KENOSHA, WI (WRN-WSAU) — Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden made a stop in Kenosha on Thursday to hear from community members at Grace Lutheran Church.
Biden spent much of his time at the event hearing from Black leaders and hearing about the struggles they’ve had to deal with in Wisconsin. Porsche Bennett of Black Lives Activists Kenosha also told Biden that her community is tired and sore and angry from the way that people have been treated for years and decades.
Biden agreed and said that Wisconsin and American both have to deal with what he called the “original sin” that lead to 400 years of racial inequality.
“Cause this is the first chance we’ve had in a generation, in my view, to deal and cut another slice off of institutional racism.”
One thing that brought him back to the campaign trail, according to Biden, was his reaction to seeing the hate and vitriol at the white nationalist rallies in Charlottesville in 2017.
“Remember what you saw on television, their veins bulging, their hate-filled speech, chanting the same antisemitic bile that was chanted on the streets of Germany in the 30s.”
Biden called out President Trump for his pivot to talking about Law and Order following months of protests over police brutality.
“There’s a lot of folks that have thought ‘well the President has made a lot of strides with his law and order strides there’, that ‘boy over his convention, he’s really made inroads’. He hasn’t. Not at all.”
Biden also said he’ll be pushing for 15 dollars an hour minimum wage, more funding for schools in poor districts, police reform, and bail and felony reform, and that he can do it with one change.
“The generic point I’m making is there’s so much we can do, so much we can do by eliminating the tax cut for the top one-tenth of one percent, which is one trillion, 350 billion dollars, which has done nothing to help anybody.”
Biden also had a chance to talk with the family of Jacob Blake, who was shot in the back by Kenosha police last month.
This is the first time a confirmed Democratic presidential candidate has made a stop in Wisconsin since 2012.
