Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Joe Biden ran on “unity,” which is critical in a multiracial America. He vowed to heal the divisions supposedly sown by Donald Trump. Instead, he is proving to be the most polarizing president in modern memory. Often his racialist rhetoric and condescension have proven demeaning to both blacks and whites. In a volatile multiracial democracy that demands tolerance and restraint, a highly unpopular Biden, for cheap political advantage, continually proves incendiary and reckless.
Last week Joe Biden snarked after watching a White House screening of Till:
Lynched for simply being black, nothing more. With white crowds, white families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies and mailing them as postcards. Hard to believe, but that’s what was done. And some people still want to do that.
Exactly who are these “some people”? Who fits Biden’s innuendos of contemporary “some people” who, he alleges in 2023, still wish, as “white crowds, white families” of the past, to mail celebratory postcards after they lynch black people? The Ultra-MAGA villains of his recent Phantom of the Opera speech? Have his current targets ever echoed anything like Biden’s own racist past warning that busing would force people to “grow up in a racial jungle”?
What current data might support Biden’s absurd charges? Is Biden referring to federal interracial crime and hate crime statistics charting violent white propensities against blacks? None exist. In fact, they continually reveal that so-called whites are underrepresented as perpetrators in both categories, while overrepresented as victims in interracial crimes—dramatically so in the case of black-on-white violent crime.
In our sensationalist YouTube world, are we suffering an epidemic of Internet-fed, white-on-black incendiary crimes that might have prompted the president’s demagogic accusations? Not at all. Most of the most recent publicized interracial violence—a woman in a gym fighting off a would-be rapist, a bicyclist doctor stabbed to death in an intersection as his attacker spewed racial hatred, a 26-year-old mother lethally shot in the back in front of her children in a parking lot over a minor argument, a young boy violently choked on a bus, a small girl on a bus beaten repeatedly by two teenage boys—have involved black perpetrators and apparent white victims. So, what contemporary evidence or widely publicized anecdotes prompt Biden’s recent charges of “white rage”-fueled violence?
Yet simultaneously with his blanket and unsupported charges of racism, no president since Woodrow Wilson has offloaded more racialist verbiage than Joe Biden himself. In an eerie example of psychological projection, never has a president accused others of racism more, while freely revealing himself either to be a racist or non compos mentis, or both.
Stranger still, Biden’s latest accusation comes from a president who once eulogized the former racist, Exalted Cyclops, and segregationist Senator. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) as “one of my mentors” and lamented that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.” That was no isolated fluke.
During his campaign for the presidency, Biden in 2019 praised segregationist Senator James O. Eastland for not labeling a younger Biden with the derogatory term “boy”: “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”
How odd, then, that Biden, as president no less, has used just that derogatory insult “boy” for distinguished blacks. Indeed, the very day before Biden leveled his “some people” slur, he was back at it with his racist “boy” reference to the black governor of Maryland: “You got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore, I tell ya,” Biden told an audience of union workers on Wednesday. “He’s the real deal, and the boy looked like he could still play. He got some guns on him.”
Such condescension was consistent with Biden’s past usage of “Negro” and his earlier August 2021 similar “boy” trope of referring to one of own top aides: “I’m here with my senior adviser and boy who knows Louisiana very, very well and New Orleans, Cedric Richmond.”
In Biden world, blacks seem to be a collective to whom he can pander in stereotypical terms, as opposed to Latinos, whom Biden feels can think for themselves. Or so he said on the campaign trail in 2020, “Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”
These were “gaffes” only if one believes Biden’s frequent racialist smears and slurs are more the symptoms of senility than bias. Again, as a 2020 candidate, Biden gave us his absurd racist “Corn Pop” fables. In these concocted, He-Man sagas, Biden stood down purported ghetto gangster with his own custom-cut chain, while often showing his tanned legs’ golden hairs to curious inner-city black youth.
Biden also smeared two black journalists who had the temerity to ask him a few tough questions, one with the now infamous slang ad hominem, “You ain’t black” and the other with the personal dismissal “junkie.”
A consistent trope in these insults is his lifelong condescension of accomplished black Americans, such as his long-ago infamous talk-down to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during Biden’s travesty of conducting his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings. In that context we also remember Biden’s idiotic warning, replete with his accustomed affected black patois, to black professionals in 2012 that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”
Like Bill Clinton, who reportedly uttered of supposed 2008 upstart Barack Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” Biden was especially bewildered by Barack Obama. He apparently seemed, in Biden’s racialist view, an aberration from Biden’s own usual stereotyped views of blacks of limited ability: “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.” That assessment came from a candidate, who, even predementia, could never string together more than a few coherent sentences.
