Former New York Governor George Pataki (R), who ran for president as a Republican in 2015 for over 6 months, warned in an interview published this week that the radical elements of the Democratic Party seem to hold influence over presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
“I’ve been disappointed by the ability of the leftist activists in the party like Bernie Sanders and [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez to apparently influence him in real and significant ways,” Pataki told the New York Post.
“The Biden who was the moderate Democrat for a long time serving in Congress might not be the Biden who we would see as president,” said Pataki.
As The Daily Wire reported back in May, “a source with direct knowledge” told CNN that the Biden campaign had retained Ocasio-Cortez as a climate change task-force co-chair, an apparent move to bolster his credibility with the far Left.
Biden has also teamed up with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to create a “Unity” task-force that will push the official Democratic platform even further to the Left.
The platform involves creating a federally funded “civilian corps of unarmed first responders” to handle 911 calls deemed nonviolent, making public colleges free for 80% of American families, forgiving federal student loan debt after 20 years, and promising to never “cut, privatize, or weaken” social security, among over 100 other pages of recommendations.
In response to the “Unity” platform, Vice President Mike Pence recently warned that Biden was adopting an agenda that made it look more like Sanders won the Democratic nomination than the former vice president.
“When you consider Joe Biden’s agenda and his embrace of the radical Left, it’s clear: Joe Biden would be nothing more than an autopen president,” said Pence. “A Trojan horse for a radical agenda; so radical, so all-encompassing, that it would transform this country into something utterly unrecognizable.”
“The Biden-Sanders agenda would set America on the path of socialism and decline,” said Pence. “And as our nation endures this time of testing, we’d do well to tell our neighbors and friends that it’s also a time for choosing.”
The Biden campaign also recently hired a video producer who tweeted a meme calling police officers worse than pigs, and has used the “Defund The Police” hashtag, according to Fox News. The staffer has since deleted the tweets, reports the news agency.
While Biden doesn’t explicitly endorse the “Defund The Police” movement, he recently told CBS News he does support “conditioning federal aid to police, based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness. And, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”
During the same interview, the former vice president also said, “we have to, in my way, change the way that the entire criminal justice system functions and the prison system. It should turn into a rehabilitation system, not just punishment.”