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Commentary By Jason L. Riley

The Racial Progress Democrats Won’t Admit

Culture Race

Biden makes an ugly appeal to fear as black voter-registration and turnout keep climbing.

President Biden has spent the better part of his first year in office insisting he wants to steer the country in a less racially divisive direction. Last week he took it all back. When you invoke Bull Connor, Jefferson Davis, George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan to describe your political opponents, your objective isn’t racial harmony but something closer to the opposite. Maybe we should thank him for finally coming clean.

With the White House struggling to advance its economic agenda, the president’s job-approval rating stuck in the mud, and midterm elections looming, it’s no great shock that Mr. Biden is resorting to racial demagoguery. The Democratic Party has long depended on keeping black people scared and paranoid to maintain their support. That’s how its activists raise money and how its candidates typically turn out the base. For many on the political left, racial progress is something to be played down or ignored altogether, and nothing seems to inconvenience them more than the incredible strides America has made in recent decades on voting rights.

Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)

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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal