by Kerry Dougherty
How much longer will the mainstream media get away with pretending that it’s conservatives who are racist and never liberals?
Perhaps you noticed. As they tried to explain away the breathtaking Republican sweep of Virginia in last week’s elections, pundits and journalists alike couldn’t stop yapping about dog whistles and white supremacy.
It was so easy and required no real thinking.
But it wasn’t Republicans prancing around in blackface in Virginia as recently as the 1980s. It wasn’t Republicans running a former blackfacer for attorney general. And it wasn’t a Republican who used an offensive racial term as recently as, well, yesterday.
Nope. That was Joe Biden.
On Thursday he wished the father of Secretary of State Antony Blinken a happy birthday by using the same tired trope he rolled out a couple of weeks ago when talking to the pope. It’s a quote attributed to baseball great Satchel Paige who was asked how it felt to be playing ball at the advanced age of 47. He replied, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?”
Mildly amusing, I suppose.
Trouble is, in telling the story yesterday, Biden referred to Paige as “the great Negro at the time…”
Biden refers to “that great negro pitcher” Satchel Paige pic.twitter.com/ikFdGaixZT
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 11, 2021
Imagine, for a moment if Glenn Youngkin said something like that. The media would be calling for a pre-inaugural impeachment.
Members of the press will excuse Biden, of course. Just another word salad from the aged and confused president. Journalists are in his head, they know what he really meant. After all, he’s a Democrat. He can’t be a racist.
Exactly how many passes does Biden get?
This is the same man who last year told radio host Charlamagne tha God, “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
Biden got away with that, too.
Campaigning in Iowa in 2019 and speaking to the Asian and Latino Coalition PAC, Biden said schools in poor areas should offer Advanced Placement classes.
“We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it. Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”
You want to know how Biden really feels about minorities? Listen to his words. Ignore the media.
On the other hand, we have Governor-Elect Glenn Youngkin. The media would like you to believe he and everyone who voted for him is a racist.
If that’s the case, Youngkin’s the worst racist ever. Not only did he run with a more racially diverse slate of candidates than the Democrats, but he repeatedly promised to fully fund Virginia’s struggling HBCUs, historically black colleges and universities, that have essentially been ignored by the last two Democratic administrations. Youngkin vowed to keep public schools open — unlike his predecessor — because it was minorities and less affluent kids who suffered the most under Ralph Northam’s prolonged school closures.
Now we learn that Youngkin asked former Gov. Doug Wilder to serve as an advisor to his transition and administration. Wilder, of course, was the grandson of slaves and Virginia’s first black governor.
During the run-up to the election, Wilder came close to endorsing the Republican ticket. He refused to endorse Terry McAuliffe, saying Democrats hadn’t done enough to earn the African-American vote.
He was harshly critical of McAuliffe who called for Ralph Northam to resign during his 2019 blackface scandal, but later made excuses for the governor and then accepted Northam’s endorsement.
After Youngkin’s win, Wilder noted that McAuliffe had made a perfunctory call to him after winning the Democratic nomination but that he never heard from him again. By contrast, Wilder said, Youngkin had kept in touch with him throughout his campaign.
Never mind all that. The media will continue with the intellectually lazy stereotyping of conservatives as racists until we call them out.
Let’s get this started.
This column has been republished with permission from Kerry: Unemployed & Unedited.
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