President Biden was called out for a racial two-fer in which he suggested that all Hispanic Americans are illegal immigrants, and mixed up the Tuskegee airmen with the infamous syphilis experiment on Black patients.
Mr. Biden made the double gaffe in less than a minute during remarks Thursday on his trip to promote COVID-19 vaccines in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the statewide vaccination rate for adults has lagged behind the national average.
“There’s a reason why it’s been harder to get African-Americans initially to get vaccinated, because they used to be experimented on, the Tuskegee Airmen and others,” he said, as shown in viral video clips. “People have memories. People have long memories.”
Mr. Biden appeared to confuse the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed Black fighter pilots who served heroically in World War II, with the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a 1932-72 federal experiment in which about 600 Black men suffering from the disease were observed but not treated, even after penicillin became widely available in 1947.
Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted that “the Tuskegee Airmen and the Tuskegee experiment are two wildly different historical stories, and Biden’s apparent conflation of the two is impressively demented.”
Mr. Biden went on to offer a theory on Hispanic vaccination rates that conflated illegal immigrants with legal U.S. residents and citizens of Hispanic descent, who numbered about 60 million in 2020, according to the U.S. Census.
“It’s awful hard as well to get Latinx vaccinated as well. Why? They’re worried that they’ll be vaccinated and deported,” said Mr. Biden.
The Republican National Committee was quick to post the video clip with the comment: “Joe Biden uses woke term ‘Latinx,’ then assumes every Latino is an illegal immigrant.”
Former Trump 2020 campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh chimed in: “It does not occur to Joe Biden that tens of millions of Latinos are American citizens.”
Others, including conservative radio host Erick Erickson, took a jab at the president’s use of “Latinx,” a gender-neutral alternative to “Latino” and “Latina” rarely employed outside progressive circles. (The “x” is intended as a replacement for the masculine “o” ending and the feminine “a” ending used by Spanish speakers.)
“President Biden used the term Latinx, which no one in the Latino community uses, and the Democrats cannot understand why the GOP continues to make inroads into that community of voters,” tweeted Mr. Erickson.
A Pew Research Center study released in August 2020 found that only 3% of U.S. Hispanics used the term.
“Latinx isn’t a real word, it’s just something insufferable white progressives say to make us think they’re woke,” tweeted Seattle radio host Jason Rantz. “Also, why does Biden think all Latinos in this country are here illegally?”
Conservative media strategist Giancarlo Sopo said that he and other Hispanics hate “Latinx.”
“He [Biden] thinks most Latinos are here illegally. We are not. He thinks Hispanics like being called ‘Latinx.’ We hate it; I can’t imagine a scenario where it’s ok to impose an unpopular label on minorities,” Mr. Sopo tweeted.
The president’s vaccine push comes with the White House acknowledging that the nation will fall short of Mr. Biden’s 70% adult vaccination goal by July 4. About 65% of U.S. adults have received one vaccine in the two-shot regimen, which is expected to reach 67% by Independence Day.
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