Pol. Ed. note: I wrote this nearly a year ago. In light of Joe Biden's remarks today about black voters ("you ain't black" if you vote for Trump), it seemed especially relevant.
A few days ago, I set out to write another piece on Joe Biden's blunders, it would have been the third this month. The more I researched it, a pattern emerged. Something had been staring me in the face that I hadn't recognized. The headlines about Biden focus on the fondling and sniffing of girls and women, verbal gaffes, his tragic and dysfunctional family, and lately, his politically incorrect remarks.
The real story is that Joe is a racist. There are simply too many "insensitive" quotes, bigoted opinions, and legislative acts wherein Biden has used his influence to steer opinion, policy, and law to the disadvantage of black Americans, materially harming what was once a burgeoning race in America.
In an age when Democrats have robbed racism of its gravitas by hurling the term at everyone from our founding fathers to those who question the aims of Black Lives Matter, leveling the same accusation at one of their own might seem ironic. To the contrary: it's about time. In a contest to determine the most racist major political party, the Democrats win handily. As you'll see, it's not even close.
Before I list the reasons for the claim that both Biden and his party are endemically racist, let me clearly state the obvious: racism exists in all walks of life, regardless of political stripe, spiritual belief, sexual proclivity, age, or indeed, race itself. I believe no one is entirely devoid of passing judgment on others based on race.
That said, Biden is a genuine, old-fashioned, deeply racist man. He might not accept that he is, or more to the point, might not know that he is--in fact, some of his quotes on the matter seem to confirm this theory--but neither self-deception nor ignorance erase his iniquity.
Biden has had the luxury of three-layered insulation in matters of race. His habit of sticking his foot in his mouth has led the public to expect gaffes and write it off as "Joe being Joe." Further, his blue collar shtick gives him an air of protector of the underprivileged, and finally, he brandishes his Democratic get-out-of-jail-free card on slip-ups involving economics, race, or sexuality with veteran confidence.
As a framework for Biden's bias, I'll take a look at his political party, specifically Democratic party leaders, due to their rank hypocrisy in the matter of race. Unlike many of my peers, I don't blame civilian Democrat voters for their views. The voters don't knock on countless doors, shake countless hands, and awkwardly hone the craft of convincing strangers to agree with them. Voters don't need to slake their thirst for power, so they can write laws to control others. Voters aren't the problem. They have been led astray by convincing actors called politicians.
I want to draw a bright line between Democratic politicians and plain old Democrat voters, because the latter believe that they are on the side of good in racial matters. They truly believe there was a "party switch" sometime around the Civil Rights era, that the old, racist Democratic Party transmogrified and somehow became the champion of minorities. They are as steadfast in these convictions as a child who believes in simple binaries such as good guys vs. bad. They are also profoundly incorrect.
On the other hand, conservatives at large have a blind spot in the racial arena, and it springs from a faulty synaptic connection. Conservatives wish to conserve tradition. They believe at heart that the old ways survived for good reason. Dedication to God, family, liberty, and fidelity to the Constitution underpin conservative, and by extension, much of Republican, philosophy.
By promoting ideas with historical merit, conservatives are seen--and too often see themselves--as looking backwards, embracing the past, and as detractors claim, wanting to rewind the clock. And here is where liberals--and by extension, many Democrats--seize on gaudy mistakes of American history...and assign them to conservatives: You want it like it used to be, with slaves? Your kind are all racist!
Inferences are made and disseminated to support the fallacy that what conservatives truly want is not just constitutional fidelity, and the values that inhere within it, but a time when America was whiter, more culturally homogenous. It's a neat leftist trick, one that has left many a well-meaning independent voter scratching his head and falsely concluding that, Well, heck, I guess I better not vote for the ones who want to reinstitute slavery.
How comfortable is the average citizen that the left can gainfully prey on his imagination over the idea that humans have not yet, in many thousands of years and generations, through the rise and fall of great civilizations, imagined the best way forward? That "progressivism" will marshal in a better way, dreamt of by recipients of far less rigorous educations and fewer empirical lessons on the nature of mankind? Such ineluctable hubris is commonly (perhaps always) a precursor to disaster.
