Harkening back to his “they want to put y’all back in chains” moment from the 2012 presidential election, former Vice President Joe Biden lumped President Trump in with the KKK while speaking over the weekend before a predominantly black church in South Carolina.
“What I realized is that hate just hides. And it when it comes out from under the rocks, when it gets a little bit of oxygen. This president and his — the Ku Klux Klan and the rest of them, they think they’ve beaten us again but they have no idea. We’re just coming back,” Biden said before the congregation at Bethlehem Baptist Church.
Biden made his comments while reflecting upon the president’s statement following the August 2017 Charlottesville protest, in which he famously said that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Prior to seemingly comparing the president to the KKK, Biden reflected upon the advancements of the civil rights movement and expressed fear that President Trump has taken America back one hundred years.
“Folks, some mornings I wake up and I think it’s more like what it must have been in 1920 than 2020,” Biden said, as reported by Fox News. “I thought you could defeat hate … hate only hides.”
Recalling Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech, Biden urged everyone to keep fighting.
“Dr. King didn’t give up on the dream,” he said. “And I’m asking you all, don’t give up on it. Don’t give up now. We can defeat this moment of hate.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden has a history of deploying racial division to maximum political effect in front of black audiences, such as when he said that Republicans “want to put y’all back in chains” during the height of the 2012 presidential campaign.
“Romney wants to let the — he said in the first hundred days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, unchain Wall Street,” Biden said. “They’re going to put you all back in chains.”
Biden has been playing the “Trump supports white supremacists” card since the release of his first 2020 presidential campaign video, framing the race as a “battle for the soul of this nation.”
“He said there were quote some very fine people on both sides,” Biden said. “With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”
“The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America, America, is at stake,” he continued. “That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.”
Despite positioning himself as the great moral crusader, Biden took a hit in credibility last year when he praised two former segregationists with whom he worked during his early years in the Senate for being “civil.” Though Biden apologized for the remarks, his continual gaffes since then have only further tarnished his image, such as when he said: “Poor kids are just as bright and talented as white kids.”