senator snows again for president. when i saw those people coming out of the woods of the fields in virginia in charlottesville, carrying torches, shouting, you will not replace us, accompanied by white supremacists and carrying nazi banners, that s when i said no, no, and i honest to god, those who know me, i wasn t going to run for certain. i was going to be darned if i was going to let i won t get going. look, we ve seen the mass shootings in charleston, south carolina, in pittsburgh. last year in atlanta. this weak in dallas, texas, and now in buffalo. in buffalo, new york. white supremacy is a poison. it s a poison. it really is.
that he said he ran because of the hate he saw in charlottesville. whether it was george w. bush talking about education or name your president, talking about something that drove them to run, this was joe biden s issue. this was the issue that he wanted to express in a very visceral, very emotional, very personal way. and he did. the question is how do you sustain it in the sense that the president of the united states saying there s a venom of hate in our politics. it cannot be the story of our time. how do you bend the arc? you know, it has been the story of our time. it has been the story of america. the sort of twin cultures not only gun culture, but also white supremacist culture as well. and gun culture in some ways being used to reinforce white supremacy as we saw in this instance in buffalo. and as we ve seen in other instances. el paso, in pittsburgh, in
both/and. both the gun control issue as well as the issue with how we deal with the question of hate crimes. one of the things that i did the evening that this became known to us, i got calls early before it hit the news from our national action network chapter in buffalo. i reached out to the head of the anti-defamation league and the latino community. all of us joined in with the national urban league and asked the president to call a white house meeting on hate crimes. also in that, we must discuss gun control. we re in the middle of a midterm election season. we need to make sure that a lot of those elections are determined by who takes a firm stand on what to do around hate crime enforcement and around gun control. we can t live in an era of buffalo and el paso and pittsburgh and act like we re a different era.
chief white house correspondent for the white house peter baker. at vanderbilt university, jon meacham. jon, in the past, we ve had tragedies. oklahoma city, of course. the 16th street baptist church bombings. there was a revulsion by american citizenry. tha reaction to it, the tragedy of the 16th street baptist church, those bombings actually helped drive the civil rights movement forward. it woke up a lot of, as martin luther king would call them, moderate white americans. i m curious, it seems we have one shooting after another, whether it s the targeting of jews at a synagogue in pittsburgh, the targeting of hispanics at a walmart in el paso, the targeting of black
has only gained steam. as the rev said, it s become so mainstream, not only on a powerful cable news network, but you now have house republican leaders who are putting it in facebook ads. that s the thing. that s the thing, joe. two things. first of all, no one should call the person accused of this horrific and unspeakable crime a lone gunman. he had backup. yeah. he had backup from the killers who came before him in charleston, in el paso, in pittsburgh, in new zealand. he had that backup. he also had backup from those who are playing footsie with this replacement theory, in