There are racist Republicans, to be sure--Jesse Helms springs to mind as a poster boy--but historically and in the present day, Democrats are far worse. It is one thing, a bad and common one, to excoriate a race of humans on the perception of their collective behaviors. It is another--and far worse--to damn and hinder that same race's very existence, to proffer unto it an endless banquet, much of it poisoned.
For Democrats are the ones whose legislation infantilized an American race with welfare and entitlements in exchange for votes. They are the ones who ignore overwhelming black-on-black crime and search instead for any example of police brutality that fits their victimhood narrative. They have slept for decades in the seats of power in rotting cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit.
Perhaps it is fitting, after all, that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. seeks to represent their party.
The Republican Party was founded, in large part, to oppose slavery, and by vote count, it was Republicans who abolished slavery. The Democratic Party fought their efforts with shameful verve, but the 13th Amendment was nonetheless passed by congress in 1865 with 100% Republican support, and only 23% Democratic support.
The 14th Amendment, which gave full citizenship to emancipated slaves, was passed in 1868 with 94% Republican support and no Democratic support--none--in congress. The 15th Amendment, giving freed slaves the right to vote, passed in 1870 with 100% Republican support and zero Democratic support.
As Ann Coulter notes in her book Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, Republicans persisted in trying to advance equality for blacks. "Republicans kept introducing federal civil rights bills and Democrats kept blocking them—a bill to protect black voters in the South in 1890; anti-lynching bills in 1922, 1935, and 1938; and anti–poll tax bills in 1942, 1944, and 1946."
The Ku Klux Klan, a domestic terror organization, was not only founded by Democrats, its first Grand Wizard spoke at the 1868 Democratic National Convention, and it sought outright control of the party at the 1924 Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden. Marching in robes and hoods in nearby New Jersey, 20,000 klansmen gathered at the "Klanbake" in a show of support for William G. McAdoo, the son-in-law of former President Woodrow Wilson, another noted racist Democrat. His opponent was Governor Al Smith, backed by the political machine of Tammany Hall.
Left-leaning editors at websites such as Wikipedia, and outright leftist historical revisionists David and Barbara Mikkelson of Snopes.com have sought to ameliorate the tawdry affair, resorting to straw man arguments about the attribution of photos of klansmen used in popular internet memes and the like. So I have linked to a 2016 New York Times article so we can get it straight from the donkey's mouth. The Times flatly states: "At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, held at Madison Square Garden in New York, the most powerful bloc in the Democratic Party was the Ku Klux Klan."
If they wore robes inside Madison Square Garden is irrelevant. If the Klanbake was "just across the river" from New York City or farther down the Jersey shore is irrelevant. If the KKK sought to influence Republicans as well is especially irrelevant as they failed utterly. Whether the rally was even referred to as "Klanbake" at the time or only afterward is irrelevant. What is indisputable: 20,000 klansmen convened in New Jersey during the Democratic National Convention to support their man.
It bears stating that Klan-backed McAdoo won the immoral victory--he garnered 543 votes to 542 for Tammany's Smith--but since neither candidate reached the requisite two-thirds threshold, an alternate candidate was selected, ending the longest ever continuously-run national party convention. The compromise candidate, John W. Davis, garnered only 29 percent of the vote when he lost the general election to Republican Calvin Coolidge.
Times don't change. "Then as now, Democrats support the hooligans," writes Coulter. "Democrats always side with a mob." Yesteryear's KKK, Weather Underground, or MoveOn.org is today's Antifa.
President Eisenhower, a Republican, integrated the US military and promoted civil rights for minorities. He also pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Eisenhower's primary foe on civil rights was Lyndon B. Johnson, a lifelong segregationist until the 1957 bill, when he discerned the need to placate black voters. Even the (eventually disastrous) Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supported by a higher percentage of Republicans than the Democrats who wrote it.
