Biden condemns media, political foes for spreading ‘poison’ of white supremacy

by mcardinal

Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News

 

President Joe Biden’s visit to Buffalo Tuesday was marked by pointed words for the people he says have brought about a rise of white supremacy in the United States.

In a speech given moments after meeting with the families of victims of a deadly mass shooting, Biden blamed the media and politics for sharing messages that have “radicalized angry, alienated, lost, and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced — that’s the word, ‘replaced’ — by the ‘other’ — by people who don’t look like them and who are therefore, in a perverse ideology that they possess and [which is] being fed, lesser beings.”

He later added, “White supremacy is a poison.  It’s a poison running through — it really is — running through our body politics.  And it’s been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes.

“No more.  I mean, no more.  We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America.”

Bidens statements revolved around Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old white teenager who is accused of shooting and killing10 people and injuring three more at a grocery store in a predominantly African-American neighborhood of Buffalo. 

As revealed by Gendron’s diary and online activity, the accused shooter was certainly motivated by hatred, and he appears to believe in the threat of white replacement, which is a conspiracy theory that posits there is a plot to slowly dwindle the white race.

Importantly, the white replacement theory is not rooted in scientific inquiry, and it is not a widely held belief outside of particularly extreme groups.

However, Biden accused people, although he did not specify names or groups, of preying upon the fears to which white replacement speaks.

“Hate and fear are being given too much oxygen by those who pretend to love America but who don’t understand America,” Biden said. “To confront the ideology of hate requires caring about all people, not making distinctions.”

However, critics of President Biden pointed out that he, too, was making distinctions and dividing rather than uniting a fractured nation.

“Joe Biden and Democrats are politicizing the evilness that occurred in Buffalo this past weekend to spin this tragedy and fearmonger the American public to push their radical agenda and stay in power,” Congressman Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tweeted. “It’s atrocious and distasteful to the families who lost a loved one.”

Conservative talk show host and former California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder took particular exception to Biden’s remarks and accused the president and numerous mainstream media outlets of misrepresenting the issue of mass killings as a uniquely white problem and thus dividing the country by race.

 “Whites, as to their percentage of the population, commit comparatively FEWER mass killings/mass shootings. Blacks and Asians, as to their percentage of the population commit comparatively MORE,” Elder tweeted.

It is unclear from where Elder got his calculations in the above table.

In a different tweet, Elder wrote in part, “The white Buffalo killer was triggered by race. So was the black Waukesha mass killer—and the Asian O.C. mass shooter.”

Elder was referring to the African American man who, in an apparent attempt to kill white people, drove a vehicle into a crowd as a Wisconsin Christmas parade and to the Chinese-born immigrant who is alleged to have opened fire at a California church due to his anti-Taiwanese bigotry.

Elder also posted a tweet in which he pointed to a hate crime allegedly committed by a person of color in Dallas.

For Biden, the day was strictly about white supremacy and he returned to the theme often in his speech as he called upon Americans to work together to fight back against the ideology.

“Now is the time for the people of all races, from every background, to speak up as a majority in America and reject white supremacy,” Biden said. “These actions we’ve seen in these hate-filled attacks represent the views of a hate-filled minority.  We can’t allow them to distort America — the real America.  We can’t allow them to destroy the soul of the nation … We have to refuse to live in a country where Black people going about a weekly grocery shopping can be gunned down by weapons of war deployed in a racist cause. We have to refuse to live in a country where fear and lies are packaged for power and for profit.”

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