President Joe Biden used the occasion of the tenth anniversary celebration of the Martin Luther King, Jr. monument in Washington, DC, to again condemn supporters of former President Donald Trump for storming Capitol Hill on January 6.
“There’s a tough through line of subjection and enslaved people from our earliest days to the reigns of radicalized terror, the KKK, to Dr. King being assassinated,” Biden said during his speech at the monument.
He said the same hateful forces that supported slavery in the Democrat south reemerged during the protests at Charlottesville, the rise in hate crimes against Asians during the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the “violent deadly insurrection” that took place on January 6.
“It was about white supremacy in my view,” Biden said, adding, “The throughline is that hate never goes away.”
Biden admitted he once believed that hate went away or disappeared as the progress continued in the United States.
“I thought once we got through it, it would go away. But it doesn’t,” Biden said. “It only hides until seeming legitimate person breathes some oxygen under the rocks where they’re hiding and gives it some breath.”
Biden again cited the domestic threat of white supremacists as “the most lethal terrorist threat in the homeland” vowing to use the federal government to combat it.
“We cannot and must not give hate any safe harbor,” he said.
Biden expressed his exasperation that many Republicans continued to believe that he did not actually win the 2020 election fairly.
“To something to like 20 percent or like half of the Republicans, the registered Republicans, I am not your president,” Biden said. “Donald Trump is still your president.”
Crossing himself, he continued, “As we Catholics say, ‘Oh my God.'”