Joe Biden Compares 2020 Election Deniers To Confederates After Civil War

President Joe Biden's remarks on Monday were the second of two speeches to commemorate the third anniversary of Trump supporters' efforts to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. 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. “Every stride forward has often been met with ferocious backlashes from those who fear the progress, from those who exploit that fear for their own personal gain, from those who traffic in lies told for profit and power.” - President Joe Biden The speech on Friday, at a community college outside of Philadelphia, connected the George Washington-led battles for independence from the British to the effort to safeguard U.S. democracy against figures like Trump in the present. Days later, at Mother Emanuel, Biden effectively argued that Trump’s election would also threaten the progress toward racial equality achieved since the Civil War.