Joe Biden's career of racial exploitation       

by DC Larson

Joe Biden is a politician in the very worst sense of that word. Throughout decades in America’s electoral sphere he has cynically manipulated voters, retailoring himself to befit cultural permutations and, by that disingenous doing, made a fortune for himself and his dysfunctional family.

That is not the principled statesmanship the founders extolled. Rather, it is the way of the deceitful and scheming political opportunist. It is Joe Biden’s way.

Like many 1970s Democrat senators, Biden inveighed against busing to integrate schools. He perceived some degree of popular opposition and rushed to cater to that racial animus.

“Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high [sic] that it is going to explode at some point!” he thundered on a 1977 senate floor.

A 2019 NBC News subheadline summed up the divisive senator’s impact: “Joe Biden helped give America the language that is still used to oppose school integration today, legislative and education history experts say.”

NBC’s story revealed that in 1975, Biden had sponsored legislation that limited courts’ authority to integrate schools, and also an amendment that prohibited the federal government’s withholding tax monies from segregated institutions.

But in the same moment he wooed segregationists, cagey calculator Biden sought to placate civil rights forces by also professing sympathy with them by advocating for affordable housing.

During that era, chroniclers note, he maintained friendships with ardent segregationists James Eastland, Herman Talmadge, John Stennis, Strom Thurmond, and erstwhile KKK leader and long-serving Democrat Robert Byrd.

His fetid background returned to plague him during a 2019 presidential-candidate debate. Then-competitor Kamala Harris confronted Biden,

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school everyday, and that little girl was me.”

In that same encounter, Harris said: “It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. It was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing.”

(Not long after this, Harris demonstrated her own inauthenticity by dispensing with pretended outrage and gigglingly becoming Biden’s vice-presidential colleague.)

When majority opinion evolved, finger-in-the-wind chameleon Biden suitably reinvented himself. No longer did he preach the supposed virtues of school segregation. Old racist pals had become liabilities. Today, he does not speak of them.

A 2020 Fox News report related that President Biden addressed Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on the anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday. He falsely claimed to have participated in the noble Civil Rights Movement as a teenager, and to have attended Wilmington, Delaware’s Bethel AME Church during that 1960s time.

According to the New York Post, when Biden withdrew from presidential campaigning in 1987 he confessed to reporters: “I was not an activist. I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma.” That he’s resumed lying to voters underscores his smug duplicitousness.

And as the Fox report noted: “Longtime [Bethel AME Church] congregants told the Washington Free Beacon at the time that they didn’t recall Biden attending the church.”

From the Ebenezer Baptist pulpit, he also repeated his discredited account of having been arrested by South African police during an attempted 1980s visit to then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela.

Undeterred by numerous press disputations of his falsehoods, and aides’ reported moves to dissuade him from continuing to promulgate them, Biden routinely includes them in addresses to applauding listeners.

Indeed, in his last month’s address to supporters at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church, Biden reiterated the ‘I attended a black church’ yarn. The uncritical audience rewarded dishonesty with applause and shouted “Four more years!”

Decades of successful exploitation taught the old political game-player the electoral utility of giving constituencies whatever they want, whatever it might be.

To Joe Biden, winning all that matters.