The Daily Signal - How Biden’s Energy Policies Harm African Americans

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

While gas prices remain at an average of $4.80 a gallon, the Biden administration continues to promote “environmental justice” policies that Donna Jackson says are harming black Americans.  “When you have someone that's spending more than 30% of their income for gasoline and they're making choices between whether their kids can have … food to eat, or medicine, or pay their energy bills, electricity, gasoline, then that is not a pain point, that's genocide,” says Jackson, director of membership development for Project 21 at the National Center for Public Policy Research.  The political left has created an environmental agenda they say will help minority communities, but it is an “agenda that black people never asked for,” Jackson says.  President Joe Biden’s efforts to lessen American dependency on fossil fuels is killing American jobs that minorities depend on and driving up the cost of living, she says.  Jackson joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain why the president’s energy agenda is so harmful to African Americans, and what the president should do to stimulate energy growth across the nation.  Also on today’s show, we cover these stories:  Police say the Highland Park shooter planned the attack weeks in advance. Multiple Texas counties declare that they are under an invasion due to the rising number of illegal migrants coming across the border. Twitter bans Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and conservative commentator Dave Rubin over a tweet referring to actor Elliot Page by birth name and biological sex.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, July 6th. I'm Doug Blair. And I'm Virginia Allen. Gas prices are at an average of $0.80 a gallon across America, and that's according to the AAA. The high price of energy is affecting everyone. But Donna Jackson says some Americans are being affected more than others. Jackson is a program's director of membership development at the National Center for Public Policy Research, the nation's largest black conservative think tank.

She says Biden's environmental justice agenda is driving high energy costs that are negatively impacting black Americans more than other communities. She joins the show to explain why the Biden administration is promoting an environmental agenda that is placing a strain on minority communities. Before we get to Virginia's conversation with Donna Jackson, let's hit our top news stories of the day. In the aftermath of a tragic shooting in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, police revealed that they believed the shooter planned the attack weeks in advance. Lake County Major Crime Task Force spokesman Christopher Covelli said the shooter had pre-planned this attack for several weeks. Covelli added that the shooter attempted to disguise himself as a woman to try and blend in with the fleeing crowd, saying,

During the attack, the assailant was dressed in women's clothing, and investigators do believe he did this to conceal his facial tattoos and his identity and help him during the escape with the other people who were fleeing the chaos. Authorities believe the shooter obtained his weapons legally. The shooter launched his deadly attack July 4th from a nearby rooftop, killing six and wounding many more. As of yet, no charges have been filed, and there is no known motive. Several counties in Texas have declared they are under an inviolventive.

The border crisis has gotten to the point that senior officials in multiple Texas counties held a press conference Tuesday and announced they're under invasion. Kinney County is located on the Mexican border south of the Rio Grande River. Brent Smith is an attorney there and told Fox News that he believes 12 to 15 Texas counties will declare that they're under invasion by the end of July. The decision some counties are making to declare that they are under an invasion is driven. by the record high number of illegal immigrants flooding into their communities. The number of migrants' border patrol has encountered has been growing steadily. In January, there were over 154,000 migrant encounters. That number jumped up to 239,000 by May.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Bernovich wrote a legal opinion earlier this year that the violence and lawlessness at the border caused by transnational, cartels and gangs satisfies the definition of an invasion under the U.S. Constitution. It remains to be seen whether or not Texas Governor Greg Abbott will declare the crisis at the border and invasion. Conservative commentator Dave Rubin and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson have been suspended from Twitter over a tweet referring to actress Ellen Page by her birth name and biological sex. Page received a double mastectomy and now identifies as a man

named Elliot. On June 22nd, Peterson tweeted, Remember when Pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician? That tweet earned Peterson a suspension. Ruben then shared a screenshot of Peterson's tweet on his account, along with a comment saying, The insanity continues at Twitter.

Jordan Peterson has been suspended for this tweet about Ellen Page. He just told me that he will never delete the tweet. That tweet got Ruben's account suspended. In a statement delivered via Ben Shapiro's Twitter account, Rubin said, I have been suspended by Twitter for posting a screenshot of Jordan Peterson's tweet, which got he himself suspended. He continued, while it is unclear how I broke their terms of service, it is clear that they are breaking their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders by letting a bunch of woke activists run the company.

