Joe Biden has a decades-long habit of making overtly racist remarks, taking discriminatory positions and cavorting with known racists – things that would get anyone to his political right tossed out of polite society. But being on the left must make it okay.
Just a few days ago, while lamenting the difficulty in convincing many Latinos and blacks to take the COVID vaccine, he committed a series of racially charged blunders that barely registered in the corporate media’s consciousness.
Biden white-splained that Latinos in America resist vaccinations because “they’re worried that they’ll be vaccinated and deported.”
This statement makes the insane assumption that all Latinos present in this country are illegal aliens subject to expulsion. It never occurred to Biden that more than 60 million Latinos are actually American citizens, according to recent census figures.
While insulting such a sizable segment of our population, Biden actually went further. He referred to this group of people as “Latinx,” which is a term invented by woke academics who objected to gender-specific words in the Spanish language.
Just 3% of Latinos use “Latinx” to describe themselves and less than a quarter have even heard of the term, according to the Pew Research Center. Many find it to be an offensive bastardization of the Spanish language.
Here, Biden is almost certainly unaware of what he’s saying and has simply repeated what a liberal on his staff has instructed him to say. But there are plenty of examples where Biden should not receive the benefit of the doubt.
In the same breath as his “Latinx” comment, Biden lectured about the fears that blacks may have of the vaccine, attempting to point to historically shameful episodes when they were subjected to inhumane medical experiments.
“They are used to being experimented on – the Tuskegee Airmen and others,” Biden said.
In this, he confused legendary World War II fighter pilots with a long, notorious governmental study of syphilis among black men – the Tuskegee Experiment.
It does not take much effort to imagine the media’s reaction if Donald Trump had mangled so many racial issues in one press conference.
Examples dating back to his campaign for president (and earlier) abound.
On Charlamagne Tha God’s popular morning radio show in May 2020, Biden infamously asserted to the largely black audience that if they were unsure of whether to vote for him or Trump, then “you ain’t black!”
Then in August 2020, Biden told a gathering of black and Hispanic journalists that “unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”
Taken together, these statements clearly suggest that Biden believes all black people think alike.
In the same interview, responding to a question on whether he had taken a cognitive test, Biden angrily fired back with the suggestion that the black reporter was a drug addict.
“That’s like saying you . . . before you got in this program, you’re take [sic] a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not,” Biden said. “What do you think? Huh? Are you a junkie?”
Put these words into Mitch McConnell’s mouth and try to envision how long he’d be allowed to remain in the Senate, let alone in a leadership position.
But Biden has been getting away with this for years.
In 2010, he warmly eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd, a former Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, saying he was “one of my mentors” and that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.”
In 2007, he referred to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”
In 2006, he said, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”
Way back in 1977, he said that forced busing to desegregate schools would cause his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.”
Of course, he infamously worked with segregationist senators to oppose that mandatory busing, which decades later led to the strongest moment in Kamala Harris’s campaign for president, when she blasted him as having personally impacted her as a young girl.
And over the course of his entire career, he had kind words to say about staunchly segregationist senators.
Any one of these statements or episodes would have been enough to sink the political career of any conservative in Washington, D.C., against whom tenuous accusations of racism are commonplace and occur almost daily.
But Joe Biden, who has a lifetime of them, is now president of the United States. On some days and in some ways, it must be good to be on the left.
Tim Murtaugh is a visiting fellow for communications at The Heritage Foundation.