Biden, remember, explained top-performing states in education as attributable to fewer minorities: “There’s less than 1 percent of the population in Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So, look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.”
In a world of law schools turning out record numbers of black lawyers, and billionaire entrepreneurs like Bob Johnson, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, or Michael Jordan, Biden opines, “The data shows young black entrepreneurs are just as capable of succeeding given the chance as white entrepreneurs are. But they don’t have lawyers. They don’t have, they don’t have accountants, but they have great ideas.”
The reason we do not associate Biden with characteristic racist stereotyping and tropes, other than with raw political demagoguery, is the same reason we give passes to liberals who say overtly racist things, which might otherwise suggest that their loud progressive rhetoric serves as some sort of psychological mechanism to square the circle of their own discomfort with the proverbial other.
Do we remember the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s quickly hushed up and contextualized confession that abortion was targeting the proper people. (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)?
Do we recall liberal icon and former Senate Majority Harry Reid, who eerily dovetailed Biden with similarly racist assessment of Obama (“a ‘light-skinned’ African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”)?
Somehow Biden has transferred his own checkered history of racial disparagement onto the white working class. Fact checkers assure us that when Joe Biden libeled Trump supporters as “chumps” and “dregs” he really meant the Ku Klux Klan or white nationalists who gravitate to Trump. But most took his blanket smears as they were intended. And they fit the larger patterns of his more recent “semi-fascism” smears, and indeed, the genre of tired leftwing demagoguery that earlier gave us Obama’s “clingers,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” or the smelly who stink up Walmart in the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page joint text trove: “Just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”
In occasional opportunistic moments, Biden transforms into “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” to accentuate his middle-class roots. But he has a repugnant propensity for using racial terms of condescension and disparagement and for projecting his own unease onto a supposedly racist white middle class and poor even as he seeks to win support from the very minority communities he has so often crudely characterized.
What is the concrete result of this now common Bidenesque schizophrenia?
Reflect for a moment. Consider the toxic plume that has polluted the skies over East Palestine, Ohio, a working-class small town that is 98 percent white, with a median income of $26,000, sits amid the Pennsylvania borderland. That very region once rejected in its 2008 primary Barack Obama—and in turn was blasted in stereotyped fashion by him: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton resonates that same contempt for the convenient target of the white poor and lower middle class. Rather than send in FEMA on day one of the toxic release with tents, mobile kitchens, and supplies and medical personnel to care for the evacuated, the federal government waited two weeks and then acted only when even the liberal media was confused by Biden’s deliberate neglect.
Amid the disaster, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in his now tired boilerplate, was on record instead railing against supposed white hardhats who supposedly do not look like the communities in which they work. For a Biden or Buttigieg, the fish and animals dying from toxic air or water were insignificant artifacts, as were the complaints of burning lungs and allergic reactions to the black chemical cloud.
One wonders what would have been the immediate reaction of Biden and the federal government had a corporation decided to vent the contents of wrecked rail cars full of vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate and then to light up the escaping gas, birthing a toxic black plume over Martha’s Vineyard or Malibu, as opposed to East Palestine or, say, South-Central L.A. or Ferguson, Missouri.
Biden would have sent legions of aid workers in to ensure social justice for the marginalized and performance-art reassurance to his donor class.
Whether Biden spouts racial bombast to curry favor with his Democratic base or to project onto others his own habitual racist put downs is not quite clear. But Biden’s utter contempt for white poor and lower middle classes, who are were deemed not worthy of the prompt federal attention customarily accorded to others in times of disaster, is self-evident.
Otherwise, Biden would have sent help immediately rather than smear “some people” as 21st-century lynchers.
Joe Biden may actually believe his own lies but at his core he is a nothing. No talent, no creativity, no judgement. Just a creepy, women and little girl sniffing guy who latched onto the Federal teat from a tiny state. Look around at his family. Drug and sex fiends, grifters and parasites. Just like Joey. Dirt bags.
Thank you James White. I believe you have gotten to the core of biden. Obviously, so has Victor. Victor has often allowed us to see what the progressive marxists saw in biden: a candidate and, unfortunately, a president that appears as an inanimate, plastic toy that can be pulled and stretched into any political shape desired. Wind him up and he will perform as programmed albeit with some deviations from the normal bell curve.
