Cal Thomas: Wearing out the race card

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, January 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: WORLD Commentator Cal Thomas on President Biden and black voters.

CAL THOMAS: A new USA Today/Suffolk University Poll reveals one in five black voters say they will support a third-party candidate instead of the president. That’s down substantially from the 92% of blacks who voted for Biden in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.

What is the president’s strategy for shoring up his and Democrats’ most loyal supporters? Telling them their biggest threat is “white supremacy.” He made it a central theme in his speech on Monday at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 2015 a white gunman shot and killed nine members of a Bible study.

In the speech, Biden said nothing about the failing schools so many poor and minority children are trapped in; or violence in big cities that kill many young black men; or the disproportionate abortion rate among black women; or the necessity of putting more black fathers in homes to provide loving discipline to their children.

Biden has a long history of using race as a political weapon while doing little to improve the lives of black Americans. He has also claimed to have been arrested during civil rights demonstrations and while on the way to see Nelson Mandela in prison. Neither is true.

There was also his 2006 remark: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” In 2020, he implied if blacks didn’t vote for him “you ain’t Black.” In 2010, he warmly eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd, a former Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, saying he was “one of my mentors” and that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.” As early as 1977, Biden said that forced busing to desegregate schools would cause his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.” In 2007, he referred to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”

So many more examples, but not enough space.

Democrats have played the race card for decades. Recently, some even blamed Harvard President Claudine Gay’s downfall on bigotry, not plagiarism and a failure to denounce antisemitic genocide. Their talk has been cheap and the results negligible. One wonders why so many still vote for Democrats given their record.

White supremacy is a minority view. Most Christians call it a sin. There are no pure-bred people. We are all mixed up in the great gene pool of life, as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has brilliantly demonstrated in several PBS programs on African American lives. To hate another person because of their race is to hate a part of one’s self.

Given the declining poll numbers for Biden, among especially young black voters, it would appear some are starting to figure out how Democrats have duped them for decades. Biden’s out-of-touch speech in Charleston is likely to do little to improve his favorability among their party’s once solid voting bloc.

I’m Cal Thomas.

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