VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Joe Biden, the habitual racialist demagogue

The most recent liberal ABC News/Washington Post poll showed President Joe Biden’s approval rating at 36 percent — the lowest in history for a president at this point in his first term.

Biden’s low popularity is no mystery.

He inherited energy independence, affordable gas prices, historically low interest rates, low inflation, calm overseas, a low crime rate and a largely closed border with legal-only immigration.

And then Biden destroyed that inheritance.

He has begged illiberal foreign governments to pump oil he refuses to drill domestically for. He spiked inflation at the highest rate in more than 40 years. Home interest rates have skyrocketed from less than 3 percent to 7 percent. He nearly doubled the price of gasoline.

His harebrained retreat from Afghanistan marked the greatest humiliation of the American military in the past half-century. Kabul is now selling billions of dollars’ worth of abandoned American equipment to terrorists and anti-American regimes.

After that fiasco, Biden foolhardily played down a possible “minor” Russia invasion of Ukraine. He implored Russia to exempt some American institutions from its cyberattack target list. No wonder an empowered Russian President Vladimir Putin went into Ukraine.

Biden’s family is corrupt from top to bottom.

Its influence-peddling schemes increasingly are targets of congressional investigations. Biden himself is explicitly mentioned by his son Hunter as the recipient of a 10 percent commission on monies the family syndicate leveraged from foreign interests.

Biden promised “unity.” Instead, he habitually smears half the country as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” extremists.

Biden is cognitively challenged and often incoherent. And he is now losing support in the polls from African Americans, once his most loyal constituency.

In response, Biden does what he has always done for some 40 years: Mouth wild racist demagoguery.

This graduation season, Biden deliberately chose Howard University to scare its Black graduates into believing the greatest threat to their aspirations is “white supremacy” — and that he, Biden, has been their protector in fighting it.

Note the existential threats Biden deliberately omits.

Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are flooding over a border Biden deliberately destroyed. Millions of incoming poor will vie for limited federal and state support with Americans who are in need. Since Biden was elected, there have been nearly 7 million illegal entries. Some 100,000 Americans now die each year from Mexican-produced fentanyl and other opioids shipped across a wide-open border.

Biden did not mention that nearly 10,000 African Americans are murdered each year, more than 90 percent of them killed by other African Americans.

Biden first should heal his own racism before he fabricates it in others.

He fueled his early Senate career with homages to southern Democratic segregationists such as Sen. James O. Eastland, D-Miss. Biden even bragged that Eastland “never called me ‘boy.’ ” Biden gave eulogies for former Dixiecrat Sen. Strom Thurmond and former Klansman Sen. Robert Byrd.

Of school busing, a younger Sen. Biden thundered, “My children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle.”

Biden in 2008 patronized former President Barack Obama in racist terms as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

In 2012, Biden condescended to a group of accomplished Black professionals that the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, would “put y’all back in chains.”

As a presidential candidate in 2020, he dismissed two Black journalists, respectively with the putdowns “you ain’t Black” and “junkie.”

His fabricated “Corn Pop” he-man autobiographical tales are utterly racist.

As president he has referred to two prominent people of color as “boy.” He still uses the term “Negro” to refer to Blacks.

Biden never cites data to support his wild accusations that white supremacy poses the nation’s greatest threat.

The 2020 riots, the lengthiest in our history, left up to 40 people dead, destroyed $2 billion in property, led to 14,000 arrests, spanned 120 days of mass looting and arson and saw mobs torching police precincts, federal courthouses and an historic church.

That violence was engineered by radicals in antifa and Black Lives Matter.

In the Jan. 6 Capitol protests, the only person confirmed to have been killed at that event was an unarmed military veteran and Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt. She was lethally shot by a Capitol police officer for the misdemeanor of attempting to enter through a broken window.

If “white supremacy” is our “greatest” terrorist threat, surely crime statistics would reveal such an existential peril. Yet federal hate- and interracial-crime data show that so-called whites are considerably unrepresented demographically in such racially motivated violence.

Far from galvanizing the public, Biden’s monotonous racial demagoguery is turning it off.

The military suffers a vast drop in enlistments that began once Biden’s Pentagon brass, without evidence, likewise began demagoguing about supposed “white rage” in the ranks.

Only 37 percent of independents in a recent poll now support Biden. Some 70 percent of the public in other polls opposes a second Biden run.

So on spec, a panicked Biden now turns to what he has done for decades — inflammatory racial demagoguery.

Contact Victor Davis Hanson at authorvdh@gmail.com.