President Joe Biden could have united the nation in grieving for the victims of the mass shooting in Buffalo. Instead, he tried to exploit the occasion to divide us — again.
This is the signature Biden move, going back to his attempt to use the deadly riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, to launch his presidential campaign, falsely claiming that then-President Donald Trump praised the neo-Nazis, who had in fact “condemned totally.” It was a lie, but it gave shape to Biden’s otherwise formless campaign.
In Buffalo, Biden used the shooting to target his opposition, linking a mass murder by a white supremacist to the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. He also attacked “replacement theory,” one of several crazy ideas evidently embraced by the murderer in his manifesto.
Conspiracy theories thrive in a vacuum: neither Biden nor his party has provided a reasonable explanation for their refusal to guard the border, and their insistence on illegal aliens being counted by the Census for congressional seats.
Biden wasn’t the first to exploit a mass shooting for political purposes, of course.
His former boss, President Barack Obama, squandered one of the finest speeches of his career in July 2016 when he spoke at the memorial for five Dallas police officers who were assassinated at a Black Lives Matter march.
Obama began wonderfully, by defending the role of law enforcement — but ended by echoing the criticisms of police that had motivated the march, and that the assassin took to a deadly extreme.
Biden, like Obama, ran on a promise to unite the nation. Where Obama made his entry onto the political stage by promising to bridge the divide between red states and blue states, and offering a “politics of hope,” Biden vowed to forge national unity by waging a war for the “soul of America.”
But both, facing electoral headwinds, chose to direct the outrage of the country against their political rivals, whom Biden calls “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.”
There is nothing wrong with condemning white supremacy — and every recent president should, just as Trump did after Charlottesville.
But President Biden has argued that the country itself is white supremacist — that we suffer from “systemic racism.” Similarly, then-President Obama infamously said in 2015 that racism is “in our DNA.” If we are all white supremacists, then there is no way to isolate the tiny minority of miscreants who really do embrace that twisted ideology.
Nor is there any way to rally potential allies.
When Rolling Stone declares that the Buffalo shooter was a “mainstream Republican,” and The American Prospect accuses Republicans of complicity in mass murder for criticizing Democrats’ immigration policy, there is no hope for bipartisan unity against extremism.
Worse, perhaps, the poison that Biden has injected into the national conversation does not remain confined to politics, but enters personal and family relationships.
This week, for example, when I pushed back against CNN’s effort to blame Tucker Carlson and Fox News for the shooting, I was attacked as if I had justified the murders. Some of the attacks came from former classmates at college — people who knew me well enough to know I would never do such a thing.
Not for the first time, I saw relationships destroyed as people lashed out against an illusion created by the media’s propaganda, rather than who I am, or indeed what this country is.
Rather than telling mourners that white supremacy was the only problem, Biden could have invited them — and us — to confront hatred of every kind, including black essentialism, radical Islam, Chinese nationalism, and other ideologies that motivate violent extremists. Rather than implicating Trump supporters, Biden could have acknowledged that they, too, condemned the shootings.
Biden promised to unite America. He is doing the opposite. In that sense, he has lost whatever mandate he had.
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.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.