When Barry Goldwater voted against the sprawling 1964 "Great Society" civil rights bill, Democrats pounced, claiming that he--and by extension, the Republican Party--was against blacks, and this single vote caused all the racists in the Democratic Party to run like rats across the aisle. Goldwater singlehandedly turned Democrats, the party of the KKK, into the physician and savior of black America, and simultaneously annulled the entire anti-slavery and civil rights history of Republicans with one vote.
That's literally their argument.
Goldwater rejected two planks of the 1964 bill on constitutional grounds, as he said on numerous occasions. As Dr. Eric Wallace, the black founder of the conservative Freedom Journal Institute, attests, “[Goldwater's] stance was based on his view that the act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of states and, second, that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do business, or not, with whomever they chose.[3]
"More specifically, Goldwater had problems with title II and title VII of the 1964 bill. He felt that constitutionally the federal government had no legal right to interfere in who people hired, fired; or to whom they sold their products, goods, and services. He felt that power laid in the various states, and with the people. He was a strong advocate of the tenth amendment. Goldwater’s constitutional stance did not mean he agreed with the segregation and racial discrimination practiced in the South. To the contrary, he fought against these kinds of racial divides in his own state of Arizona. He supported the integration of the Arizona National guard and Phoenix public schools.[4] Goldwater was, also, a member of the NAACP and the Urban League."[5]
What is fair to concede about Republicans re: the "switch myth" is that a growing infusion of corporate capital had turned it into the party of big business, a characterization it retains today. It was still pro-civil rights, but not as staunchly.
As discussed below, Lyndon B. Johnson, lifelong segregationist until the 1964 bill, an opportune moment arose for the Democratic Party to recast itself. Goldwater was the stooge, and Johnson was elated over the victory. He infamously said of the Great Society, "I'll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years."
The Civil Rights Era was authored by Democrats looking for a way to appeal to black voters. Reeling in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination, the nation embraced all his ambitious ideas, likely more than they would have had Kennedy lived. Lyndon Baines Johnson took advantage of the moment and rapidly advanced the legislative agenda, allegedly designed to end racial inequality. Finally, the Democratic Party was to atone for its sins, salve the wounds of slavery it fought to protect. Or so it appeared.
The reach of the programs was vast. From the War on Poverty to initiatives on education, health, arts endowments, public broadcasting, cultural centers, transportation, the environment, taxpayer-funded housing, and of course, food stamps and welfare, the depth and breadth of the agenda affected virtually every sphere of American life.
In short, Democratic leadership--unchanged, still the same men they were before the vote--endeavored to take black America under its theretofore morally palsied wing. The results are visible today. The effects of The Great Society were manifold, but chief among them is the destruction of the black American family. Of the reams of statistics that demonstrate the catastrophic decline in quality of life for blacks since 1964, one speaks most loudly.
From a National Center for Health Statistics study: the percentage of illegitimate black children (children born into fatherless homes):
1964: 23%
2017: 77.3%
This sickening number is a direct result of Democratic meddling in black family life. All races have experienced an increase of single mothers since the introduction of the Great Society programs, but its outcomes are seen and felt most acutely by blacks. And yet, the idea persists that welfare, food stamps, and affirmative action are not cultural usurpations or bought votes, but the continuing, unsolicited beneficence of the left.
From Ronald Kessler's Inside the White House: The Hidden Lives of the Modern Presidents and the Secrets of the World’s Most Powerful Institution, regarding LBJ:
“'That was the reason he was pushing the bill,' said [Air Force One staffer Ronald] MacMillan, who was present during the conversation. 'Not because he wanted equality for everyone. It was strictly a political ploy for the Democratic party. He was phony from the word go.'”
I'd say "phony" is awfully generous. It would be phony if the Great Society programs were actually designed to help black people instead of make them wards of the state. LBJ, a segregationist for most of his career, was virulently racist. He wanted in no way to help black people.
An LBJ quote from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream:
"These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference."
To further illustrate the irony of LBJ as a champion of blacks: a previous bill, the 1957 Civil Rights Act, was the first civil rights legislation since 1875 not thwarted by Democrats, and which was signed into law by a Republican, President Dwight Eisenhower. According to his biographer Robert A. Caro, LBJ regularly referred to it as “the nigger bill.”
