For the last year, Americans have been promised that the Biden presidency would be a “return to normalcy for the country”. Mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN have repeated these talking points ad nauseam. It has gotten so “normal” that news outlets such as the ones previously mentioned have run articles proclaiming that the news is set to be “boring” again.

On Jan. 20, the very first day of the new, more normal administration, President Biden signed an executive order revoking the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline. According to the Keystone XL website, and energy company TC Energy, the project would have “sustained about 11,000 U.S. jobs”. But, with millions of Americans already out of work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Joe Biden has put another 11,000 people out of jobs with a single stroke of a pen.

In the aftermath of this executive order, opposition by Republicans was fierce. Biden’s nominee for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg defended the decision by the administration to fire those workers in a Senate hearing last week. Buttigieg said, “we are very eager to see those workers continue to be employed in good-paying union jobs, even if it might be different ones”.

Transitioning from welding an oil pipeline to working in “new green jobs” will not happen overnight. You cannot throw people out of work and expect them to immediately transfer career paths.

President Biden and Secretary Buttigieg do not care. They are attempting to appease an ever-growing loud group of unhappy college kids and postgrads on the coasts who think the world is going to end in twelve years. Biden and Buttigieg, along with these unhappy people and their progressive allies, would like to see the elimination of fossil fuels altogether. This means higher energy prices, poorer quality utilities, higher taxes, and fewer jobs. The economic burdens of this would hurt poorer Americans disproportionately while doing little to mitigate climate change.

Moreover, the elimination of oil pipelines does nothing to reduce carbon emissions. It has the opposite effect. Revoking permits and canceling the pipeline projects will increase carbon emissions as the oil being exported from Canada will now need to travel longer distances on trucks and trains to be delivered.

Political Science major and current ASSP Senator Cade Huston has looked into this topic extensively and he agrees.

“Keystone pipeline cancellation won’t help the environment, it will just cause us to have to ship our oil from abroad, which is worse for the environment.” Huston states, “understanding the reality of the situation is more important than the aspirations.”

If this concerns you, it should. But what is next is even more alarming. On the very same day President Biden killed 11,000 high-quality jobs, he also signed another executive order instructing the Department of Homeland Security to halt deportations from the United States.

To demonstrate his allyship and solidarity with people living in the United States illegally, President Biden unveiled a bronze bust of Cesar Chavez, the famed left-wing labor union leader who led farmworker strikes in California in the 1960s and ’70s.

The Jeff Bezos-owned corporate Washington Post ran a headline about this ceremony titled “Biden Cesar Chavez Bust in the Oval Signals New Era for Latinos, Activists Hope.” This is all hilarious and ironic if you know anything about Cesar Chavez.

Cesar Chavez despised unchecked illegal immigration. He despised it because it artificially lowers the wages for American workers. He once said in a union memo, “If we can get the illegals out of California, we will win the strike overnight.”

Chavez would routinely send union workers to the border with Mexico to hunt, beat, and kidnap undocumented workers in the most horrible ways to prevent them from working in the United States. Chavez believed that unchecked illegal immigration was just another corporate stunt masquerading as a human rights issue. That stunt still continues today.

That is not to say that people who want to come to this country are bad people. They are not. I have personally been to the southern border and have traveled all across Mexico and Central America. I have heard their stories. Some of the stories have true pain. Deep pain. Actual oppression. More oppression than I, or anyone reading this, will likely ever face.

As citizens of the most prosperous and privileged country in human history, we should understand and appreciate that. The United States should, and does, accept people fleeing political persecution and repression. All persons are valuable in the eyes of God. They should be treated with dignity and respect consistent with the law and the Constitution. But, unchecked illegal immigration hurts all Americans, citizens, and non.

All of the virtue signaling and pandering by the administration aside, President Biden is putting America in danger. Because this order applies to illegal aliens who commit violent crimes, and not just to illegal aliens who come to the United States to work and overstay their visas, crime will skyrocket.

Consider the case of Fernando De Jesus Lopez-Garcia. Lopez-Garcia has been living in San Jose, California illegally for many years now. He has been arrested multiple times, been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, and has pending charges for domestic violence. According to detainer requests issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Lopez-Garcia had been ordered removed from the United States. However, The State of California has repeatedly ignored these requests.

Then in November of 2020, Lopez-Garcia stabbed five people at Grace Baptist Church in San Jose. The church had been serving as a temporary shelter for the homeless during the pandemic. Two homeless people residing there were killed, while two others were injured along with a church volunteer.

If Lopez-Garcia had been deported when he was supposed to be this tragedy likely would not have happened. But, in order to not seem racist, the State of California refused to turn him over to federal authorities. And now, because of President Biden’s order, this applies to the entire nation.

In signing this executive order, the Biden administration has made one thing very clear: if you illegally enter the United States by openly flaunting our laws, and commit violent crimes when you arrive, you can stay because deporting you would uphold white supremacy.

This goes to say these positions on climate change, oil infrastructure, deportation, and illegal immigration are not mainstream. The actions the Biden administration has taken are not the moderate center-left cool hip uncle we were promised. No, the administration is actively trying to alter the fundamental basis of American liberty itself by killing jobs, permitting criminal behavior, and restructuring the economy; hard-working Americans be damned.

Liam is a senior studying Political Science