CLAIM: “This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.”
VERDICT: FALSE. MAGA is not an extremist group, while there are several examples of actual extremist groups in the U.S.
President Joe Biden attacked MAGA — the acronym for former President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again” — in remarks Wednesday about the impending Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 abortion case.
Biden claimed, falsely, that the draft majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito would endanger other rights — ignoring the fact that Alito explicitly said it did not affect other rights, and limited the holding to abortion alone: “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” (Breitbart News fact-checked Biden on this point Tuesday.)
Rather than dealing with Alito’s actual opinion, which the president implied he had read fully, Biden hearkened back to his old opposition to Judge Robert Bork, whom he and other Democrats demonized when he was nominated to Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. Biden, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, pioneered the practice of attacking a nominee’s ideological views, arguing that Bork’s opinion that there was no right to privacy in the Constitution meant he was too extreme. Bork failed to win confirmation as a result.
The president gave an example of what he claimed would be a consequence of overturning Roe, saying that it meant states could make laws providing that “children that are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children.” Biden did not say what he meant by “children,” or at what age he expected “children” to develop sexual preferences. Nor did he explain how the right to privacy would impact the Constitution’s bans on discrimination, as extended to sexual preference and gender.
Biden said that such extreme legislation was possible given the extremism of the “MAGA crowd,” which he called “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.” He later clarified that he meant “recent American history.”
Given that Trump won over 74 million votes, Biden is suggesting that a significant portion of the country are extremists. He overlooked, of course, that there are many actual extremist groups in “recent American history,” some tied to Democrats:
- Ku Klux Klan: The white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-Catholic violent extremist group produced such alumni as the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), for whom then-Vice President Joe Biden delivered a eulogy at his funeral in 2010.
- Antifa: The so-called “anti-fascist” organization, which then-candidate Biden tried to minimize during the 2020 campaign, led riots throughout that summer and routinely targets law enforcement officers as well as journalists.
- Nation of Islam: The racist, antisemitic group led by Louis Farrakhan is close to several Democrats and spawned violent extremists, such as the murderer of Capitol Police Officer William Evans, whose death Biden downplayed.
There are many more examples. Biden’s attack on MAGA is not only false, but flagrantly violates his commitment in in Inaugural Address to govern in the spirit of bipartisan “unity,” so as “to restore the soul and to secure the future of America.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.