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democratic senator from New York, worked for LBJ on the War On Poverty, and to author the report that ushered in the destructive power of modern entitlements. He and his staff produced "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." Known informally as the Moynihan Report, it undergirded the socialist flights of fancy that were the social engineering programs of the civil rights bill. In many ways it was the very justification for the bill itself, written months after the passage of the Great Society.
Written with the assistance of a small staff, the report details living conditions, impediments to employment, the absence of fathers, and the rise of single motherhood in the black community. It ascribes all of these issues to 300 years of white mistreatment of blacks.
In a 2015 article in The Atlantic, titled "The Black Family In the Age of Mass Incarceration," reparations champion and author Ta-Nehisi Coates correctly states that "Moynihan’s report 'The Negro Family' tragically helped create this system [of mass incarceration]." The tragedy of it, to Coates' eye, is that the report was misunderstood, and that it was received as a condemnation of black America, not a prescription for it.
Coates fails to recognize that the report did exactly what it was designed to do: paint black families as unable to help themselves, so Democrats could, as Coates is fond of saying, plunder. The Moynihan report gave Democrats fodder to continue to foist entitlement programs on black America, to infantilize them, thereby creating the most reliable (read: dependent) voting bloc in the country. Instead, Coates portrays Moynihan evenly, ascribing no ill will to him, despite Moynihan's conspicuous hand wringing over being labeled a racist in the years following the report. He worked and published steadily during that time.
"Moynihan had lots of ideas about what government could do," writes Coates, "provide a guaranteed minimum income, establish a government jobs program, bring more black men into the military, enable better access to birth control, integrate the suburbs—but none of these ideas made it into the report. 'A series of recommendations was at first included, then left out,' Moynihan later recalled."
And this doesn't sound suspicious to Coates? He implies that a few suggestions, even more deeply socialist than the Great Society already was, would have saved the black family, ignoring that even without such further meddling, the Great Society laid waste to it.
Moynihan: "'It would have got in the way of the attention-arousing argument that a crisis was coming and that family stability was the best measure of success or failure in dealing with it.'"
The "logic" here: offering solutions would have tempered the hysteria that followed. Further, even if we take Moynihan at his word as Coates does, what difference would it make to suggest guaranteed minimum income and a jobs program for black fathers to the inveterately racist Lyndon Johnson, who had to hold his nose just to "give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down"?
"Integrating the suburbs" whites had fled to? Good luck floating that to LBJ.
Coates pretends not to know any of this, and weaves a nice apologist web for his fellow Democrats. The report and the 1964 bill severely wounded black America and hindered its rise. Only a shill says otherwise.
That the report was widely condemned as racist is unsurprising. That it was allowed to stand as Democratic true north in 1965 is disgusting, that it still does is laughable.
As Walter E. Williams, black author and professor of economics at George Mason University notes, in a short span, the effects of such toadying policy were widespread and disastrous, and "by 1980, the black illegitimacy rate had more than doubled, to 56 percent." A mere 15 years after the advent of Great Society programs--astounding.
Williams continues: "Much of today's pathology seen among many blacks is an outgrowth of the welfare state that has made self-destructive behavior less costly for the individual. Having children without the benefit of marriage is less burdensome if the mother receives housing subsidies, welfare payments and food stamps. Plus, the social stigma associated with unwed motherhood has vanished. Female-headed households, whether black or white, are a ticket for dependency and all of its associated problems."
As black economist Thomas Sowell notes, "Ignored in all discussions is the fact that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994."
A key failing of the new welfare that grew out of Great Society programs is that it rewards more funds to single mothers, a "detail" that Moynihan would later claim to regret. As Edwin Feulner, founder of The Heritage Foundation notes,
"The War on Poverty created negative incentives. Instead of promoting the growth of healthy families, the welfare system discouraged them. A single mother could receive larger payments from Uncle Sam by remaining single than by marrying the father of her child. Over time, many fatherless children entered the world. The welfare checks showed up month after month, regardless of how their parents spent their days. As these boys and girls grew up without fathers around, they came to regard such households as natural. The social safety net, designed to be a temporary help to the people in need, instead kept them trapped in government dependency."
