Fox News reports that President Joe Biden has left many confused and others disturbed with an impromptu remark that he made during a recent speech.
The incident took place on Friday during a speech that Biden gave to the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in America.
Totally weird
At this particular point in his speech, Biden was speaking about climate change.
“And everybody found out, there’s not a lot of total climate deniers anymore after they’ve seen what happened this year,” Biden claimed. “But guess what, we got a lot to do.”
This is not the comment, though, that set social media ablaze. Rather, it is the one that came next.
After Biden made that statement, he pointed into the crowd, supposedly at someone he knew. “You gotta say hi to me,” Biden said in a low voice. The crowd laughed.
Then, Biden dropped this line on his listeners: “We go back a long way. She was 12 and I was 30, but anyway. This woman helped me get an awful lot done. Anyway.” The crowd, once again, laughed.
A laughing matter?
Not a lot is known about the situation. We don’t know who the individual is whom Biden pointed to, we don’t know how she and Biden met when she was 12, and he was 30, we don’t know why they met, we don’t know what she helped Biden to get done, and so on.
What we do know, to say the least, is that it is an extremely awkward statement without further explanation. And so, it is not surprising that it set social media ablaze.
Conservative podcast host Monica Crowley hypothesized that “as dementia progresses, patients lose more of their filter and tend to blurt out the truth. Biden: ‘She was 12, I was 30.'”
Tim Graham of NewsBusters said that this is “why Biden frustrates handlers” because “you know the right-wingers are going to tweet ‘did he sniff her hair then?”
Conservative commentator Kyle Becker, perhaps, summed it up best, writing, “This is just plain creepy.” Neither Biden nor the White House has provided any explanation or context for Biden’s remark.