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‘Utterly repugnant’: Biden takes heat over recycled anti-Irish ethnic slur at town hall with vets

December 18, 2022 | | Print Article

President Joe Biden is facing criticism for using some ethnic stereotyping to try to make a room full of veterans laugh.

Speaking at a town hall for veterans in Delaware this Friday, he at one point joked, “I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid. I married Dominic Giacoppa’s daughter so, you know, I got a little Italian in me now.”

Listen:

The remarks provoked offense from those who say Biden was basically accusing regular Irish people of being stupid.

“Biden loves this Bidenism (he’s said it in the past before) — just casual old school anti-Irish stereotyping, but he thinks it’s a fun part of his gift of the gab because he considers himself Irish (his great-great-great grandfather moved to America from Ireland in the 1800s.),” Jerry Dunleavy of the Washington Examiner tweeted.

See more backlash below:

This isn’t the first time Biden’s used this one-liner. He also said it during the White House’s Annual Friends of Ireland Luncheon in March.

And he used the Irish part of it back in 2015.

Watch:

In the president’s defense, he does have Irish roots, though he himself wasn’t born there.

“He spent his earliest years surrounded by his mother’s Irish American family, the Finnegans, in the Irish American stronghold of Scranton, Pennsylvania. After moving to Delaware during elementary school, he was schooled by nuns at Parochial schools,” Politico reported last year.

“He also makes sure to emphasize it. Like many Irish-American politicians, he is a regular at St. Patrick’s Day feasts and makes frequent allusions to his Irish Catholic upbringing in public remarks. Biden, though, has gone further than most. He commissioned a genealogy of his Irish ancestors, rolling it out for public consumption at the tail end of his vice presidency, when he and his family toured the Emerald Isle to great fanfare, visiting ancestral sites.”

All this said, the president has a sordid history of making racially/ethnically controversial remarks such as these.

Recall when, during the 2020 presidential election, he told urban radio show host Charlamagne The God that anybody who was considering voting for then-President Donald Trump “ain’t black.”

That same year, he once said that “unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”

The examples go on for days.

“In 2007, he referred to Barack Obama as ‘the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.’ In 2006, he said, ‘You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.’ Way back in 1977, he said that forced busing to desegregate schools would cause his children to ‘grow up in a racial jungle,'” according to The Heritage Foundation.

He’s never faced any sort of real accountability for these remarks, as evidenced by the fact that the same man is now the president of the United States.

Dovetailing back to the president’s latest remarks, there was also a glaring factual error in them. His wife, first lady Jill Biden, is not the daughter of Dominic Giacoppa. She’s his granddaughter.

Vivek Saxena
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