them.

The real shame of it all is that Fox News is the only network highlighting the problem — and it is a problem. Every network could have up drones showing the massive scale of the crossing. Every network could have reporters on the ground talking to the overwhelmed locals and the overwhelmed border patrol. The migrants are setting new records, with over 2 million crossings in the last year.

The real story here is not why Fox is covering this story, but why the other networks are not. And the bigger story is why is an American presidential administration more concerned with the root causes affecting people not from the United States than with the end result of the problem affecting American cities and towns.

It’s as if the Biden Administration would rather be in charge of Central America than the United States of America. Politics 101 is to address the concerns of your voters. Mr. President — American voters are concerned with the massive humanitarian crisis at the border. If you solve that, you might then get them to care about the root causes and underlying problems.

Otherwise, it’s all academic, and Americans have the same feeling about academics that you guys in the White House have for Bill Melugin.