Joe Biden has claimed that Twitter under Elon Musk’s ownership ‘spews lies across the world’ – with his remarks raising eyebrows given the president’s own history of spouting untruths.
Speaking at a fundraiser in Rosemont, Ill., on Friday, Biden said he was ‘worried’ about Musk’s October 27 purchase of Twitter.
Musk vowed to end censorship on the platform, and stop policing free speech.
Biden on Friday said he was disturbed.
‘And now what are we all worried about: Elon Musk goes out and buys an outfit that sends – that spews lies all across the world,’ the president said. ‘There’s no editors anymore in America. There’s no editors. How do we expect kids to be able to understand what is at stake?’
Musk, who fired 3,700 people on Friday – half of Twitter’s workforce – was unrepentant amid the torrent of criticism.
‘Power to the people!’ he tweeted.
Joe Biden, seen on Friday at a campaign rally in California, said he was ‘worried’ about Elon Musk taking over Twitter, saying it ‘spewed lies’
Elon Musk bought Twitter on October 27, and fired 3,700 people on Friday. He is unrepentant amid the criticism
Biden’s concern about the ‘spewing of lies’ came amid a flurry of mistruths from the president himself.
On Tuesday, Biden claimed that the United States has ‘the lowest inflation rate’ of almost every developed country – despite the US faring significantly worse than Japan, France and Canada and Germany.
‘We have the lowest inflation rate of almost any major country in the world. We’ve done a lot to try to take it under control,’ Biden told the crowd in Florida.
Inflation in the US as measured by the Consumer Price Index is currently at 8.2 percent, for September’s data.
Among G7 countries, only Italy and the United Kingdom have worse inflation according to the OECD’s latest data, from August.
The US is at 8.26 percent, with Italy at 8.37 and the UK at 8.6 percent.
Japan, France, Canada, and Germany are all out-performing the US – in Canada, inflation was 7.1 percent, while in France it was 5.91, and in Japan a mere 3 percent.
Biden has repeatedly claimed his son, Beau, died in Iraq when in fact he passed away from a brain tumor in a Maryland hospital.
Beau Biden, who served as Delaware’s attorney general and in the Delaware Army National Guard in the Iraq War, died at age 46 in 2015 from brain cancer.
He passed away at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
The president has long linked his service, and the military’s use of burn pits, to Beau’s brain cancer diagnosis.
‘In my view, I can’t prove it yet, he came back with stage 4 glioblastoma. Eighteen months he lived, knowing he was going to die,’ Biden said in 2019.
President Joe Biden again said his son Beau Biden died in Iraq, while catching himself calling the war in Ukraine the Iraq war, while delivering remarks in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on Tuesday
Beau Biden (left) died of brain cancer in 2015 after serving in Iraq. He’s photographed with then Vice President Joe Biden (right) in 2009 at Camp Victory on the outskirts of Baghdad
‘Inflation is a worldwide problem right now because of a war in Iraq and the impact on oil, and what Russia is doing — I mean, excuse me, the war in Ukraine,’ said Biden on Tuesday.
‘And — I’m thinking of Iraq because that’s where my son died. The — because he died.
‘But the point is that there — you know, that’s why it’s up.’
Biden was also mocked online for his claim about insulin, and its pioneers. One of his signature achievements has been to reduce the cost of insulin for diabetics.
‘Okay, you know how much it cost to make that insulin drug for diabetes?’ Biden asked the crowd.
‘It was invented by a man who did not patent it because he wanted it available for everyone.
‘I spoke to him, OK? And guess what? It cost $10 to make. Ten bucks to make. And if you count packaging and everything, you can maybe get it up to $15.
‘Well, guess what? They’re not going to have to pay more than $35 a month. They’ll still make a significant profit instead of an average of $400 a month.’
Charles Best (left) and Frederick Banting (right) are pictured on the roof of the medical building at Toronto University with one of the first diabetic dogs to receive the hormone insulin
Charles Best is pictured in the reconstructed lab where he and Banting isolated insulin, in 1921. Best died in 1978
Canadian doctors Frederick Banting and Charles Best successfully isolated the hormone insulin in July 1921.
Banting died in 1941, the year before Biden was born.
Best died in 1978, five years after Biden was elected to the Senate – making a meeting not impossible, but not confirmed.
As far back as 1987, during his first presidential run, Biden was forced to withdraw after it emerged that his claims about his education were exaggerated.
He said that he ‘went to law school on a full academic scholarship,’ and that he ‘ended up in the top half’ of his law school class, and ‘graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school’.
If fact, as he later admitted, he had only a partial scholarship, was 76th out of 85 law school student and graduated with one bachelor’s degree: a double major in history and political science.