In time, the War on Poverty was derisively known as "The War On the Poor."
Further, as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation notes, "welfare began to serve as a substitute for a husband in the home, and low-income marriage began to disappear. As husbands left the home, the need for more welfare to support single mothers increased. The War on Poverty created a destructive feedback loop: Welfare promoted the decline of marriage, which generated a need for more welfare."
The lasting result for the children of single mother families? They are:
If you're inclined, go to this Wikipedia page about the Great Society and read it. Its writer-editors would have you believe that "Moynihan was right," and the state of black America today reflects his dire predictions in his report, ignoring entirely that his report, tossed off in less than a year to foster support for the Great Society, which was implemented to the utter detriment of black families, is its root cause. How Wiki editors sleep at night, I'll never know. The very idea that such larded nonsense is a research tool for impressionable students is frightening.
The New Deal, much like the Great Society, was a Democrat-authored program. A key difference is that the New Deal united Americans instead of dividing them, and there was a true need for it: America was in the worst chapter of its history short of the Civil War. Extreme measures were called for. Not so in the case of the Great Society, in which the solution to the alleged fracturing of black families made the problem literally three times worse. Helping a man get back on his feet is a great and noble endeavor. To keep him on the perpetual dole is to take a hostage.
Put a few other ways, throwing life preservers to people drowning at sea can save lives. Throwing them to folks swimming in a pool is distracting, an invitation to float. Just as the goal of therapy is to end therapy, the goal of welfare is to get people on their feet and back to the dignity of self-supporting work.
The social safety net is there to catch people. That's why it's a net, not a hammock.
Enough about their party. On to its leading candidate, a relic of its stained past.
I count in excess of ten times that Joseph Biden has exposed himself as a racist in public life. Some instances have been mere words, either dogwhistles to constituents or outright bigotry that is too often dismissed, written off as "Joe being Joe." Others involve the traumatization of black individuals. Still others demean the entire race. The final instance is a crime bill written by Biden that worsened or ended the lives of millions of black Americans, and scarred millions of their relatives and dependents.
I'll start slowly and build up. The first example is from the recently unearthed 1973 speech from the City Club in Cleveland, Ohio.
“I think the two-party system,” Biden said, “although my Democratic colleagues won’t like my saying this, is good for the South and good for the Negro, good for the black in the South."
This is classic paternalistic racism, the bread and butter of White Man's Burden. Paraphrased, it would accurately read: Those darkies don't even know it, but a balanced two-party system is good for them. It's Archie Bunker level stuff: not the worst ever, but the casual, knowing manner speaks volumes about the assumptive underpinnings of his argument. The effortless veil.
Two years later, in 1975:
"I do not buy the concept, popular in the sixties, which said, 'We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.' I don’t buy that. I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation. And I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.”
To be fair, I don't find this passage to be strictly racist. There are plenty of morally sound perches to stand on in the opposition to both reparations and welfare, as Coleman Hughes of Quillette demonstrated so adroitly last week. Some blacks are aghast at the idea. I include it here as it sheds light on quotes and stances to come. Further, while not racist in an outright manner, Biden's offended, antagonized tone--"I'll be damned...to pay," and his mathematical exaggeration of "300 years ago," which misses the end of slavery by 190 years, are hallmarks of signaling.
Later, in a policy decision which affected millions of blacks and whites, Biden stood firmly against busing children in order to achieve the aims of desegregation. From The Washington Examiner:
"In September 1975, Biden supported an anti-busing amendment to a federal bill. It was proposed by Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, a segregationist until at least the 1960s and regarded by most to be a racist. Delighted by Biden’s shift, Helms welcomed him to 'the ranks of the enlightened.'”
