When he declared his candidacy for president five years ago, Joe Biden said that the No. 1 reason he was running was the anti-Semitic violence that took place at Charlottesville, Virginia, two years before, and his bogus claim that President Trump failed to condemn it.
Biden even began the video launching his campaign with two words – “Charlottesville, Virginia.” He stated that the city was, “home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years. It was there, [in] August of 2017, we saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open, their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging, and bearing the fangs of racism, chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ‘30s…”
“And that's when we heard the words of the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation. [Trump] said there were, quote, ‘some very fine people on both sides.’ Very fine people on both sides? With those words, the president of United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”
Biden finished off his three-minute video rant by imploring, “We can't forget what happened in Charlottesville. Even more important, we have to remember who we are. This is America.”
Notwithstanding Biden’s sixty year record of plagiarism and prevarication, even left-leaning Factcheck.org admits he could not have told a bigger lie than his assertion that President Trump did not speak out against the anti-Semitism in Charlottesville in 2017.
In remarks to the nation immediately after the rally on August 14, Trump stated plainly and directly, “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
The next day, Trump emphasized again, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
In contrast to Trump’s swift condemnation of antisemitism following the Charlottesville violence, Biden waited three weeks until the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's annual commemoration in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda Tuesday before denouncing unequivocally the anti-Semitic pro-Hamas rallies on dozens of campuses nationwide that began April 17.
(Curiously, the day after his speech decrying antisemitism, Biden threatened to withhold key weaponry from the Jewish state in its response to the biggest terrorist attack in its history. But that’s another story.)
One week before, Biden’s then-fortnight of silence on the college protests and threats to Jewish students stunned even reflexively liberal media outlets. On May 1, CNN’s Dana Bash pointed to an anodyne statement by a White House deputy mouthpiece that “hate speech and hate symbols have no place in America” as emblematic of Biden’s failure to address the violence head-on.
“He's the deputy press secretary, he's certainly not the president, who we haven't heard from,” Bash noted, “He's not the communications director, who we haven't heard from. He's not the press secretary, who we haven't heard from. This is very telling that this is what we have so far with everything that's going on, from the White House and the president of the United States.”
Some Democrats admitted politics was driving their Party’s silence on the protests. Congresswoman Annie Kuster, D-N.H., told Axios the same day that some of her colleagues “have been, kind of, holding back” from stepping out on the issue, noting, “It just has become this confrontation. And in certain states like Michigan, there are big Arab American populations, big Jewish populations, it's roiling all kinds of groups.”
Scrambling to respond to the friendly fire the next day, May 2, Biden declined to focus squarely on antisemitism, instead taking precisely the same “both-sides” approach to the protests that he said five years earlier motivated him to run against Trump in the former president’s response to the Charlottesville riots.
“There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, antisemitism, Islamophobia, discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian-Americans,” Biden intoned. “It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”
Believe it or not, this is the same Joe Biden who has a long history of racist statements himself, including calling his future running mate Barack Obama in 2007 “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”
Last year, Biden called Maryland’s first Black governor “boy,” a racially loaded term over which Democrat Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, himself Black, criticized Biden for using five years earlier. “You don’t joke about calling Black men ‘boys,’” Booker said about the current president.
For at least a decade, Biden has implied that Blacks don’t know how to obtain a driver’s license or other form of identification by saying that expanding voter ID laws amount to an “attempt to repress minority voting,” and calling a move to do so in Georgia “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Twenty years ago, Biden elected to deliver an uplifting eulogy for a senator who ran for president as a segregationist, and five years later he did the same for another senator who was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.
In Biden’s very campaign for president in 2020 that he says was motivated by his view of Trump’s wanting response to bigotry in Charlottesville, Biden said that any Black voter who weighed his or her options at the ballot box was either inauthentic or a racial sellout.
“Well, I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black,” Biden told Black radio host Charlamagne tha God.
For any voter weighing options at the ballot box in this November’s presidential election, one thing is certain – the current occupant of the Oval Office, if he follows his own logic, would run against himself for his doublespeak on ant-Semitism and denounce his own record when it comes to statements of bigotry that he rightly calls out as “un-American.” The country deserves better than to be led by a pretzel.
Mr. Ullyot is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former deputy assistant to President Trump.