On Tuesday morning, former Vice President Joe Biden emerged from his basement to give a speech. In it, he slammed President Trump and virtue signaled to the country about unity and the pathway forward. He did not condemn the violent riots that have destroyed the lives of Americans over the past week, but he did lecture plenty about race.
The Trump campaign took notice and went straight to Biden's record as the "architect for mass incarceration" for their rebuttal.
"Biden hasn't just stoked America's racial divisions over the course of his decades in Washington. Biden was the chief architect of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, which targeted Black Americans. Biden admitted he is directly responsible for the mass incarceration policies of the 1980s and 1990s, authoring the 1994 crime bill which decimated Black communities," an email sent out by the campaign states. "Biden voted to extend minimum penalties for people under 21 charged with selling marijuana, and introduced the civil forfeiture legislation which allows the government to seize assets of citizens accused of drug crimes. Biden helped write the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which created the 100:1 crack cocaine sentencing disparity and disproportionately targeted minority communities."
Further, the campaign slammed Biden's efforts to rewrite history on the issue.
"While President Trump leads, Joe Biden has tried to politicize this crisis since the beginning. He failed to condemn the violence for days, and just delivered a speech posing as a unifier. Biden's self-imagined reinvention as a racial healer is laughable and requires memory-holing decades of racially inflammatory rhetoric," the email continues. "Biden is a serial race-baiter. In 2018, he claimed Republicans were responsible for "Jim Crow sneaking back in." In 2008 he told a Black audience that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would "put y'all back in chains." In 2019, he falsely claimed President Trump's repeated condemnation of white supremacists did not exist. Most recently, he said that Black Americans who do not automatically support him 'ain't black.'"
And finally, they reminded everyone of Biden's association with actual KKK member Robert Byrd and anti-desegregationist George Wallace.
"Biden has a long history of praising white segregationist leaders like Strom Thurmond, Robert Byrd, and George Wallace. Biden accepted an award from Wallace and said he was 'right about some things.' Biden also said people who display the Confederate flag are 'fine people,'" they said.