And that'll do it for headlines today. But stay tuned for my conversation with Donna Jackson. as we discuss how President Biden's energy policies are affecting black Americans. For over 35 years, the Heritage Foundation Job Bank has been helping conservatives at all professional levels, find employment in key positions in Washington, D.C., and across the country. We can help connect you with positions in the administration, on Capitol Hill, in public policy organizations, and in the private sector. To learn more about the Heritage Foundation Job Bank, go to Heritage.

org slash job dash bank. Well, gas prices are at record highs across the country and, you know, these high energy costs, they are affecting all Americans, but they're affecting some people more than others. And so here with us to talk about that is Donna Jackson. She's the director of membership development for Project 21 at the National Center for Public Policy Research, which is the nation's largest black conservative think tank. Donna, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Well, so as of Monday, our average on gas prices, according to the AAA, were $4.89 a gallon. We're all feeling these effects. President Biden right now, he's blaming Russia. He's blaming these high gas prices on oil companies. Is this accurate? Who's really at fault here? Oh, no. I mean, you know, Biden owns this.

I love it when he's always blaming Putin. Okay, let's start off. He created a perfect storm. So there was the disasters withdraw from Afghanistan where the focus was on understanding white rage and pronouns where they had more meetings about that than actually the Afghanistan pullout. So what happened? It was disasters.

And it encouraged Putin to invade. So he owns that because of the way he handled the pullout. Now, add that to his war on domestic energy. Now, he said when he was running that he was going to end the fossil fuel industry. Now, the left and the Biden administration have been very strategic in the way they've attacked the fossil fuel gas industry. At every step, they block pipelines, there's litigations with permits, they're slow rolling, environmental analysis that they need to get drilling, to get pipelines. And then they've also signaled the financial industry that if anybody invest in the industry,

then they were going to target them. So you got the banks, the financial institutions, afraid to invest because this is a long haul. You don't just get up and drill today and then have everything you need. So they've attacked any industry that invest. Now with SEC, this SEC regulation, they're trying to make normalize climate change and understand, because I've worked in the county industry for a long time. Financial institutions investors use the financial statements to determine whether they want to invest in the industry. So if you have an industry that looks like fake numbers, I'm saying. they're fake numbers, but it looks worse than it should using these climate change disclosures,

then they're not going to invest their money. So in every aspect, you got bureaucrats from the EPA, you got them, the SEC, you have everybody targeting. And then you have the president that gives an expectation that says, I'm going to end your industry in eight years. So why, even if I was a worker, why would I devote my life to working in an industry? or a career that I know is going to end in less than eight years. I can't guarantee a house or a mortgage.

I can't determine that I'm going to be able to take care of my kids and put them through college. So in every aspect of this issue, this president has a signal that his expectation is that he's going to end the fossil fuel industry. He's going to, he has a war on gas and he's trying to force people. into electricity, something that people don't want. I want to really, you know, explain about how this parallels to what they've always did to African Americans. Because they're doing to the American people what they've done to African Americans for decades. Yeah, if you would get into that. Because, you know, they have this, you know, the left creates this agenda that black people never asked for.

And then they tell them to fall in line to do with their toe. That's the same thing they're doing with this fossil fuel industry. They decided that everybody should use electricity. And they have this war on fossil fuel. And so they're going to force the fossil fuel industry into bankruptcy and then force the American people into vehicles, into a energy source that they, a Green New Deal energy source that they didn't ask for. and they expect everybody to fall in line.

Now, why do they use environmental justice? Because I can blackmail you for black people, and they've been very good at the CRT, infusing this into it. For black people, they've already given this narrative that we're too stupid, too dumb, too ignorant, to know what's best for us, so they're the ones that's telling everybody what we need.