Republicans have their racists, and Helms was a noted one. Biden reached across the aisle, defying his party on the issue, united with Helms in their mutual determination to keep blacks and whites apart. Biden's tap dancing on the issue from an audio recording of a 1975 NPR interview is particularly revealing (if you click the link to the recording, pick it up at 2:30 to hear Biden):
"How do I legislate it specifically? I give you my word as a Biden, I've put in over a hundred hours, by far, I would say close to 300 hours...on just torturing this thing, meeting with leaders...calling my staff together...the blacks on my staff together, saying, 'Listen, now look, this is what I think. Do you think I am? Is there something in me, deep-seated that I don't know?'...it's a hard, hard thing...especially when you've pictured yourself, and been pictured by others...as being someone who, you know, has been out in front the other way."
Again, the posturing (interestingly, 300 is his go-to number when exaggerating) is apparent, but what stands out is the pretense of self-examination. To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, if you consult with colleagues for 300 hours and wonder aloud during NPR interviews if you are a racist...you might be a racist.
His diction is noteworthy as well, from "torturing" to "listen, now look" to the repeated use of "pictured." The first speaks for itself in a Freudian slip fashion. The twin commands to his black staffers, "listen, now look" suggest Biden's concern with how his stance is perceived by ears and eyes. Next, instead of saying he's "out front on anti-racism," he chooses to say in a passive tone that he has "pictured himself" as against racism, and has been "pictured by others that way." Lastly, he can't bring himself to say the word "racist," but dances around it: "Do you think I am?"
In 1984, Biden found himself in hot water after answering a question about Jesse Jackson's campaign. "He is one of the brightest guys around. That boy ain't no dummy, just like Gary Hart, that boy ain't no dummy either."
Let's agree that no one, especially a politician, makes the mistake of calling a black man "boy," or a grown white man for that matter, as Biden inappropriately but far less shockingly refers to Gary Hart. One of two conclusions can be drawn: he slipped up and quickly tried to cover himself by using the same term for Hart, or that it was premeditated, and he deliberately insulted Jackson as a wink to fellow racists, and used the Hart line as a plausible excuse. If the former, what an idiot. If the latter, we would naturally expect to see other instances of racially charged speech.
And...just such an echo is easily unearthed: in early 2007, the same day he filed the paperwork for his candidacy in the 2008 presidential election, Biden pulled the compliment-followed-by-slur formula again.
"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."
Biden manages to damn Obama with faint praise--look, a negro who can speak well and wash himself too!--while simultaneously taking another dig at Jesse Jackson and many others, from Frederick Douglass in 1888 to Shirley Chisholm in 1972. Were they ugly, dirty, dumb, or mumblers? Which of Biden's criteria did they fail to meet? That question aside, the point is the pattern. The identical method used to demean opponents of color.
To those who say, "But Obama and Biden are such good friends, the bromance, etc.," well, why not? I ask you: what did Obama do for blacks except to increase the number of them on welfare rolls? Where were the jobs? What did he do for his hometown of Chicago? Many Americans expected that he would naturally seek to improve the Second City, but he neglected it, along with his race. William Darity Jr. writes in The Atlantic, "The Obama administration never gave serious consideration to aggressive transformative universal policies [to help blacks]" in this excellent article, "How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans".
Back to Biden. During a campaign stop in Iowa later in 2007, the Washington Post asked him about the discrepancy of outcomes between rural and urban schools. He said, "There’s less than one percent of the population of Iowa that is African-American. There is probably less than four or five percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.”
The reporter, probably not believing his ears, asked Biden to clarify, which he did.
“When you have children coming from dysfunctional homes, when you have children coming from homes where there’s no books, where the mother from the time they’re born doesn’t talk to them — as opposed to the mother in Iowa who’s sitting out there and talks to them, the kid starts out with a 300 word larger vocabulary at age three. Half this education gap exists before the kid steps foot in the classroom.”
First, it's worth noting the dehumanizing "What is in DC" Biden employs instead of "who." This is another example of his pattern of not saying the ugly thing that is signified. And there's that number again--what is it with 300? Biden uses it to suit any random claim.
But those are the least remarkable things Biden does in the delivery of his white supremacy anthem. From the dismissiveness of "there's no books" at home, to the idea that the mother "from the time they're born doesn't talk to them?" This is beyond racist, it's ignorant. An argument could be made that Biden doesn't comprehend that such stereotyping is by definition racist, but it's not an excuse.
