Biden's targeting of racist extremism is being portrayed as an attack on the right itself [View all]

[tenderfoot]

It may not be politically useful, but if Republicans insist that an attack on racism is an attack on them maybe we should believe them —Michelle Goldberg, NY Times

President Biden’s words during his inaugural address were straightforward in their targets.

“The cry for survival comes from the planet itself, a cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear,” he said. “And now a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat. To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity.”

National unity would be required to address climate change and the scourge of extremism, particularly racist extremism. Not anything terribly controversial on its face.

Yet some nonetheless managed to wring out some controversy.

“If you read his speech and listen to it carefully, much of it is thinly veiled innuendo,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said during an interview on Fox News, “calling us white supremacists, calling us racists, calling us every name in the book.”

Paul also apparently objected to Biden’s saying that “there is truth and there are lies, lies told for power and for profit.”

“Calling us people who don’t tell the truth,” Paul continued. “ ‘And going forward we’re not going to have manufactured or manipulated truth.’ That’s another way of saying all of my opponents manufacture or manipulate the truth and are liars.”

In that last sentence, Paul does explicitly what he did implicitly on the issue of race: conflate Biden’s constrained criticisms with a broad attack on Republicans generally. Biden never specifically mentioned who was telling those lies, though the focus was obvious. He never even called out the extremism he was targeting as being right-wing. But for Paul, the implication was clear: Biden thinks Republicans are racist liars.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/21/bidens-targeting-racist-extremism-is-being-portrayed-an-attack-right-itself/