EXCLUSIVE Op-Ed from Diamond & Silk: Joe Biden is a threat to North Carolina’s growing black middle class

(Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, “Diamond and Silk,” are vloggers, commentators and Fox Nation personalities who describe themselves as “President Trump’s most loyal supporters.”)

Joe Biden’s attempt to position himself as “the black candidate” in the race is laughable in light of the decades he spent enabling China to the detriment of black Americans.

By now, everyone should know that Biden was at the forefront of the globalist movement that led to Chinese factories taking the place of the American plants that were once the backbone of the black middle class.

Starting in the early 1980s, Biden voted again and again as a member of the U.S. Senate in favor of liberalizing trade with China. In the 1990s, he backed President Bill Clinton’s plan to make China’s “most favored nation” trade status permanent, despite its history of human rights abuses and illegal trade practices. China was soon welcomed with open arms into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the global economy.

Joe Biden, as a U.S. senator and later as vice president, was one of the few people who could have done something to hold China accountable and protect vulnerable American workers; but he didn’t. China continued to disregard human rights, steal American intellectual property, and manipulate its currency while our trade deficit with them more than quadrupled, costing American workers nearly 4 million jobs over the course of just two decades.

Before Donald Trump came along, Biden and a whole generation of establishment politicians stood by as black Americans lost 60,000 of the factories they once relied on for work and our business elite got rich offshoring those jobs to China. North Carolina alone lost more than 230,000 manufacturing jobs in the nine years after China entered the WTO, and kept on losing them. Since 2001, more than 3 percent of our state’s entire workforce has been displaced by the growing trade deficit with China.

Since Donald Trump took office, the black middle class has painstakingly recovered from Biden’s betrayal, finding new economic opportunities outside the factories. Now, though, Biden is threatening to dismantle the “new economy” and the jobs that underpin today’s black middle class.

There’s nowhere that better characterizes this new middle class than North Carolina’s own  Research Triangle Park, which is one of the world’s great centers of intellectual property creation. Original  research and development conducted there results in new drugs, new information technology, new medical techniques, and more. The Research Triangle is also a prime destination for young black professionals trying to break into the global creative class.

Joe Biden’s softness on China, unfortunately, is no less a threat to the aspiring members of this new black middle class than it was to industrial workers 30 years ago. Until President Trump put unprecedented pressure on China, no one in Washington, D.C. was doing much of anything to stop China from flagrantly stealing American intellectual property invented in places such as the Research Triangle.

Combined with America’s increasing dependence on Chinese manufacturing, Beijing’s flippant disregard for our patents and copyrights threatened the prosperity of our research industries just as young black people were breaking their way into those fields.

While Joe Biden was out giving speeches about how China was “not a problem,” President Donald Trump was trying to solve the problem that’s plain to everyone but Biden. China signed the “Phase One” trade deal earlier this year because of the President’s persistence in leveraging tariffs and putting pressure on China, which was having a major impact on its economy. The deal is the start of something much bigger, of course, but even this early version included unprecedented protections for American intellectual property to which China has access.

As he has throughout his presidency, Donald Trump continues to pursue policies that will bring genuine, durable prosperity to black America. Joe Biden, who for three decades enabled China to wage all-out war against the black middle class, is nonetheless trying to portray himself as “the black candidate.” This November, many black voters in North Carolina will see through his charade.

(Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, “Diamond and Silk,” are vloggers, commentators and Fox Nation personalities who describe themselves as “President Trump’s most loyal supporters.”)