Al Sharpton is as toxic a figure as exists in American public life, and any decent person should treat him the same way we would treat David Duke.
It’s a crowded field to choose the worst thing about Joe Biden’s dishonest and demagogic speech on Tuesday at the National Constitution Center, but one of the “good friends” he chose to single out in the crowd should top the list:
I see an awful lot of good friends out there. Please have a seat if you have one. I — let me begin by saying I used to be important. (Laughter.) I used to be the chairman of the board of this place. And Jeffrey Rosen allowed me to do that for a while. But thank you all for being here. I truly appreciate it. Governor, it’s above and beyond the call. Mr. Mayor, I’d compli- — I thought you were a great mayor — still think you are — but your judgment in fiancées is even stronger. And — but — but all of you. And a good friend, Bobby Brady. I see so many friends out. Al Sharpton — Al, how are you, pal? It’s great to see you. (Applause.)
(You can watch the clip at 2:05 here). If this does not shock you, it should. Al Sharpton is as toxic a figure as exists in American public life, and any decent person should treat him the same way we would treat David Duke. I have previously rounded up some of the most damning writing on “Sharpton’s sins, which include inciting murder, riot, and arson, leading a hoax rape accusation against innocent men, anti-Semitism, and tax evasion,” and much more space would be required here to recapitulate the entirety of that grim resume. I will offer a brief refresher.
Consider the hoax 1987 rape accusation made by Tawana Brawley against Steven Pagones and others, which led to Pagones obtaining a successful defamation verdict against Sharpton and his associates, Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason (Mason has since been disbarred; Maddox merely had his law license suspended). The Brawley case, as much as anything, made Sharpton a household name in New York and set him on the road to becoming a national figure. As early as 1988, New York’s liberal Democratic attorney general opened an investigation into Sharpton, and this contemporaneous New York Times report gives a flavor of why:
Perry McKinnon, a former aide to the Rev. Al Sharpton, said in a television interview yesterday that the [Sharpton, Maddox and Mason] themselves doubted the story of a racially motivated abduction and rape of the 16-year old black schoolgirl last November and that ”the two lawyers and Sharpton were making it up as they went along.” ”There was no case, only a media show,” Mr. McKinnon told WCBS-TV… [Sharpton, Maddox and Mason] have steadfastly refused to cooperate with the investigation, terming it a cover-up and suggesting that the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan and the Irish Republican Army had conspired with the state to thwart a fair investigation…In Albany, Governor [Mario] Cuomo, who denounced the Brawleys and their advisers as having ”mocked and trifled” with the law, said the latest allegations required ”a fresh look at the case – a whole new look at the situation.”
Mr. McKinnon, a black 39-year-old Vietnam War veteran and private investigator, served as Mr. Sharpton’s assistant, driver and liaison to news organizations for the first four months of the Brawley case, until last April when he dropped out of sight….He said he became convinced that ”this case is not about Tawana.” Instead, he said, ”it’s about Mason, Maddox and Sharpton sort of taking over the town, so to speak.” He said, “Their exact words were, ‘We beat this, we will be the biggest n*****s in New York.”’ The words, he said, were Mr. Sharpton’s.
Sharpton ended up getting his backers to pay the defamation verdict, and remains unrepentant about ruining a man’s life and perpetrating a giant fraud on the state’s politics and legal system: “What do I have to apologize for? I believed her.” (This stance drew criticism from Ta-Nehisi Coates when Sharpton ran for president). Sharpton’s portfolio of mendacity is flexible. He was “flipped” by the FBI to act as an informant after being caught in a drug sting in 1983. He was charged by Abrams in a 67-count indictment including more than two dozen felonies involving the theft of $250,000 from a youth group, but was acquitted. He worked with Roger Stone as a consultant and fundraiser on his 2004 presidential campaign. He painted himself as a happily married religious man during that campaign, even though it appears that he had already separated from his wife after Sharpton had an extramarital affair. He seems to have had the help of government pressure on Comcast to get him his MSNBC show when Comcast needed federal approval for its merger. He admittedly pulled punches on that show to avoid criticizing heavy-handed federal government when Obama was president. His financial records disappeared in suspicious fires, a matter of some interest for a man with serial tax-evasion issues.
