Gas prices in the United States hit a new all-time high under President Joe Biden’s watch on Tuesday, clocking in at an average of $4.17 per gallon, surpassing the previous record of $4.11 set in 2008.
A friend told me he recently saw prices jump 50 cents from the time he drove to work to the time he drove home. A gas station in Florida I stopped at last month had two “I did that” stickers on it. After someone had apparently tried to rip them off, someone else took a blue ballpoint pen and scrawled “FJB” on the front of the gas pump. Similar stickers have popped up in growing numbers all around the country.
It’s obvious to everyone paying attention (except for Biden and his corporate media comms shop… but that’s redundant) that the Democrat administration’s policies, not just the Russians, are to blame for rising prices at the pump. The third week of February, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, the average price of U.S. gas was $3.53 per gallon, compared with $2.38 the week Biden took office: a $1.15 difference. (That fact hasn’t stopped Press Secretary Jen Psaki from lying through her teeth to blame the spike entirely on Russia.)
But, bumbling though they are, the Biden administration did not just achieve rising gas prices through accidents and incompetence. Your pain at the pump isn’t just unforeseen collateral damage of the White House’s policies — it’s a very intentional result of it.
That’s right: Biden wants staggering gas prices to force you from being able to drive where you want, when you want, as much as you want to. It’s all a part of his green energy agenda, which panders to radicals on the far-left side of Biden’s ever-further-left party.
A video from Americans for Tax Reform shows Biden at a campaign rally pledging, “We are gonna get rid of fossil fuels.” Asked “would there be any place for fossil fuels, including coal and fracking, in a Biden administration?” by CNN’s Dana Bash during one of the Democratic primary debates in 2019, Biden responded “No.”
“We would — we would work it out,” he continued. “We would make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those, either — any fossil fuel.” Eliminated.
In the same debate and at many other moments, Biden has made clear his desire for the United States to erase gas-driven cars for electric vehicles. “My plan calls for 500,000 charging stations around the country so by 2030 we’re all electric vehicles,” he said at the time (a plan he’s unlikely to reach in the next eight years). If they want to get rid of your car, don’t think they wouldn’t start by trying to squeeze your gas tank dry.
When Biden’s damage control team has tried to soften his anti-oil remarks, even leftists can see through it. “Of course Biden meant what he said about fossil fuels. There is a price to fighting climate change,” headlined an op-ed in the Washington Post in October 2020.
His actions have backed that agenda up, too, from canceling the Keystone XL pipeline to suspending new drillings on federal lands to moving us away from the energy independence the U.S. established under former president Trump. That agenda has been apparent even in the Biden administration’s tone-deaf responses to the current spike in gas prices.
Psaki’s No. 1 takeaway from the gas crisis is to remind everyday Americans that it’s a good time for “reducing our dependence on fossil fuels,” as if rising prices play directly into the gleeful administration’s hands.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who has failed in every sector she’s been appointed to take charge of, spent Monday afternoon with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promoting the administration’s anti-gas messaging and suggesting that perhaps Americans should just eat cake buy electric cars.
The average cost of an electric vehicle is $56,437, “equivalent to an entry-level luxury car.” But the financial reality that most Americans don’t have 50 grand to drop on a Tesla didn’t stop Harris from fantasizing about a world in which all of your gas-guzzling trucks, minivans, and school buses are in the junkyard.
“Imagine a future: the freight trucks that deliver bread and milk to our grocery store shelves and the buses that take children to school and parents to work. Imagine all the heavy-duty vehicles that keep our supply lines strong and allow our economy to grow. Imagine that they produce zero emissions,” she said.
“We have the ability to see what can be unburdened by what has been and then to make the possible actually happen,” she continued, in her trademark word salad.
Even in the face of rising gas prices back in November, Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm admitted that in her perspective, the United States was “working through an energy transition” from oil and gas.
You paying more (and more, and more) at the pump just means Biden gets one step closer to his anti-oil agenda. Don’t think he isn’t happy about it.
