A Democrat congressman from Georgia who has been targeted by members of his own party because he is an unabashed supporter of President Trump issued an op-ed on Tuesday in which he declared former Vice President Joe Biden a “full-blooded bigot.”
“Since that day in May when I announced I would support Donald Trump for president, my motives have been questioned, my integrity assailed, even my intelligence challenged. That’s okay,” wrote Georgia Rep. Vernon Jones (D) in an op-ed published by The Daily Caller. “Since that day in May when I announced I would support Donald Trump for president, my motives have been questioned, my integrity assailed, even my intelligence challenged. That’s okay. I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I am also a black man, the son of a World War II veteran and a proud American.”
Jones segued to Democrats’ “absurd” calls to defund the police, noting that he had formerly served as former Chief Executive Officer of DeKalb County, Georgia, and thus managed “one of the largest police departments in the state.” The “Defund the Police” movement, he argued, “will only lead to more pain and suffering in our most vulnerable communities.”
“I’ve had the experience of dealing with police shootings and comforting the families of victims,” he wrote. “But at the same time, I’ve also had the experience of losing two black police officers. I’ve had to comfort their families in the middle of the night and console their young children. I know firsthand when others are running away from chaos, police officers are running into the fight to protect and serve.”
Jones opined that Trump “was sickened by the death of George Floyd and fully committed to ensuring that he will not have died in vain.”
Jones went on to laud Trump’s executive order on police reform, then turned to Biden, noting that the black unemployment rate while he was vice president “averaged a horrific 12.8 percent,” while the number of black Americans fell by just 145,000 over eight years. “By comparison, more than double that number – 350,000 black Americans – were lifted out of poverty during just the first two years of the Trump administration,” Jones pointed out.
Jones then turned back the clock:
Even before that, where was Biden for 36 years in the United States Senate on this issue? I’ll tell you. He was too busy shouting “my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle.” That racial jungle he was referring to includes black and brown Americans like me. Right now, President Trump is being defined as a racist by the media, when in reality Joe Biden is the full-blooded bigot.
Don’t take my word for it, take then-Senator Joe Biden’s own words for it. “The truth is, every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.” Now that Biden is running for president in a woke Democratic Party in 2020, he’s attempting to sweep his racist legacy under the rug. We can’t let him.
Joe Biden is directly responsible for the mass incarceration policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which decimated the black community. Biden authored the 1994 crime bill which imposed mandatory minimum sentences, disproportionately putting hundreds of thousands of young black men in prison.
He closed the piece by addressing the black community. Describing Biden has having “betrayed black Americans throughout his career” and Trump as having “spent his 3.5 years in office fighting to improve the lives of black Americans,” Jones stressed, “We cannot be tricked again” by politicians who “only care about black people during election years.” (Read Jones’ full op-ed here.)