European-origin Americans deserve respect even after they become a minority in the United States, President Joe Biden told a friendly interviewer in an October 1 interview.

“We’re going to be — very shortly — a minority-white European country, and sometimes my [Democrat] colleagues don’t speak enough to make it clear that that is not going to change how we operate,” he told the progressive billionaire-fundedProPublica website.

Democrats must treat white Americans with respect, as they and their children quickly become a racial minority in their own nation, Biden insisted, saying:

It’s not so much the economic benefits; it is treating them with respect, treating them with respect. … The Democratic Party in the past has — on occasion — spoken less to their needs and fears or concerns. And so, I think a lot of the guys that I grew up with in Delaware and in Scranton, Pennsylvania, they feel like they’re not being respected. Not so much by policy — just by the failure to talk about their needs.

Current polls show mainstream, plurality, or majority opposition to the federal policy of mass migration that has helped suppress incomes for most Americans since 1990. {snip}

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In the ProPublica interview, Biden did not mention — and was not asked — about the impact of his immigration policy.

The interviewer was John Harwood, who is not a conservative. He is an establishment journalist and asked Biden:

The millions of Americans who think the country is changing in ways that are harmful to whites, men, social conservatives, small town, blue collar America…A poll by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that 40 percent of the people who call themselves “Christian nationalists” think that “Patriots may need to use violence to save the country. Is that fear of change where the threat to democracy comes from?

Biden prefaced his call for “respect” by describing the criticism of federal immigration policies as unreasoning “hate.”

He also portrayed the growing share of all groups of Americans who oppose the government-forced changes as creatures who should be forced to live under rocks: “[As a senator,] I thought you can defeat hate, you can bury it, you can kill it. But I learned you can’t. All you can do is you can drive it underground, and when you [allow] oxygen under the rock, it comes roaring back out again.”

Biden did not suggest that he would reduce what he described as the “hate.” For example, he did not say he would begin enforcing the federal laws against immigration into Americans’ jobs and communities. But he described himself as a partial populist:

In the 2020 campaign, I said, “I speak to you, not from Wall Street. I speak to you from Scranton, Pennsylvania.” That was a bit of a populist point, but it was a genuine point — that, in fact, I represent all those people. I will represent all those people.

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