OPINION:
From the very outset of his campaign, former Vice President Joe Biden has presented himself to Black America as a savior figure for whom they have a moral duty to vote. It’s a total fraud. Mr. Biden is part of the problem for poor urban Blacks. He is not part of the solution.
Mr. Biden’s announcement speech was a blatant attempt to racially divide people. He worked hard to make the audience view White supremacists as “a threat to our nation …” — which they are — but failed to mention other threats to Blacks and other Americans that are thousands of times worse.
Although his remarks were intended to divide, he still presented himself as the one who could unite. Over a year later, he was telling radio host Charlamagne tha God that “you ain’t black” if you haven’t decided to vote for him yet. Such a statement can only come from an arrogant, entitled career politician who thinks he owns Blacks and the Black vote.
It is a strategy that is consistent with what Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party have offered African-Americans for the entirety of Mr. Biden’s political career: fear and dependency.
The narrative of fear is fatally misleading. It points people in the direction of the least threat, and it ignores the greatest threat. In reality, far more Black lives are lost from the explosion of violent crime in America’s major cities than from Mr. Biden’s White supremacist bogeymen.
Instead of addressing that reality, or even supporting President Trump as he deploys federal resources to address the problem, Mr. Biden has chosen to attack police, exploiting the false charge of “systemically racist” law enforcement to pose once again as the only one who can protect Black Americans.
It’s the only narrative Mr. Biden has, convinced as he is that significant Black turnout is what will carry him to the White House. He knows full well that he can’t claim to have actually done anything for the Black community except for mass incarceration.
Especially in reliably Democrat-voting urban districts, no group has been so completely ignored and exploited as African-Americans. Half a century or more years of complete Democratic control in some of America’s cities — not to mention eight years of “America’s first black president,” Bill Clinton, and another eight under America’s actual first black president, Barack Obama — produced no measurable improvement in the lives of countless black constituents.
The last time American cities were engulfed in rioting, in 2015, the late-Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings stood in his Democrat-dominated district in Democrat-run Baltimore with a Democrat in the White House and wept over the hopelessness in his community and how “the entire country has to take a warning from this.” He and his party had 50 years to fix all these problems but did nothing to help their people except find a way to have their families become personally wealthy.
In many places Black unemployment, the death of local businesses and services, and the unacceptably high rates of victimization that Blacks face at the hands of Black criminals remained a constant problem throughout Mr. Biden’s career, including during his stint as vice president. Compare those decades of pandering and abandonment to Mr. Trump’s record of producing real progress after a mere three and a half years in office.
“What have you got to lose?” he asked African-American voters in 2016, alluding to the Democratic Party’s continual failure to deliver. Far more of those voters took him up on the offer than the D.C. establishment expected.
It turned out that they didn’t just have nothing to lose; they had a lot to gain. During this administration, Black unemployment hit a record low, the poverty rate in the African-American community hit its lowest level in history, and black wages reached their highest levels ever.
These are tangible accomplishments that were never achieved by Democrat politicians, either because they couldn’t do it, or because they didn’t want to do it. If Mr. Biden was capable of achieving anything close to what Mr. Trump has, he had more than 40 years to do it.
On a recent edition of my podcast, “Common Sense,” Black conservative author and radio host David Harris Jr. told me that Donald Trump may prove to have delivered more for Black America than any president since Abraham Lincoln.
I can say with equal certainty that a Republican with half as much of a penchant for racially insensitive behavior and remarks as Joe Biden would be condemned continuously as a racist in the press. The fact that he is able to escape criticism is part of the media double standard. Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party rely on the extremely biased media to support and spread the irrational fear of Republicans, encouraging Black voters to believe that racist Republicans will destroy them if elected.
President Trump’s record has completely exposed, for any honest person, the five-decade fraud perpetrated on the Black community by the Democrat party.
• Rudy Giuliani is the former mayor of New York City.
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