https://www.motherjones.com/2020-el...u-aint-black-crime-bill-factcheck-misleading/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/mother-jones/
Biden’s “Breakfast Club” Comment About Black Voters Was Off. So Were These 5 Claims About the Crime Bill.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden went viral in a bad way Friday morning, when, at the end of a radio interview with
The Breakfast Club, he told host Charlamagne tha God that “you ain’t Black” if you “have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump.”
Progressive activists quickly
slammed the former vice president for trying to act like an arbiter on Blackness, while the Trump campaign and the president’s supporters
cynically seized the comment, even
selling T-shirts featuring it. Later in the day, Biden apologized. “I’ve never, never, ever taken the African American community for granted,” he
said on a call with members of the US Black Chambers Inc., an organization promoting Black-owned businesses. He added that he “shouldn’t have been such a wise guy.”
But that comment wasn’t the only problematic part of his appearance on
The Breakfast Club. Biden also made several misleading or downright false statements about his role authoring the 1994 crime bill and the impact it had on mass incarceration. The much-derided law contained a host of measures to prevent crime—including “three strikes” mandatory life sentences, extra funding for policing and prisons, an assault weapons ban, and the Violence Against Women Act—and is often pointed to as a factor that fueled the disproportionate imprisonment of Black and brown people in the United States...........................
Here, we fact-check five of his claims to set the record straight.
1. “The crime bill didn’t increase mass incarceration. Other things increased mass incarceration.........
2. “I opposed that ‘three strikes and you’re out.'”.......
3. “I opposed…any mandatory sentences.”.....
4. “On balance the whole bill…it did in fact bring down violent crime.”.....
5. “The one thing I opposed in that bill was people wanting to give money to state prisons to build more prisons. I opposed it.”