Tom Slater Tom Slater

The absurd outrage over Dr Jill Biden

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The Electoral College has confirmed Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Now America puts weeks of mad discussions about stolen elections and Venezuelan voting machines behind it, and conversation turns to what kind of president Biden will be. Will he make good on his pledge to bring America together? Will he heal the wounds of the Trump era? Well, if the past few days are anything to go by, his administration will certainly stand up for the rights, for the dignity, for the humanity, of people with advanced academic degrees.

I’m referring to the Dr Jill furore, which just may be the most phoney bit of elite outrage from 2020 (in a very crowded field). It centres on Jill Biden, the soon-to-be first lady. She has a doctorate in education, and a cheeky article in the Wall Street Journal by writer and academic Joseph Epstein dared to suggest that her going by Dr Jill Biden (she even has it in her Twitter handle) is a bit pretentious. ‘A wise man once said that no one should call himself “Dr.” unless he has delivered a child’, he wrote, before all hell broke loose.

The true base of Democrats these days is the well-off and well-educated

Epstein was swiftly denounced as a misogynist by the Democratic establishment. Jill Biden’s spokesman slammed the WSJ for publishing a ‘disgusting and sexist attack’. In the absence of any other evidence that Epstein was motivated by hatred of women, ire focused solely on the fact he referred to her as ‘kiddo’ in the first sentence. That Joe Biden famously often calls people kiddo, and has himself used it to refer to his wife, didn’t figure in the analysis. Nor did the fact that, at 83, Epstein is arguably within his rights to call most people kiddo.

Things got even more loopy when Northwestern University, where Epstein was an emeritus lecturer of English, scrubbed his name from its website.

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