RUTHFULLY YOURS

Joe Biden talks frequently about Donald Trump’s “Big Lie”: that the 2020 election was stolen. The president is correct; Trump’s claim hurts our nation.

But Biden has some Big Lies too: that the biggest threat this country faces is white supremacy, that efforts to prevent election fraud in states like Georgia will suppress minority voting and that the United States is a “systemically racist” country.

These lies are purposeful and political, meant to shore up support among Black and White liberal voters. They are also harmful, leading to policies that have made our country less safe, our elections less secure and our people less optimistic.

Biden has lied generously, consistently — almost voluptuously — about so many topics: inflation, the border, Build Back Better, his loopy fictions about conductors, being arrested with Nelson Mandela, the most recent fable about applying to the Naval Academy and so on.

But his creative juices really start to flow when he talks about race and crime.

For instance, Biden speaks with great passion about hate crimes perpetrated against Black Americans, implying that white supremacy is the scourge that fills our morgues and makes our sidewalks unsafe. It is total bunk.

Heather MacDonald writes in the City Journal that most hate crimes are committed not by whites but rather by blacks. MacDonald presents the statistics, which do not lie. She writes: “From 2016 to 2020, blacks nationally were twice as likely to commit a hate crime as whites, according to FBI data, among hate-crime suspects whose race and ethnicity were known.”

As to local hate crimes: “In New York City, from 2010 to 2020, blacks were 2.42 times as likely as whites to commit a hate crime…Blacks in Los Angeles committed anti-Asian hate crimes at 4.8 times the rate of whites in 2021…committed anti-gay hate crimes at seven times the rate of whites, and anti-Semitic hate crimes at 2.4 times the rate of whites.”

These are facts. They are unpleasant facts, and they in no way condone any violence perpetrated by other groups. The recent murder by a White man of ten individuals in a Buffalo grocery store, most of whom were Black, is a heinous act. So was the murder of six White people by a Black man in Waukesha, Wisconsin, last Christmas.

Only one of those incidents has been charged as a hate crime. Only one inspired a visit from President Biden.

As Jason Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the Waukesha incident: “Given the suspect’s history of posting messages on social media that called for violence against white people and praised Hitler for killing Jews, you’d think that his race and the race of his victims would be relevant to reporters.”

But, as Riley concludes, when the outrages don’t fit the narrative, “the left…[goes] colorblind.”

Hate truly is, as Joe Biden has said, a “stain on the soul of our nation,” but it is not mostly driven by White racists.

How potent is the dishonest messaging from President Biden and his colleagues? In a survey conducted in 2021, the Skeptic Research Center found that “over half (53.5%) of those reporting “very liberal” political views estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed Black men were killed by police each year. One thousand. The real number was 27.

Why does this matter? Because the perception that our country’s streets are running red with the blood of defenseless Black men killed by racist cops has led to laws on bail reform and efforts to hobble our police that have allowed crime to spike and made our cities more dangerous. This is intolerable.

Just recently, President Biden signed a mostly toothless executive order designed to “reform” police in our country, mainly by tying them up in red tape. His EO applies only to some 100,000 federal law enforcement officials in the U.S.; he hopes the 700,000 local cops who work to keep our cities and towns safe will adopt the “best practices” laid out by the White House.

The president’s executive order was signed on the two-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder in an attempt to revive the anger and activism inspired by that event. Because, as Biden himself noted, “there’s a concern that the reckoning on race inspired two years ago is beginning to fade.”

Biden is right. Polling shows crime is more important than race for American voters today, and especially for Black voters; support for the defund-the-police movement and bail reform measures that put hardened criminals back on the streets is waning.

Crime is not the only issue distorted by President Biden. He deemed voter laws like the one in Georgia meant to correct some of the unreliable policies adopted during COVID “Jim Crow on steroids”, suggesting it intended to suppress voting by blacks.

And yet in its recent primary, Georgia’s Secretary of State reported that over 800,000 people turned out for early voting, “a 168 percent increase over 2018, the last gubernatorial primary and a 212 percent jump above 2020, the last presidential primary year.” In addition, over 100,000 more Black voters cast ballots this year compared to 2018, more than a three-fold increase.

Biden also argues that it is “systemic racism” perpetrated by white people that has held back Black people in our country.

This damaging narrative encourages more hate and violence from those who perceive themselves to be victims as it denies them hope. It also prevents any investigation or amelioration of other reasons that Black achievement lags that of Hispanics and whites. Like perhaps our corrupt public education system, which fails so many minority children.

Joe Biden is desperate to keep Black voters in his column. Instead of playing the race card, maybe he should tackle the issues that matter most – to blacks, and indeed to all voters – like inflation and crime. And, start telling the truth about the challenges we face.

Published on Fox News