Before Joe Biden and the Democrats start lambasting the president on his record on race, perhaps they ought to check their own video archives. That’s because a recently resurfaced video clip displays Joe Biden calling members of a Confederate heritage group “fine people” in 1993, almost exactly the same words as President Donald Trump’s 2017 remarks that some people opposing the removal of Confederate statues in Charlottesville, Va., were “very fine people.”

Close

Biden declared his presidential candidacy in 2019 by saying that Trump, in comments made on those protests, had “assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.” Although Trump noted at the time that he was “not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally,” Democrats and the media hit him for not condemning some protestors more harshly.

But Biden said in 1993, “I, too, heard that speech and, for the public listening to this, the senator made a very moving and eloquent speech,” said Biden, referring to remarks by then-Alabama Democrat Senator Howell Thomas Heflin. “As a son of the Confederacy…not granting a federal charter to an organization made up of many fine people who continue to display the Confederate flag as a symbol.” The group Biden refers to as made up of “many fine people” is the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Former members defined the group as previously racist and having a historical connection to the Ku Klux Klan.

“[S]ince the UDC was founded in 1894, it has maintained a covert connection with the Ku Klux Klan,” Heidi Christensen, the former president of the Seattle chapter of the UDC, told the press. “In fact, in many ways, the group was the de facto women’s auxiliary of the KKK at the turn of the century. It’s a connection the group downplays now, but evidence of it is easily discoverable, you don’t even have to look very hard to find it.”

In fact, Annie Cooper Burton, then the president of the Los Angeles chapter of the UDC, wrote in a 1916 publication: “Every clubhouse of the United Daughters of the Confederacy should have a memorial tablet dedicated to the Ku Klux Klan; that would be a monument not to one man, but to five hundred and fifty thousand men, to whom all Southerners owe a debt of gratitude.”

In 2006 Biden described his home state of Delaware like this: “This state is not a homogenous state. We’re a border state, a slave state.” Asked for a response by the media to those unearthed comments on Monday, a Trump campaign official asked: “Who brags about being from a slave state?”

But now that the political winds have shifted, so has Biden. The former veep has come out for the renaming of Army posts to reflect PC themes. “The names affixed to our military installations must honor the diverse heritage of leadership and sacrifice in our country’s history,” Biden said in a recent statement. “I fully support Senator Warren’s bipartisan effort to form a commission to rename Defense Department facilities named after Confederate leaders in the next three years, and look forward to implementing the commission’s work as president.” If somehow the political math changed again, given his past record on the issue, likely so would the views of the former vice-president.