Joe Biden Compares 2020 Election Deniers To Confederates After Civil War

Pro-Palestine protesters interrupted the speech to demand that Biden end Israel's invasion of Gaza.

Speaking to a predominantly Black audience on Monday at the site of the worst white supremacist terror attack in recent U.S. history, President Joe Biden compared the people who falsely assert that the 2020 election was stolen to defeated members of the Confederacy making spurious claims about the Civil War.

Biden’s remarks from the pulpit at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, showed how the president hopes to use former President Donald Trump’s role in fomenting the U.S. Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, to excite the Black voters in his base, as well as retain the support of suburban swing voters.

Although a larger percentage of Black voters approve of Biden’s performance than virtually any other demographic group, some polling shows that Black voters’ support for him has waned since 2020.

To make his point on Monday, Biden laid out the historical analogy in some detail. Following the South’s loss, he noted, many Confederates and their sympathizers promoted a “Lost Cause” theory of the Civil War: that the South had fought nobly to protect states’ rights, rather than to uphold slavery. The Confederates’ “self-serving lie” created the cultural basis for the implementation of the anti-Black caste system in the Jim Crow era, Biden said.

“So let me be clear for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War,” Biden said, taking an apparent swipe at Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor-turned-Republican presidential candidate who omitted slavery as a cause of the Civil War when asked about it in late December. “There’s no negotiation about that.”