The Gettysburg Address it surely wasn’t. In 1863, President Lincoln concisely and brilliantly laid out a grand plan for what should unify the United States of America. Yesterday, President Biden deliberately set out to divide the nation along the racial divide already made larger by the cynical efforts and policies of the Obama administration. President Obama, however, avoided directly stoking hostility between the races except when he was speaking off the cuff, as in his irresponsible comments on the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck. Biden is far more direct and open about it. His party has decided that stoking black fear of white citizens and anger toward the United States itself as a purveyor of “white supremacy” is its best strategy for keeping power—that, and hammering away at the Big Lie that the purpose of abortion restrictions is to make women second-class citizens.
After all, as the late Harry Reid would surely point out, Biden’s 2022 “Soul of the Nation” speech pushing the same theme that Republicans and conservatives are racists and terrorists “worked.” What should have been an electoral rejection of disastrous progressive policies turned into a relative victory: Democrats held control of the Senate and just barely lost the House. It was predictable that the soulless and mercenary political consultants advising the party would urge it to follow the same playbook for 2024….prime hate, anger, distrust, bias, bigotry and fear, all while accusing the opposition of being agents of …hate, anger, distrust, bias, bigotry and fear. If that course damages the nation, well, you gotta crack some eggs to make an omelette.
So thus it was that President Biden spoke in front of a Howard graduating class assembled by racial discrimination and the principles of apartheid to tell them that they, their family, their communities and their race were in increasing peril because of ‘white supremacy.” After typical Biden babble, the President kicked off another dose of race-based suspicion by saying, “When it comes to race in America, hope doesn’t travel alone. It’s shadowed by fear, by violence, and by hate.” The speech went downhill from there. Most commencement speeches are exultant in tone, cheering on a rising generation to take advantage of the open and promising road ahead of them. Not this one. Here are some quotes:
But after the election and the re-election of the first Black American President, I had hoped that the fear of violence and hate was significantly losing ground.
Of course, Obama’s election and re-election proved conclusively that racial bigotry in the U.S. had diminished spectacularly.
But in 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, crazed neo-Nazis with angry faces came out of the fields with — literally with torches, carrying Nazi banners from the woods and the fields chanting the same antisemitic bile heard across Europe in the ‘30s. Something that I never thought I would ever see in America. Accompanied by Klansmen and white supremacists, emerging from dark rooms and remote fields and the anonymity of the Internet, confronting decent Americans of all backgrounds standing in their way, into the bright light of day. And a young woman objecting to their presence was killed.
I wonder what hack wrote that purple prose. The demonstration, which had been granted a legal permit, was triggered by the home state of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson beginning to airbrush the history of the United States by removing statues of heroic Confederate officers in grand Soviet fashion. Torchlight marches are not the sole genre of the Far Right; as with most political demonstrations, many groups and interests joined the march, and many traveled from far away to participate. Even so, the number of marchers was estimated in the hundreds, not thousands. It was also a single demonstration aimed at a matter of special emotional and historical resonance at the time.
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