In a commencement address delivered at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, President Joe Biden correctly deemed white supremacy “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland.” He was quick to add that he wasn’t saying this just because he was speaking at a historically Black university. “I say it wherever I go,” he added.
Biden is right to highlight the threat from violent white supremacists, who federal law enforcement agencies say “promote accelerationist thinking, which advocates committing violence to precipitate a large-scale conflict often framed as a race war” in order to establish a “white ethnostate.” These extremists pose immediate danger to American lives, as we have seen far too many times, most recently in the horrific mass shooting at a Texas mall.
But it is not enough for Biden to talk about white supremacist violence. As he hits the campaign trail in earnest, Biden needs to be far more pointed in calling out how the Republican Party props up and even promotes white supremacists, who threaten our democracy from within.
It’s easy to find GOP lawmakers echoing Trump’s enabling of white supremacy.
At Howard, Biden quoted former President Donald Trump’s claim that there were “very fine people” at the notorious 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. But he didn’t name his likely 2024 rival, the biggest culprit in bringing white supremacists out of the shadows over the past eight years. As president, he hired staffers sympathetic to white nationalism, embraced some of their causes and espoused racist views. The men and women who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, included white nationalists like the Proud Boys, whom Trump had asked before the election to “stand back and stand by.” Unsurprisingly, Trump hasn’t moderated his views since losing his bid for re-election. Last year, for instance, he hosted the Hitler-admiring white supremacist Nick Fuentes for dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
In his…
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