Joe Biden Fights White Supremacy With More White Supremacy

Joe Biden wants to declare war on white supremacy or at least so he claims. “White supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison… running through our body politic.” He forcefully declared at a recent PR junket following one of the seemingly endless active shooter tragedies that have sadly come to define Middle America in the last decade. Silence is complicity, our cognitively challenged commander-in-chief told a live studio audience in what came dangerously close to seeming like a rare moment of lucidity. “We need to say as clearly and as forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America.” He reiterated, pounding the message home, and after tragedies like the massacre in Buffalo, it’s hard for any reasonable human being to disagree with that sentiment.

Ten people were slaughtered in cold blood, and another three were grievously wounded on the linoleum battlefield of an urban supermarket specifically selected on a map for its proximity to a predominantly Black community. An 18-year-old white kid, a fucking child, traveled 200 miles and three and a half hours from his predominantly white small town on the Pennsylvania border, armed with an AR-15 littered with racist graffiti, just to kill people he never met because he was terrified that somehow, they would replace him in America’s twisted caste system. Something isn’t wrong with this picture, everything is, and we should all be able to agree that something needs to be done to reshape the paradigm of this nation’s entrenched race relations to end this madness. Our president and his party, which has long billed itself as the guardians of America’s marginalized communities, claim they agree, but they have come up with a rather strange way to show it.

The Democrat’s answer to the distinctly American cancer of white supremacy is to add it to our nation’s long list of targets in the ever-expanding and decidedly undemocratic wars on crime and terrorism. The House recently passed yet another in a long line of domestic terrorism prevention acts, which thankfully died a partisan death in the Senate, as part of a long campaign to empower both local and federal law enforcement to confront the scourge of radical extremism in the wake of Donald Trump’s incendiary dog-whistle concert of a presidency and the January 6 riot which seemed to epitomize it.

The result is the rather absurd spectacle of a party that ran its last election as a referendum on the lynching of George Floyd dumping millions of dollars into the system that lynched him, the system that many of them promised to defund. “We have to not only talk about how we’re going to end the hate” their president drones on with an increasingly hollow stoicism “but who’s responsible for generating it.” But who is responsible for generating it? And can we really trust a party that places a man like Joe Biden on its mantle in trying times of racial division to confront it? A man who, let’s face it, is essentially a career white supremacist in his own right.

I honestly don’t know how else to put it. That term gets chucked around a lot lately for totally loaded purposes but anybody who suffers under the delusion that it doesn’t stick to Joe Biden like glue clearly knows nothing about that bastard’s real legacy in this country as one of the single greatest generators of white supremacy in the Post-Civil Rights Era. When that broken old plutocrat was still young and vital and fresh on the Hill as a senator from Delaware, he was the protege of arch-segregationist and Dixiecrat-turned- Republican, Strom Thurmond, who spent the eighties carefully grooming Joe to take his place as Grand Wizard of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Thurmond hadn’t simply abandoned Joe’s party during the Civil Rights Era, he had also quietly abandoned his commitment to its former sacrament of segregation. Not in favor of racial justice, quite the contrary. The forward-thinking senator from South Carolina didn’t abandon white supremacy, he simply embraced Nixon’s new tactic of enforcing it federally through law and order and the War on Drugs, and his handsome young dauphin in his former party was with him every step of the way.

Together, the lethal bipartisan tag team of Thurmond and Biden spent the eighties building the foundation for a massive expansion in the Prison Industrial Complex that would serve as America’s new Jim Crow. They passed laws that drastically increased sentences and eliminated parole for federal prisoners. They were instrumental in turning the Crack Epidemic into a defacto race war by creating a disparity in sentencing between the proletariat narcotic sweeping the country’s inner cities from the killing fields of Nicaragua and its bourgeoise powder cousin popular in the board rooms of the credit card companies that paid for Joe’s tuition at Strom Thurmond’s Academy of Senatorial White Supremacy. But all of this was just prep work for Biden’s greatest hate crime, the 1994 Clinton Crime Bill that Thurmond’s heir at the Senate Judiciary Committee carefully constructed with another glad-handing liberal white supremacist named Bill Clinton.

