“The truth is under assault”: Biden takes his pro-democracy agenda to church
In a passionate campaign speech at Mother Emanuel AME Church, the president overcame pro-Palestinian protestors to promote his 2024 vision.
Joe Biden knows he wouldn’t be president without the votes of South Carolina’s Black community who fueled the 2020 primary victory that jumpstarted his campaign four years ago. And he knows he won’t win a second term without those same voters—and the broader Black coalition—showing up in numbers to reelect him and Vice President Kamala Harris to, as Biden often says, “finish the job.”
Standing between them, of course, is former President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement fueled by grievance, white nationalism and a brand of populism that’s reshaped the American political world order in the nearly eight years since Trump rode down the escalator to announce his candidacy.
The day before that announcement, a white supremacist walked into Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina and sat with churchgoers attending bible study before he killed nine and injured another in an anti-Black mass shooting. At the time, it was the deadliest shooting at a place of worship in US history and the deadliest in South Carolina history.
“The Word of God was pierced by bullets and hate, of rage, propelled by not just gunpowder, but by a poison—a poison that for far too long has haunted this nation,” Biden said in a campaign speech on Monday afternoon at Mother Emanuel. “And what is that poison? White supremacy. [It] has no place in America—not today, tomorrow or ever.”
The political violence that Charleston experienced was inspired by the same extremism Trump exploited to win the presidency in 2016, convince his supporters to attack the US Capitol on January 6th when lost in 2020 and place him on the cusp of the Republican nomination for the 2024 election.
“The truth is under assault in America,” Biden said picking up where left off last Friday in another speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania to mark the three-year anniversary of the January 6th insurrection. “As a consequence, so is our freedom, our democracy, our very country because without the truth, there is no light. Without light, there's no path from this darkness.”
This was the moment pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted Biden’s speech to demand he call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
“I understand their passion,” the president said after the protestors were drowned out by chants of “four more years” from his supporters. “I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and get out of Gaza.”
There’s growing anxiety among national Democrats that the Biden campaign’s focus on democracy, though a noble message, is one that won’t resonate with the base’s communities of color and young people.
But Biden’s bet is that he can thread the needle to warn that the progress on the party’s policy priorities—from student debt relief, abortion rights and a diverse federal judiciary to police accountability, housing affordability and climate justice—will end if the institutions that enable them cease to exist.
“We all do well if every race in small towns and big cities is doing better, when our freedoms are protected and we deny hate as a safe harbor, where everyone has a fair shot and a life of dignity and opportunity and where our democracy works for everybody. It benefits everybody,” Biden said.
Although he was among a congregation of loyal supporters, critics like Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) accused the president of “[using] the pulpit of a church to further divide our nation and distract from his failures on the economy, the border and foreign policy.”
Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesperson, reposted a link to the president’s speech and a clapback: “Maybe Nancy Mace can learn something today about calling out hate, extremism and division, instead of encouraging it.”
Biden was introduced by Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), who serves as the House Democratic Assistant Leader and a Biden 2024 co-chair, and spoke not only about the president’s legislative accomplishments but also his familiarity with the Black community.
In a statement released by the campaign ahead of the speech, Clyburn said the 2024 election would not only determine the fate of American democracy and freedom but also whether the US would stand up against the worst consequences of the MAGA movement.
“I have always said that South Carolina picks presidents and I know President Biden and Vice President Harris agree,” Clyburn, whom Biden called the “best friend you could ever have,” said in the statement. “We’re all proud to welcome President Biden to the church to remind the nation of what happened and that it is on all of us to fight back against this extremism.”
From the sound of it, the Black people of the Palmetto State seem up to the task.
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