Biden says the January 6 insurrection was 'about white supremacy,' and that hate doesn't go away, 'it only hides'

• President Joe Biden said the January 6 insurrection is part of the US's legacy of white supremacy.
• The insurrection "was about white supremacy, in my view," Biden said on Thursday.

Toward the end of his speech on Thursday in front of the Martin Luther King Jr. monument in Washington, President Joe Biden said the January 6 insurrection "was about white supremacy."

Biden, who was marking the 10th anniversary of the monument along with Vice President Kamala Harris, described a "through line" from slavery to the Capitol siege.

"You know, there's a tough through line of subjugation of enslaved people from our earliest days to the reigns of radicalized terror of the KKK to Dr. King being assassinated," Biden said. "And through that - though that line continues to be torturous, emerging from dark shadows in Charlottesville, carrying out Nazi banners and chanting Antisemitic bile and Ku Klux Klan flags, and the violent deadly insurrection on the Capitol nine months ago, it was about white supremacy, in my view."

The president also cited "the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the pandemic, and the rise of Antisemitism here and around the world."

After a pause, Biden reflected on his own naivete as a longtime politician.

"The through line is that hate never goes away," Biden said. "It never - I thought, in all the years I'd been involved - I thought once we got through it, it would go away. But it doesn't. It only hides."

The line appeared to resonate with the crowd, eliciting applause and shouts of approval.

Biden also echoed the intelligence community's assessment that white supremacist groups present the greatest danger to the homeland in the form of domestic terrorism.

"It only hides until some seeming[ly] legitimate person breathes some oxygen under the rocks where they're hiding, and gives it some breath," Biden said of hate.