OPINION:
President Biden and his family sound like a bunch of racists. The latest example came on Monday when first lady Jill Biden spoke to the UnidosUS conference and said, “The diversity of this community — as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio, is your strength.” She was rightfully denounced by elected officials, candidates, and even some in the media like the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
This isn’t the first time a member of the Biden family has said something outrageous about race. In 2007, then-Sen. Biden said this about then-Sen. Barack Obama: “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.”
The media let it pass after a day or two.
Then there was the time in 2020 when candidate Mr. Biden was on the radio with a popular African American radio host on a show called “The Breakfast Club.” Near the end of a tense interview, candidate Biden’s staff told him he needed to go. The host said, “You can’t do that to black media.”
The host told candidate Biden to come to his studio in New York City because he said, “we’ve got more questions.” Mr. Biden shot back: “You’ve got more questions? Well, I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”
So typical of tired old liberals like Mr. Biden. He thinks that the left owns black voters. With inflation now surpassing 9%, Black and Hispanic voters — plus all other voters — should be upset with Mr. Biden’s tax and spend policies. They are pushing inflation higher and higher. And that is driving up the costs of food, gas and housing.
Liberals like Mr. Biden have also been defending failed government-run schools and denying black and Hispanic families real choice in education for decades. It is time that conservatives empower parents to make the right choices for their children.
A recent study by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty found that students in schools that closed for in-person learning to start the 2020-21 school year saw significant performance declines in math and English. Specifically, they found that “these Wisconsin school closures, impacting more than 250,000 students, occurred in districts with large numbers of African American and low-income students. The findings highlight the growing body of evidence that school closures hurt the academic performance of students who can least afford setbacks in education.”
Mr. Biden and his allies in the teachers union are largely responsible for the length of the shutdowns. As the data shows, Black and Hispanic children — often in low-income neighborhoods — have been significantly hurt by the impact of the closures. This is part of a disturbing trend.
During a Senate hearing in 1975, civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg took then-Sen. Biden to task for sponsoring legislation that would limit the power of the federal courts to order school desegregation. Mr. Greenberg, the longtime director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said that Mr. Biden’s legislation “heaves a brick through the window of school integration.” A powerful indictment from one of the lawyers who had won the Brown v. Board of Education case that ended school segregation years earlier.
Throughout his time in the United States Senate, Mr. Biden has praised members who supported segregation. In the past, Mr. Biden called then-Mississippi Sen. John Stennis, as a “hero” and “the rockbound integrity of the United States Congress” in the 1980s. Mr. Biden called Stennis “a hell of a guy” in 2008.
In May, Mr. Biden reminisced about his time in the Senate. He said, “We always used to fight like hell. And even back in the old days when we had real segregationists like Eastland and Thurmond and all those guys. But at least we’d end up eating lunch together. Things have changed. We gotta bring it back.”
South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond ran for president as a segregationist in 1948 as a Dixiecrat and filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Sen. James Eastland was a Democrat from Mississippi who often described African Americans as “an inferior race” and sometimes spoke on the Senate floor about what he called “mongrelization” of races.
As vice president, Mr. Biden spoke at the funeral of former Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia Democrat. He sang his praises about his leadership in the Senate. He did not mention Byrd’s past involvement in the Klu Klux Klan, having been once named the “exalted cyclops,” which meant he was the top office in the local klan.
The Bidens have been sounding like racists for years — but too many on the left and in the media cover for them. It’s time for the rest of us to call them out.
• Scott Walker is the president of Young America’s Foundation and served as the 45th governor of Wisconsin from 2011 to 2019.
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