Politics - News Analysis

Conservatives Claim Joe Biden Called Baseball Legend Satchel Paige a ‘Negro’ — This is NOT True

They know how to listen to people. They just choose to work in soundbites.

As President Joe Biden delivered a Veterans’ Day speech on Thursday, conservative media once again jumped on something that he said as offensive, even though it was clearly not what he was saying.

While he was wishing Donald Blinken — father of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and a former diplomat himself — a happy 96th birthday, Joe went back to an anecdote he loves to tell about legendary baseball pitcher Satchel Paige. And because of the order that he said the words in, conservative media tried to paint him as having said something racist.

In fact, Benny Johnson, the right-wing mouthpiece for Turning Point USA who was fired from an actual mainstream media outlet after it was discovered that most of his work was plagiarized, didn’t even try to hide that their media machine was twisting Joe’s words.

In the anecdote, Joe refers to Satchel Paige, who first pitched in the Negro Leagues and then in the Major Leagues.

I’ve adopted the attitude of the great Negro — at the time pitcher in the Negro Leagues — went on to become a great pitcher in the pros, in Major League Baseball, after Jackie Robinson. His name was Satchel Paige.

Now watch how Benny frames it in his tweet by omitting the fact that Joe was clarifying that the league Paige pitched in first was called the Negro League at the time, and by using the lower-case version in his quote:

That’s what they all ran with today.

This is the same thing that right-wing media did with Barack Obama’s now-infamous “you didn’t build that” comment. They knew that he was saying that nobody succeeds without help from their friends and family, from tax breaks, from American infrastructure — but they painted the whole comment as President Obama telling business owners that they had no part in the success of their own business.

That’s the whole modus operandi of conservative media, though. In fact, that’s how the Republican Party works: Take just enough truth that people can think “I definitely heard something like that,” then apply a different meaning to it entirely.

Rest assured, Joe Biden didn’t say anything like that today, and when your racist uncle brings it up this Thanksgiving, now you know exactly what to say.

meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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