Well said my friend.
The pedophile in chief is a harbinger of how stupid the American voters have become.
May God protect us from this evil.
And that has been known his entire public life, but people voted for him anyway.
“A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
As always an extremely well written, informative and educational article. Thank you Mr. Hanson for all you do.
Victor,
This is, quite sadly, one of your best editorials. Unfortunately we have such an awful occupant in the White House. I cannot call him presidential…he does not deserve the title. This administration (no capitalization on purpose) has been a sham from the days just prior to the South Carolina primary. Powers that be, (just who are they?) commanded that every viable candidate step aside and let this awful person run the table of remaining primaries. Then hid in his basement for most of the campaign because they knew exposure of him would reveal his shortcomings. A common theme emerges: hide everything, and tout your “transparency”. The past 26 months have been a debacle and I fear what the months ahead will bring to not only our beloved US, but the rest of the world too. January 20, 2025 cannot come soon enough!
I totally agree, that date can not come soon enough.
Here is what I predict: China will invade Taiwan before the next president takes office, if he is a serious leader, that is–something of Trumpian stature. Biden is too big a gift for them to squander. Under his watch they could invade with virtual impunity. (BTW, I recently sold my Taiwan stock in a chipmaker company. It had done respectfully in both share appreciation and dividends over the last few years, but I feared it would tank if there was an invasion.)
The FBI is responsible for allowing a senile, corrupt president to be elected. It would have happened if they had exposed the contents of the Hunter laptop. They had plenty of time to do so.
“…if would NOT have happened…”
It really is amazing how the Dems project all of their worst faults onto anyone with a different opinion.
The black population seems oblivious to the Dem politicians who have contempt for them. LBJ was correct when he stated, “We will have those “N word” voting for us for the next 100 years.” This was after he passed the Civil Rights legislation that made it more financially advantageous for black men to not live with the wife or family, thus creating generations of fatherless black children.
The African-American community is divided, but the Dems invest tons of energy into isolating those that break with the party line. Ever seen a Karen blasting a black woman for not being Black enough? It’s quite a sight. Also, as conservative Shelby Steele points out in “Content of Our Character,” the Reps have failed again and again to address the real problems that African-Americans face.
An excellent article by Dinesh D’Sousa that available online is called “LBJ’s Democratic Plantation”. In my view it is informative, credible, and excellent.
Also, Democratic operatives (Blue cities, teacher’s union, voter registration activists) are being given billions in funds, often in the form of bail-outs from our $trillion plus omnibus bills.
As usual, Victor Davis Hanson is compelling. He clearly articulates with examples and facts in an organized and entertaining fashion. Unlike any other, he superbly tells a story bringing an array of events into focus. I am never disappointed. VDH is an American treasure.
Ditto.
The D’s no longer need Jim Crow as they’ve stumbled onto something equally debilitating. The new scam is denying those of color something called “agency” otherwise known as the ability to represent oneself and act independently without the governmental man. A devilish form of meth for those looking for easy solutions.
We can also add that denying a group agency is a Mortal Sin in Neo-Marxist ideology.
Thank you for writing so eloquently we are all thinking.
Spectacular—Thank you again. will forward on to others.
This is a clear, sober, and judicious take-down of Biden’s racism. The two great hypocrisies of Progressive support for Biden have been their tolerance of his outspoken racism and covering up his glaringly obvious mental impairment after having spent four years advocating some manner of coup to remove Trump for his malignant narcissism (a trait Biden shares and that also goes unnoticed!).
The ball is in Progressives’ court to prove that they mean what they say and that their elite aren’t using charges of racism to “divide and conquer” the populous while getting an edge on other elites in the fight for dwindling chairs on the Lido deck.
Every sentence is right-on. Biden is and always was a confused individual as he grasped for explanations of events like a child trying to catch bubbles from a bubble machine. Always bragging that he caught the biggest ones when he knew he didn’t. I always found it curious that he was even elected to office in the first place, grateful he wasn’t my representative. And in Delaware, considered at the time almost insignificant state, until banks and credit card companies began setting up their headquarters there to avoid all kinds of taxes. Someone ought look into that aspect of Biden’s fifty years in public service.
. . . and that’s not even getting into the Biden’s family’s parasitic, self-aggrandizing, even ruthless criminality.