You know, I don't agree with Al Sharpton, or Jesse Jackson or some of those guys. But on this issue, even they said that black people shouldn't bear the burden of these high green energy deals that's burdening to the African American community. Now, people like me, that's a black conservative, they would say, oh, she's just, you know, the suffering from multi-racial whiteness or she's just, you know, being used. But even them, they said they're taking dark money because they're. they resent African Americans when they say the impact of pollution or dirty air, as they want to say, poverty has done more or harm than any pollutant to any African American. But they use that environmental justice to push their issues through because any American that says,

you know what, I think that this is overhyped. I don't really want to buy these vehicles. I don't think that I want all of my energy sources to come from one source. They'll say, well, you're a racist. You're a white supremacist. You're an extremist. And so they use these kind of policies. They use these kind of environmental justice to blackmail the people into an agenda that they don't want.

Well, and I think my guess is that a common response we might hear from the left, if they heard you say something like this is, you know, well, you know, there's going to be a little bit more pain initially and a little more hurt as we move away from dependence on fossil fuels. But ultimately, you know, environmental justice and shifting to electric and shifting to solar, you know, that will ultimately help minority populations. What would be your response to that argument? Listen, what environmental justice is doing to black people now is creating the new Jim Crow. If you look at California and places that they've been advanced in adopting environmental justice policies, they're also the most racist. You know, I'm going to give you an example. In California, they needed 100 to 200,000 units in order to have enough housing for individuals.

And it wouldn't encamped everybody in there. But just to have enough housing, affordable housing for people. using environmental climate change policies, they were only able to get 1,824. It's a huge difference between 200,000 units and 1,800 units. The pain points, what they've decided is that black people are disposable, that your life doesn't matter, because they are actually pushing people into poverty. When you have someone that's spending more than 30% of their income for gasoline, and they're making choices between whether their kids can have food to eat,

food to eat, or medicine, or pay their energy bills, electricity, gasoline, then that is not a pain point. That's genocide. They're destroying black communities. They're destroying black businesses. In California, they forced every new building to have electricity instead of gas. The Black Chamber of Commerce is the one that came out. And the Latino Chamber of Commerce are the ones that came out and say, listen, this is hurting minorities, the worst.

Because you have small businesses that can't afford the fees, can't afford the taxes, can't afford. can't afford the cost of these new regulations. In fact, if you look at a small business which minority businesses generally fall into, they pay four times the cost of that big businesses pay for these rules. They usually can't withstand the expenses involved and being able to comply with these environmental regulations. So they're forced out of business.

during a pandemic, 40% of black businesses went under. So to understand the volatility that they already face to power on more regulations that they can't afford, plus the fact that the amount of paperwork that you have to do, the outside counsel that you have to get, actually increases that barrier and is pushing people, not only out into poverty, but out of business and it's creating those larger wealth gap. That's not a pain point. That's actually deciding who gets to live and who doesn't because the cost of living expenses are too great. And if you tell me a pain point is I have to watch the pain of my child who can't eat.

That's not an inconvenience. That's cruelty. Yeah. Yeah. So then let's talk about solutions because what you're saying is that, you know, what the Biden administration is doing right now isn't working. So then how can we move forward in such a way where we are lifting everyone up through our energy policy in America? Well, the first thing you do is you create a pro-energy policy, climate change policy. you, if you signal to an industry that we're not going to destroy you, maybe they'll want to create more.

The other thing is that we should be doing an economic impact study of climate change policies that we adopt so that we will see if the policies themselves are creating more hardship, then the harm that is supposed to save us from, then we shouldn't be adopting these policies. But they won't do that because they already know the net result. They already know that people are hurting. But they had already decided long ago because every black city in America that you see in poverty has been run by liberals for 70 years. They've already decided that we don't matter. And now what they've done is realize that that experiment,

worked, and they're imposing it on all the American people today. And so now you don't have a choice. The market should determine what we buy, not the administration telling us what we should buy. And that, because people know what's best for them. But their signal is you're too ignorant, and you don't know what, you're too stupid. And so we have to tell you what you need. So if we keep going down the path that we're going down right now, if the Biden administration is successful at continuing to press their climate change agenda, where are we headed as a country? You know, we hear people throughout the word recession.

What do you think? I mean, I think that we're already in a recession. I mean, for a lot of people, maybe you're affluent Americans. not feeling the pain, but I can tell you your middle class and your working class people, if it's 8.5, the inflation rate is 8.5 for everyone. For them, it's like 11 to 12 percent, because all of the goods that they, and services that they use are more impacted by it. But we have to first make people aware of it because people don't really realize that, you know what, they're imposing regulations on every appliance in your house that's making it more expensive, less efficient, and they're taking away all of your choices.

So they've already decided it doesn't matter if you can't afford it. We don't care if you can't afford it. You can go it out. And so first we need to educate people, then we need to make sure that when these regulations are coming out, that people are chiming in. You know, the environmental justice, when it started, was supposed to be. be designed so that the communities impacted could give their input? Do you know that ever since they started that environmental justice in 1994, not one community of color have been able to chime in on any of these regulations they're doing in the name

of communities of color? Really? That was the whole goal. If there's pollutants, if there's disproportionate impacts, whatever solutions, they were to be chimes, they're supposed to have the opportunity to comment and be part of the process. They've 100% excluded anyone, I mean, from liberal to conservative, any black person that says, wait a minute, you're creating an environmental policy that are killing good, blue-collar gateway jobs because our communities have fewer people with education, and these jobs give them the

opportunity to be able to get into the middle class, to be able to be homeowners. They kill every job, every new factory in the name of environmental justice. Well, where's the justice in pushing me into poverty that I don't have the income to be able to afford to move in your neighborhood? See, they always say, well, black people live in communities where it's overly, it's more pollutants, right? Well, they only live there because that's what they can afford. If you didn't kill high-paying blue-collar jobs like killing the Keystone Pipeline,

attacking Alaska pipelines. In Virginia, they did the same thing where they got rid of, they attacked the pipelines. Then they wouldn't live in those communities because they could be able to afford to live in better communities. But every time those jobs come up, the first thing they do, they come in, convince people, to go in against those factories, once that factory or project is killed, they're gone. They're not giving any substitute. So are there any action steps we can take? Because it's really discouraging, honestly, hearing you talk and you think, my goodness, this is so unjust.

What can I do? Well, how many people really realize that this was going on? Yeah. Podcasts like this, different avenues where we're speaking out and saying, hey, there's this. This bill, HR, you know, 255, whatever the bills are that are coming up, and this is what they're proposing, the more we make people aware of it, and we need to really contact those congressmen that are participating that may end up voting on some of these bills because this is a billion dollar, a multi-billion dollar industry. You would not believe how many grants have been given out in the name of environmental justice with zero. impact to the communities. We need to contact our congressmen. Any energy issues, we need to make ourselves aware of it. There's the Energy and Commerce Committee that has hearings every day.

We should be looking at the websites, make people aware of any policies that are actually going to be detrimental to the lifestyle and the cost of living for most Americans. They're out in open, but they're not in open. Donna, tell us how we can follow your work in the Worker Project 21. You can follow us at National Center.org, Project 21 at National Center.org. We're always excited to partner with people to get their input. We fight for issues that concern our communities, but all communities. And we definitely don't want these false narratives out here that says that all black people

just sit around and want to check. We believe in capitalism. We believe in upward mobility. We believe in self-determination. We believe in all of the same principles, believe it or not, that everyone else does. We love our Constitution. And we fight on behalf of any injustice, irregardless of the color of your skin. because at the end of the day, we're all the same.

We're all created equal. We all can determine our own path, which is what the, and whatever that success is, which the Constitution guarantees us. Absolutely. So, you know, we're there. We're open. Just let us know. Thank you.

Thank you for the work that you're doing. And thank you so much for joining the show today. We really appreciate your time. Thank you for having me. We're winning. So I signed up for the fight. I feel positive. Good.

And, you know. I'm glad to hear you say that you're positive. I'm positive. We should all be positive. We're dating. We're slaying giants. Amen. Amen.

Done. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. If you haven't done so already, please be sure to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast. on your podcast listening app of choice. That's Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio.

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