Biden, in May, claimed he was ‘appointed’ to the Naval Academy.
‘I was appointed to the Academy in 1965 by a senator who I was running against in 1972,’ he said.
In his 2008 biography, Biden never mentioned that he considered going to the Naval Academy. Furthermore, the 1965 date does not make sense as Biden graduated from the University of Delaware that year.
The Naval Academy does not offer graduate programs.
In 2010, Biden claimed that he applied to the Naval Academy in 1960.
‘In 1960, I was a pretty good football player at the University of Delaware, and I was one of the guys that applied to come to this great academy,’ he said.
Biden graduated from high school in 1961.
In July 2021, Biden claimed he used to be a truck driver.
‘I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man,’ he said on a visit to a Mack Truck facility in Pennsylvania.
He then clarified that he ‘got to’ drive one.
But challenged by Fox News to produce evidence, a White House spokesperson could only point to a December 1973 article from the Wilmington Evening Journal that showed Biden rode in an 18-wheeler, not that he drove one.
In September 2021, he told Jewish leaders that he remembered ‘spending time at’ and ‘going to’ the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after the mass murder of 11 people there in 2018: it later emerged he never visited.
The White House said he was referencing a phone call and misspoke.
Biden claimed in January this year, while speaking to students of historically black colleges in Atlanta, that he was arrested during civil rights protests – a claim for which there is no evidence.
In September, Biden finally admitted that his oft-repeated story about being arrested in South Africa, while attempting to see the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, was not true.
Biden set the record straight during a meeting with South Africa’s current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in the White House on September 16.
Biden recounted meeting Mandela in 1990 and said the anti-apartheid leader thanked him for facing arrest in order to meet him in South Africa.
The president told Ramaphosa that meeting Mandela was ‘one of the great moments of my career.’
‘I was a senator at the time, and we met in the Senate Foreign Relations executive committee room. And he came in we all stood there and said hello to him and the like and afterwards, he asked if he could come by my office and he came by to say thank you because he heard I had been stopped trying to get to visit him, to see him in prison.’
Biden then admitted he had never been arrested in South Africa.
‘I wasn’t arrested, I got stopped, prevented from moving. But he was extremely gracious.’
Biden is seen in December 2013 visiting a memorial to Nelson Mandela outside the South African embassy. Mandela died aged 95 on December 5, 2013
Biden is known for his exaggerations, and his contorted, misremembered stories.
The 79-year-old president, who joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee aged 32, and became its chair in 2001, has frequently spoken about his ‘arrest’ by the South African police.
On February 11, 2020, Biden told a South Carolina audience that he had been arrested in the African nation.
‘This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,’ he told the crowd.
‘I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our UN ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robben Island.’
Biden did not specify the year, but was in South Africa in 1977.
Mandela was held behind bars on Robben Island from 1964 to 1982 – but Robben Island is off the coast of Cape Town, while Biden said he was in the Johannesburg district of Soweto.
Later the same month, Biden repeated the story of his arrest to a Nevada crowd at a black history brunch.
‘[Mandela] came to Washington and came to my office,’ Biden said, during a presidential campaign meeting in Las Vegas.
‘He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’
‘I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’
‘He said: ”You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.”’
And at a second Las Vegas event, days later, Biden repeated the arrest story for a third time.
He told the crowd he ‘came back from South Africa, trying to see Nelson Mandela and getting arrested for trying to see him.’
Mandela is seen during a joint meeting of the US Congress in June 1990
Mandela in June 1990 addresses the United Nations, urging the UN to maintain sanctions against South Africa until apartheid was abolished
The claim of an arrest was debunked by The New York Times in February 2020, with multiple officials and former colleagues in the Senate telling the paper they had no recollection of the arrest.
The paper even noted that Biden’s own accounts, in his autobiography and in his statements about Mandela, did not reference an arrest.
Fact-checkers, who gave Biden’s account ‘four Pinocchios’ and declared it ‘Pants on Fire’, did find that he had been separated from black colleagues when landing at the airport in neighboring Lesotho in December 1976.
At the time, Biden was among 13 members of Congress to travel to Lesotho.
‘When I exited the plane I was directed to one side of the tarmac, while the African American congressmen traveling with me were sent to the other side,’ he said.
‘I refused to break off, and the officials finally relented.’
At the end of February 2020, amid intense interest in whether he was actually arrested, Biden told CNN that he was not.
‘When I said arrested, I meant I was not able to move,’ Biden said, after recounting what had happened to him.
‘Cops would not let me go with them. I wasn’t arrested, I was stopped. I was not able to move where I wanted to go.’
He did not specify whether that encounter was in Lesotho or South Africa.