Where to start. Joe Biden has always been a nasty fellow. They don’t refer to him as creepy Joe for no reason. This is the caliber of human that we the people have allowed to run roughshod over us. He is as fake as they come. He has enriched his entire family from across the globe. He has even stooped so low as to evoke his dead son to curry favor with the left and anyone else blind enough to believe it. hard to believe that there are people in this country that despicable.
Thank you Professor Hanson!
Biden: the very definition of grifter, the ugly American.
Interesting piece VDH. (National Review is sorely missing you.)
Joe Biden is a typical authoritarian. Their game plan is always the same, to create a grievance based society. Once they get people to war with one another, they destabilize society and can more easily step in and steal the power. The Communists had class warfare. The Nazi’s had (anti-Semitic) race warfare and the Fascists nationalism. Their first goal is to define the enemy and to direct the public’s hatred toward them (to “other them”). After that they can take access the power structure. Although they tried many times, this Marxist game plan never worked in America, because of our superpower… Christianity. This faith system works against racism and ethnic hatred. It taught us to get along, as a melting pot. Although the Communists have often tried to get the anger up, between people, then just could not anger the people, until perhaps now. The woke Marxists have infiltrated the schools and are steeping (anti-White) racism into the kids. This is a precursor to their Communist ambitions. America should ban postmodernism and the Marxist pedagogy that it enabled, from our schools.
The sooner the sonofabitch dies, the better. For the entire planet.
This is a cancer throughout the biden regime. Schumer, markey, and other elected democrats touted the CCC program, the Civilian Climate Corps. Here 1.5 milion “people of color” will be hired by the United States govt. to become a climate corps but the real jobs are gutter cleanin, sewer sloggin, rat killin, bug mashin, brush hoggin throughout the auster terrain of Ca. and Nv. No matter your education level or studying and working towards your dream career….It’ll all come down to how your hand fits around a shovel or broom.
Thank you for the clear, cogent and tragic truth about a modern day “street-corner” pol… sadly our current President. Surely the people behind the nearly unimaginable series of destructive and costly episodes accelerating before our eyes have even more to reveal before 2024. Finally, I am so angered by the situation in Ohio I can’t give vent to it in words. I hope the organized resistance that you predict arises sooner than later!
My comment got scubbed, bummer. Oh well, it wasn’t very good.
After all we have endured as a country as we approach our 250 year anniversary, it is deeply sad that racial demagoguery is still used to stir up anger/resentment and to gain advantage by it.
The most powerful and enduring memory I have in the days, weeks and months after 9/11. We were kind to each other, we supported each other, we forgave old divisions, recognizing that we were all part of the family of man. The hatred that had been brutally visited upon us could not come between us.
The triumph of human decency over human depravity. I will never lose faith in my fellow human beings.
Maybe some residents of East Palestine should send a pint of so of freshly-bottled stream water to 1600 Penn.
I don’t recall his name but one respected Black attorney testified in favor of Justice Thomas at the hearings. I was shocked to hear Joe Biden call him “buddy boy.” When the lawyer got a chance to speak at the hearings he ripped Joe Biden a new one. I remember his courage in defying Biden in the fact of Joe’s racist disrespect.
At this point, it’s not hypocrisy by the left. It’s a transparent friend vs. enemy situation. Proceed accordingly.
As a resident of East Palestine, Ohio, be advised that when you are the most discouraged, and you see the black smoke of Hell, all you have to do is square your shoulders and take 1/2 step forward then fear has no more power over you.
Can you imagine what life will be like if he wins a second term?
Listening to Susan Rice speaking on equity yesterday, I came to the obvious conclusion that Rice is nothing but a hypocritical bigot gas lighting the American people who happened to hear her remarks. Rice stated, “Equity, we all benefit from equity.” The preachers of equity fail to recognize and inform those listening that equity is earned, not granted nor given. I have earned every bit of equity in my home, my truck, my IRA and my bank account. Just because I earned that equity and own it does not make anyone else entitled to the benefits of my equity. Susan Rice is a communist and a traitor speaking only for her own benefit at the expense of others.
Incredibly divisive, the POTUS is. On a related note, looking for your thoughts, sir, on the insane executive order that flew somewhat under the news cycle radar late last week. Thanks.
The downhill slide on this slippery slope of liberal city, county, state and federal regulations shows little sign of changing and will continue until the absurdity is felt by the blue collar community.