Biden, the Racist

Here is a Joe Biden quote from 1977, as verified by Snopes and posted by Instapundit.

In early March 2020, readers asked Snopes to verify a quote in 1977 in which Biden, then a U.S. senator representing Delaware, allegedly expressed fear that desegregation, if not done in an “orderly” way, could result in his children growing up in “a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point.”

The quote is accurate as reported.

As The New York Times reported in a detailed delineation of Biden’s history with busing, Biden at the time had emerged as the Democratic party’s crusader against busing, taking the same side as segregationists. Biden “joined up with Jesse Helms, the segregationist senator from North Carolina, to offer his own anti-busing amendment to that year’s education spending bill.” Biden’s “advocacy made it safe for other Democrats to oppose busing,” The Times reported.

The Times further reported that Biden sided with Helms in 1975 when the latter proposed to strip the federal government’s power to withhold funding from school districts that refused to comply with racial-equality measures.

This Biden history does need to be publicized. At the time he claimed his home state - Delaware - had sympathized with, but did not join, the Confederacy.