It's not that the stereotypes aren't accurate, they are. The cruel part is that the stereotypes exist, in large part, due to Democratic legislation.
I hate to employ the tired, old "imagine if a Republican said that" chesnut, but for crying out loud, imagine if a Republican said that! Republican Senator Trent Lott was forced to resign at the height of his considerable powers for joking at a cocktail party in 2002 that the nation would have been better off if segregationist Strom Thurmond had been elected president. I would posit that Joe's black-DC-dumb, white-Iowa-good remarks were far worse, and not spoken remotely in jest.
One wonders if Biden would have allowed the disgraceful badgering that Anita Hill had to endure if she were a white woman. As Senate Judiciary Chairman, Biden controlled the tenor of Clarence Thomas' hearing, one of the ugliest chapters in the history of that esteemed chamber.
The Washington Post recounts:
"Sen. Joseph R. Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, lost control of the biggest moment yet in his political career — the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings — moments after Anita Hill finished describing what the Supreme Court nominee said about his penis...Biden banged his gavel. For the future vice president, it went downhill from there. That Friday, Oct. 11, 1991, was one of the most surreal moments in U.S. political history, with testimony about breast sizes, sex with animals and someone named Long Dong Silver."
For once, it's not what Biden said that rankles. Instead, it is the skeptical tone he and others used, condescending to and badgering Hill, making her repeat the more gaudy accusations. "What's the most embarrassing of all the incidences you've alleged?" Biden asked from the dais.
It was as if they were trying to break her remarkable composure, force her to lose it altogether and shout out the vulgar slang she implied Thomas had used instead of the polite euphemisms she chose in their stead. Biden alone had the power to contain it, to tactfully steer the discussion, and he did not.
It was a circus, with Biden as the ringmaster, other powerful white senators as the trainers, and the caged animals were Hill and Thomas. Lest we forget, Thomas was outraged by the proceedings as well. Fittingly, there was an echo of Lyndon B. Johnson in the room that day. From MSNBC's Adam Serwer:
"In Flawed Giant, Johnson biographer Robert Dallek writes that Johnson explained his decision to nominate Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court rather than a less famous black judge by saying, 'When I appoint a nigger to the bench, I want everybody to know he’s a nigger.'"
Whether or not Clarence Thomas was guilty of Hill's accusations, he too had to pay a humiliating toll before he would sit on the highest court, and Biden made sure to collect it.
Lest I paint him into a corner, it should be known that Biden is equal opportunity racist. Speaking to a few supporters in 2006, Biden said, "In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking. It's gigantic."
Despite the checkered past of his racial commentary, when Biden speaks directly to a black audience, he doesn't shy away from the subject. If anything, he doubles down. From the campaign trail in 2012:
"Romney...said in the first hundred days he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, 'unchain Wall Street.' They're going to put y'all back in chains."
In the video clip, it's clear that Biden is telegraphing his message. The remarks upset some of Biden's allies as well. Artur Davis, former Obama campaign co-chair and the four-term Democratic congressman from Alabama, said that Biden was propagating "racial viciousness" when he said Romney's regulatory policies would "put y'all back in chains."
Biden claimed that he was misunderstood.
Davis, who is black, continued, "But I happen to have spoken to a few African-American audiences in my time, represented a predominantly African-American district. I know what Joe Biden was doing yesterday, and every black person in the room knew who the 'y'all' was, they knew what the chains were about, and they knew what the metaphor was."
Lastly, for now: Biden on the campaign trail in 2007, in a panel event with other candidates, speaking to a largely black crowd, decided to lecture black men on condom use, denial about how HIV is spread in the black community, and a lack of black leadership around confronting AIDS. Biden points out that there should be no stigma in wearing a condom, nor in getting tested for HIV.
"I've been down holding rallies in the parks," Biden begins, "getting men to understand it's not unmanly to wear condoms, getting women to understand it's okay to say no...it's not unmanly to be tested for AIDS. I've been tested for AIDS, I know Barack has been tested for AIDS." The crowd breaks into knowing laughter, as there were unfounded internet rumors swirling at the time that Obama had engaged in gay sex. Obama was clearly perturbed by the comment.