“I don’t care why someone is a malefactor in society. I don’t care why someone is antisocial, I don’t care why they’ve become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society.” These were the racially loaded words that Joe Biden growled from the Senate floor like George Wallace on a bender to justify a bill that would devastate generations of Black and brown people in this country by redesignating their children federally as super predators.

Since this heinous bill was passed, America’s prison system has gone from a despicable menace to a colossal juggernaut, doubling the population on these glorified plantations to 2.2 million overwhelmingly Black and non-violent slaves to a system that has profited greatly from the largesse of social justice warriors like our current president and the destruction of the communities he pretends to want to save. Joe Biden isn’t interested in fighting white supremacy. He just wants to centralize it in the federal government, and this isn’t the first time he’s used the looming specter of right-wing domestic terrorism to do it either.

Less than a year after passing the most heinously racist piece of legislature in decades, Senator Biden attempted to use the Oklahoma City Bombing to justify a bill that influences might be even more devastating. Joe’s 1995 Omnibus Counterterrorism Act would have granted the federal government nearly endless powers in the name of combatting domestic terrorism. Those so much as even charged with acts deemed by the police state to be “terrorism” would automatically be stripped of their constitutional rights and detained indefinitely without bail before a show trial in which the federal government would be free to use “evidence” collected from anonymous sources before shipping you off to be buried alive beneath Florence Supermax. This hideous thing was never actually put to a vote but if it sounds familiar that’s because it served as the blueprint not just for Bob Dole’s habeas corpus slaughterhouse known as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act but John Ashcroft’s blatantly neo-fascist Patriot Act as well. Both of which, I shouldn’t have to tell you have been used overwhelmingly to destroy people of color.

That’s because white supremacy in this country is a systemic problem and the source that continues to generate it is the state itself. The United States government essentially invented this goddamn menace when it became the first British colony to codify the construct of whiteness into law in the wake of a growing surge of multicultural peasant uprisings in the late 1600s, creating a permanent slave class among the nation’s African population and a constructed sense of superiority amongst the European peasantry who once fought side by side amongst their dark-skinned comrades in imperial oppression.

As the violently racist empire built upon this rock enters its inevitable decline and lashes out violently against a world that has no more use for its existence, it’s hardly shocking that the bastard proletariat of its master class would react just as savagely. I don’t believe that it’s simply a cruel coincidence that lonely, twisted kids like Payton Gendron show up to temples of conspicuous consumption dressed like Derek Chauvin with glorified hunting rifles designed to look like the ones used by our military to slay brown children in places like Somalia and Afghanistan. These active shooter situations are basically imperial copycat crimes and the criminals they copy are reaping all the rewards from their senseless nihilism.

The dirty little secret of the Democratic Party is that they never really became “woke.” Like Strom Thurmond, they just got a lot savvier about concealing their racism after they realized that suburban white soccer moms like to believe that they are benevolent slave masters. Joe Biden continues to celebrate his racist crime bill to this day by pointing out that he tacked the Violence Against Women Act onto it like a virtue-signaling air freshener. Even LBJ’s signature Civil Rights Act of 1968 included a slew of laws criminalizing the Black uprisings that scared him into signing it in the first place.

Laws like the H. Rap Brown Law, were broadly used to crackdown on free speech as long as it could be blamed for inciting riots. This is the same law used against the Chicago 8 and the same law that became the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s war on domestic extremism in the wake of the George Floyd Uprisings. This war has continued under Biden with him retaining the services of Trump’s FBI director, Christopher Wray, a craven neocon who cut his teeth on Muslims while enforcing Joe’s Patriot Act as Assistant Attorney General under George W. Bush.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, it’s all one big hustle. The Republicans blame Islam, the Democrats blame the militia movement, either way, the same pigs get fed at the troth of an ever-expanding white supremacist police state and the same marginalized people get sold into slavery in the Prison Industrial Complex. It really doesn’t matter who the target is, when it comes to empowering the state, the disenfranchised will always get fucked. The only way to end this hustle is to go back to the source and fight the oligarchy that invented race in the first place to divide us, as we did at Jamestown, as we did at Watts, as we did at Detroit and Ferguson and Minneapolis. Because the only time we’ve ever seen any fucking change in this country is when poor people of every color got their hands dirty together, smashing the police state in the streets.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.