When President Joe Biden arrived in Culpeper, Virginia, on Thursday, he received a rather cold welcome from local Republicans.
According to the Culpeper Star-Exponent, they learned Biden was set to give a speech in their town on Tuesday, and they devised a peaceful way to voice their displeasure.
“This is a Republican-leaning district. We’re very red here,” Culpeper Republican Committee member David Cissman said. “When we saw in the Star-Exponent that Biden would be coming to town, we immediately put the word out.”
In the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump received 59 percent of the vote in Culpeper County, according to the state Department of Elections website. Biden received just 39 percent.
The Republican group encouraged people to bring signs, flags and anything else that could be used to send a message without engaging in violence.
When they learned President Joe Biden would be visiting Culpeper on Thursday, Culpeper Republicans decided what they considered an affront would not go unanswered. https://t.co/k2r8u747XD
— The Star-Exponent (@CulpeperSE) February 10, 2022
Cissman said the participants were not limited to Culpeper residents. He told the Star-Exponent people turned out “from all over the state.”
One of Cissman’s criticisms of Biden was that his lax border policies have led to a surge of illegal immigration.
“These people are criminals and need to be vetted,” he said. “Biden won’t even require them to be vaccinated to enter our country.”
As a military veteran, Cissman also took aim at Biden’s foreign policy blunders, particularly the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. While he said he was in favor of sending troops to Ukraine, he felt Biden needed to address issues directly plaguing America first.
According to a White House transcript, the president attempted to address one of those issues during his Thursday speech at Germanna Community College.
“Inflation is up,” Biden said. “It’s up. And coming from a family when the price of gas went up, you felt it in the household, you knew what it was like, it matters.
“But the fact is that, if we’re able to do the things I’m talking about here, it’ll bring down the costs for average families.”
Biden went on to say his plan to lower costs for families included getting the government to pay for child care.
“You still have pay to for childcare,” he said. “Child care is a cost for millions of families. You still have to pay your prescription drug prices. You still have to pay for health care. You want to lower the cost of living for people? Help them in those areas.”
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This, of course, ignores the fact that the money to pay for these things has to come from somewhere. While families might pay less in child care, many would be forced to pay more in taxes to fund the president’s spending spree.
Mirroring a campaign promise, Biden said in Thursday’s speech that “if you’re making less $400,000, you’re not paying a single penny more in taxes.”
Yet in a November 2021 analysis, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that while direct taxes might not go up, up to 30 percent of middle-income families would be paying more in taxes when all major provisions were taken into account.
These hollow promises from Biden are the very reason he receives backlashes like the one he saw in Culpeper seemingly everywhere he goes.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.