When Joe Biden joined the Senate in 1972, he immediately ingratiated himself with the segregationist wing of the Democrat party.  He's never disavowed those friendships, nor has he disavowed his regular racist remarks over the decades.  That's why it's so disgraceful that Biden has repeatedly played the race card against Trump, as he did on Wednesday, when he again invoked the "Fine People Hoax."  The Trump campaign, though, is finally hitting back hard.

Biden has been in the United States Senate since 1972.  Back then, the Democrat party still had its fair share of open segregationists.  And that's not a right-wing talking point.  That's what NBC had to say just last year, when it wrote an article asserting that Biden was one of the leaders in the 1975 fight against nationalist desegregation through busing.  The report noted that Biden has defended what he did by saying he was a junior senator who had to work with more powerful people who just happened to be race-haters, but the facts put the lie to this defense:

But political experts and education policy researchers say Biden, a supporter of civil rights in other arenas, did not simply compromise with segregationists — he also led the charge on an issue that kept black students away from the classrooms of white students. His legislative work against school integration advanced a more palatable version of the "separate but equal" doctrine and undermined the nation's short-lived effort at educational equality, legislative and education history experts say.

Biden also had a cozy relationship with those same old-school Democrat racists.  Biden called Robert Byrd, a former KKK "Exalted Cyclops" and recruiter, his mentor.  As recently as last year, he boasted about his good relationship with Senator James Eastland of Mississippi and Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia, two other hardcore segregationists.

In addition to cozying up to old-fashioned racists, Biden keeps saying awful, racist things.  In 1977, he said desegregation would turn schools into racial jungles.  Biden also referred to lenders as "Shylocks," an utterly anti-Semitic term.  He mocked East Indian accents.  Then there was the time when he said it was "a storybook" that Obama was an "articulate and bright and clean" black man running for president.

At one campaign appearance, Biden said "poor kids" can be as smart as "white kids."  He then made headlines when he said of blacks who don't support him, "then you ain't black."  Biden built on that concept a few days ago, when he said blacks are intellectually indistinguishable from each other.  And of course, it was Biden who pushed, and still applauds, his 1994 Crime Bill, which sent two generations of black men to prison.

Biden is a man obsessed with race and in all the wrong ways.

So what does Biden do, given his shabby record?  He calls Trump a racist.  In April 2019, when Biden announced that he was running for president, he instantly played the race card by asserting (falsely) that Trump, when speaking about a 2017 rally in Charlottesville that turned fatal, had said white supremacists were "fine people."

Biden's charge is a complete hoax.  Trump never praised white supremacists.  Instead, he castigated them as bad people who needed to be "condemned totally."  Here's the transcript:

Despite the hoax being soundly debunked — so much so that the mainstream media have mostly dropped it — Biden made the same claim again in February.  Then, on Wednesday, when he made his first campaign appearance with Kamala Harris before a tiny crowd in a gymnasium, Biden said it again!  (Apropos that tiny crowd, the WaPo's Robin Givhan laughably tried to spin the empty room as an effective way for America to hear the Biden/Harris message better.)  He (or his handlers) repeated the charge in a text:

Three years ago today, white supremacists descended on Charlottesville with torches in hand and hate in their hearts. Our president said they were "very fine people."

It was clear then, and it's clear now: We are in a battle for the soul of our nation, and we must win.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 12, 2020

This time, though, with the campaign season on for real, the Trump team was ready and pushed back with a powerful video setting the record straight:

The above video needs to be viewed in tandem with this video from Monday that attacks Biden's long racist history:

pic.twitter.com/IlYgFXtpPq

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2020

Bravo to the Trump team.  If the Democrats want to head their ticket with a doddering old racist whose 1994 crime bill locked up two generations of black men, and a hard-left prosecutor who sent over a thousand blacks to prison on minor charges, they need to expect to be called out for the profound damage those two politicians have done to American blacks.

Image: A screenshot from the Trump campaign video about Biden's racism.