Pressing KJP during the Wednesday, May 1 White House Press Briefing, Fox News Channel White House correspondent Peter Doocy pressed White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre over President Biden being relatively silent in the face of massive college protests over American support for Israel. KJP had no good answer, responding with her usual word salad obfuscation.
Bringing up the matter, Doocy asked KJP, “And I understand that President Biden historically has spoken very forcefully about antisemitism, but this week he’s not. He’s MIA. Is he that worried about losing the youth vote with these protestors?”
She first brought up the 2024 campaign while dodging the “MIA” aspect of the question, saying, “I’m going to be mindful. You’re talking about “youth vote.” You’re talking about 2024.” He clarified, saying,
“Support of young people.” She then told him, “No, no, no. I — I have to say what I have to say and just give me a second. So, I’m not going to speak about —”
At that point, she was cut off by a ringing cell-phone. She joked, “Somebody’s doorbell? Is that a doorbell?” and was told it was from “an alarm.” Continuing after the interruption, she let loose with one of her word salads, saying, “An alarm. Okay. All right. And I’ll speak more broadly. I can’t speak to youth pe- — youth and support and voters. That’s not something I can do from here.”
Continuing with it, she said, “The President has taken a lot of policy actions here that he knows that young people care about. And a lot of those actions are popular with those young folks, whether it’s giving a little bit of breathing room with student debt relief. So- — we made an announcement today, matter of fact, and we are going to continue to do that because we think it’s important as families or as an American and you coming out of college and you want to build a family, buy a home, you have the opportunity to do that and not be crushed by student debt. The President understands how important it is to deal with that issue.”
She then said, “Climate change — something that young people really, truly care about. One of the crises that the President said he came in to having to deal with was the climate change crisis. This is a president who has taken more — have taken aggressive, aggressive action to deal with climate crisis. Look, I can’t speak to — I can’t speak to youth voters or their support. What we’re going to do is continue to take actions that we believe helps all Americans in all communities.”
Doocy then twisted the knife. He asked, “And you mentioned what he said in 2017, after Charlottesville. He said about Trump’s response then, “Charlottesville, for me, was a moment where I thought silence would be complicity.” So, how does he explain, how you explain his silence this week?”
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She fired back, saying, “The President has not been silent on this issue when it comes to hate speech, antisemitism. He started — ” Doocy interrupted, telling her, “He — he has.” She then said, “Wait. He started — he launched the first-ever antisemitism — Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, something that no other president did. No other president do —”
Doocy, interrupting and adding some context to what she was saying, told her, “In the time since, a school building on a — at an Ivy League campus got taken over.” Firing back, she told him, “And I — and we call that out. And we said: That is not peacefully protesting. Taking over a building at a university is — or a college is not peacefully protesting. And we’ve been very clear. We’ve been very clear — taking more than a hundred new actions to deal with antisemitism in this administration, no one has ever done that before. Not any other administration has ever done that before.”
Watch them spar here;
Featured image credit:s screengrab from the embedded video