While speaking in Wisconsin Monday, Joe Biden falsely claimed he was the first person in his family to go to college, decades after it was exposed for being a lie.
“I, like an awful lot of people in this audience, was the first in my family to go to college,” he told a small crowd at Madison College Truax campus Monday afternoon.
Biden delivered a 15-minute speech in the technical college’s gymnasium, focusing on his latest scheme to unilaterally cancel student loan debt.
BIDEN: "I, like an awful lot of people in this audience, was the first in my family to go to college."
He's lying. In 1987, he was even forced to admit it's a total LIE (after he plagiarized a British politician). pic.twitter.com/nUmIMrApwX
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 8, 2024
CHRONIC LIAR JOE BIDEN: "People say to me … 'How about all those hardworking people who grew up and had no opportunity to go to college?' I get it! That's the neighborhood I come from!" pic.twitter.com/TGXiaCjfCQ
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 8, 2024
Contra Biden’s claims, at least one of his forefathers attended college. His maternal grandfather Ambrose Finnegan attended Santa Clara College where he played football at the turn of the 20th Century. Biden was forced to admit this in 1987 after he had, as the New York Times delicately put it at the time, “miscast some of his own forebears, painting them as having rather more humble origins than they in fact did.”
On September 18, 1987, Biden admitted to reporters that in fact ”there are Finnegans, my mother’s family, that went to college.”
That wasn’t the only problem with his story, however. In his final statement at a Democrat primary debate for president in Iowa, Biden had flagrantly plagiarized a popular speech by a British Labor Party leader. Neil Kinnock had recently run for prime minister and subsequently lost to incumbent Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Despite his loss, his passionate speech was reportedly studied by presidential campaign strategists of both parties as it had “raised his approval rating by 19 points and became an instant classic.”
“Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, a Democratic hopeful, was particularly taken with it,” the New York Times reported. “So taken, in fact, that he lifted Mr. Kinnock’s closing speech with phrases, gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact for his own closing speech at a debate at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 23 – without crediting Mr. Kinnock.”
The plagiarism, one of several embarrassing instances of plagiarism that came to light during that primary election, was stunningly blatant and led to him dropping out of the race a month later.
In his speech, Kinnock began, ”Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?” Then pointing to his wife in the audience, he continued: ”Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?”
As the New York Times noted, Biden actually began his plagiarized remarks by claiming “the ideas had come to him spontaneously on the way to the debate.”
”I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?” he said. Then, pointing to his wife, he continued: ”Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?”