Just as racist Democrats Lyndon Johnson and Daniel Moynihan crafted the Great Society which ravaged black America, Biden authored the infamous crime bill--the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act--that greatly expanded mass incarceration of blacks, and punished distribution and possession of crack at a 100:1 ratio versus powdered cocaine.
In this way, Biden is truly the heir of the racist Democratic Party: he gave blacks the knockout punch with his crime bill. Staggering after the all the "help" they received from LBJ and Moynihan's Great Society gut punch, black America took a roundhouse to the jaw with Biden's bill.
You know it's bad when politicians are lining up to apologize for a 25 year-old vote, but that's what's happened in the past few years, with then-president Bill Clinton foremost among them. Hillary, who infamously used the "super-predator" label herself, apologized on the campaign trail in 2016.
Biden gave an impassioned speech about the 1994 crime bill on the Senate floor. This isn't smiling "Uncle Joe." This is a Biden who, unless you watched a lot of C-SPAN in the nineties, you have never seen before. I believe that this video will be end of Biden's chances with the black voters he needs to beat Trump, assuming he even gets out of the primaries. It's that damning.
I've transcribed the bulk of his speech below, but do yourself the favor of clicking this hyperlink and watch it instead of reading it. It's a riveting three minutes.
"We must take back the streets. It doesn't matter whether or not the person accosting my...son or daughter...my wife...It doesn't matter whether or not they were deprived in their youth...It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society! The end result is they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe..shoot my sister, beat up my wife..I don't want to ask 'what made them do this?' They must be taken off the street. That's number one. There's a consensus on that! Unless we do something about that cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing, because they literally--I yield myself three more minutes--because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity. We should focus on them now...If we don't, they will, or a portion of them will, become the predators 15 years from now. And Madam President, we have predators on our streets, that society has...in part because of its neglect, created. Again, it does not mean because we created them, that we somehow forgive them or do not take them out of society to protect my family and yours from them. They are beyond the pale, many of those people, beyond the pale. And it's a sad commentary on society. We have no choice but to take them out of society...you cannot make rehabilitation a condition for release. It's a shame, but we don't know how to rehabilitate them. We must make the streets safer. I don't care why someone is a malefactor in society. I don't care why someone is antisocial...[or] a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society. Try to help them, try to change the behavior, that's what we do in this bill, we have drug treatment, and we have other treatments to try to deal with it, but they are in jail! Away from my mother, your husband, our families...We would be absolutely stupid as a society if we didn't recognize the condition that nurtured those folks still exists, and we must deal with that."
One begins to see why Biden got along so well with the segregationists James Eastland and Herman Talmadge. I'm sure Biden is truthful that they didn't call him "boy," more like "good old boy." Lately, Biden has gone so far to say that he "got stuck writing the crime bill" because he was the Judiciary chair. Just a laughably bad lie.
Speaking of the recent Eastland-Talmadge-Biden fracas, liberal TV host Trevor Noah got involved, noting that when candidates Kamala Harris and Cory Booker pushed back on Biden's shtick about his relationships with segregationists, calling him "tone-deaf," Biden's weirdly asymmetric reply to reporters:
"I don't have a racist bone in my body."
But Joe, neither of them called you a racist. That word you hear is just your conscience speaking.
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What a well researched and written article. Sure to make those who refuse to face the truth upset.
Thank you.
“You cannot go into a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking" ...Groping Joe
“They’re going to put y’all back in chains," spoken to a largely African-American audience with a fake African-American accent...Groping Joe.
"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," ...Groping Joe. So does he mean that non-mainstream African-Americans are not articulate (all speak Ebonics), stupid, dirty and ugly?
Watch Groping Joe fondling young girl. And the DemocRATs want to put this pedophile in the WH. At least rapist Slick Willie Clinton, for the most part, kept his sexual abuses confined to adult women. Pass this on, everyone needs to see what a creep Groping Joe is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbKrV1NCxBI
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Look white boy, let them fight their own meaningless battles, they don't need you.
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