The broader problem for Biden, and why it is so glaring for him to welcome “Al” as a “pal” in a speech decrying the January 6 Capitol riot, is Sharpton’s record as a hatemonger and inciter of violence. In 2000, then-Congressman Joe Scarborough introduced a resolution in the House “Condemning the racist and anti-Semitic views of the Reverend Al Sharpton.” A sample:
Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has referred to members of the Jewish faith as ‘‘bloodsucking [J]ews’’, and ‘‘Jew bastards’’; Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has referred to members of the Jewish faith as ‘‘white interlopers’’ and ‘‘diamond merchants’’;… Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton’s vicious verbal anti-Semitic attacks directed at members of the Jewish faith, and in particular, a Jewish landlord, arising from a simple landlord-tenant dispute with a black tenant, incited widespread violence, riots, and the murder of five innocent people; Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton’s fierce demagoguery incited violence, riots, and murder in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, following the accidental death of a black pedestrian child hit by the motorcade of Orthodox Rabbi Menachem Schneerson; Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton led a protest in the Crown Heights neighborhood and marched next to a protester with a sign that read, ‘‘The White Man is the Devil’’; Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has insulted members of the Jewish faith by challenging Jews to violence and stating to Jews to ‘‘pin down’’ their yarmulkes…
It is Sharpton’s role in the 1991 Crown Heights riot in which a mob stabbed Yankel Rosenbaum to death and the 1995 murder and arson at Freddy’s Fashion Mart that are most jarringly at odds with Biden’s message. I’ll let Phil Klein tell the Crown Heights story:
In July 1991, a controversy erupted when Leonard Jeffries, a professor at New York’s City College gave a speech blasting “rich Jews” for financing the slave trade and for controlling Hollywood so they could “put together a system of destruction for Black people.” Sharpton rushed to defend Jeffries, and in the middle of the swirling controversy, declared, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”
A day after Sharpton made that comment, in August 1991, a Jewish driver accidentally ran over a 7-year-old black boy named Gavin Cato in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and an anti-Semitic riot broke out in which Jewish rabbinical scholar Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death. Instead of calling for calm, Sharpton incited the rioters, leading marches in the streets that included chants of “No Justice, No Peace!” and “Kill the Jews!” At a funeral for the boy who had been run over, Sharpton said, “The world will tell us he was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident. … It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. … Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights.” For those unfamiliar, “diamond merchants” was a thinly-veiled reference to Jewish jewelers. After an investigation, no indictment was made of the driver who had accidentally run over Cato, and he left for Israel. Sharpton flew there in an attempt to “hunt down” the driver and hand him a civil law suit. According to the Daily News, at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, a woman spotted Sharpton and shouted, “Go to hell!” Sharpton yelled back: “I am in hell already. I am in Israel.”
Malcolm Gladwell recounted the Freddy’s Fashion Mart massacre, which followed on the heels of protests led by Sharpton, in the Washington Post at the time:
Every day for two weeks an embittered band of protesters formed a picket line on 125th Street outside Freddy’s Fashion Mart clothing store, one of Harlem’s largest Jewish-owned businesses. Shouting “Kill the Jew bastards and burn down the Jew store!” and “This block for n*****s only, no whites and Jews allowed!” the demonstrators vehemently challenged Freddy’s plans to expand into a black-owned business next store. The Rev. Al Sharpton called the owner of the store a “white interloper.” Demonstrators harassed store employees and customers and on one occasion, a protester made the motion of striking a match and tossing it into the store. New York City has more than its share of protests and angry words. But last Friday morning, the threats became real when one of the pickets, 51-year-old Roland Smith, opened fire with a gun and then torched the store, killing himself and seven other people…Sharpton and other black leaders…have found themselves in the unusual position of arguing that hateful speech and hateful deeds are not always connected, and that the epithets and racial taunts of the protesters have been blown out of proportion.
Jeff Dunetz has more on the role Sharpton’s radio show played in fanning the flames. The racially motivated gunman, who had attended Sharpton’s protests, told all the black customers to leave before opening fire, but he did manage to kill 22-year-old black security guard Kareem Brunner, and the other victims — Angelina Marrero, Cynthia Martinez, Luz Ramos, Mayra Rentas, Olga Garcia, and Garnette Ramautar — were mostly Hispanic. The massacre was far from unforeseeable:
Hours before a crazed gunman turned a Harlem clothing store into a fiery death chamber, the shop’s shaken owner sought a last-ditch legal crackdown on hate-spewing protesters. In an affidavit, shopkeeper Fred Harari detailed a fearsome campaign of anti-Semitism and death threats in an eerie foreshadowing of the terror wrought by Smith. “Recently the protesters have made motions of striking a match and throwing it . . . on the outside clothing displays or into the doorway of the store. I can only believe that if they are allowed to continue with their protest up close to my store, at some point real matches will be thrown.
As Dunetz notes, Brunner also submitted an affidavit saying that he had been called a “cracker lover” and “would get mine as a traitor [to the black race].” Again, Sharpton spent years insisting he had nothing to apologize for:
Sharpton was and remains unrepentant. “You only repent when you mean it, and I have done nothing wrong,” he insisted in 2001. In 2011, on the 20th anniversary of the Crown Heights pogrom, he blamed “extremists in the Jewish community” for setting a dishonest racial narrative.
Knowing all of this, Joe Biden spoke regularly last summer with Sharpton and consulted with him on his vice presidential choice. Now, when Biden seeks to raise the alarm about the threat of mob violence to our democracy, this is the “pal” he greets? Biden’s old segregationist friends may have died off, but his choices of whom to pal around with have not improved with age.