Video shows Joe Biden once praised alleged 'neo-Confederate' group as 'full of many fine people'

Former Vice President Joe Biden once praised a group that liberals have described as a "neo-Confederate" organization as consisting of "fine people," in a video shared Sunday by President Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

The video is from a 1993 Senate hearing during the Supreme Court confirmation process for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As the Daily Wire's Ryan Saavedra pointed out, then-Sen. Biden made the comments about the United Daughters of the Confederacy in response to remarks from by one of his colleagues in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

At the time, Biden said:

I, too, heard that speech and, for the public listening to this, the Senator made a very moving and eloquent speech, as a son of the Confederacy, acknowledging that it was time to change and yield to a position that Senator Carol Moseley-Braun raised on the Senate floor, not granting a Federal charter to an organization made up of many fine people who continue to display the Confederate flag as a symbol.

While there is no evidence that Biden holds any racist views and it is unclear how he currently feels about the UDC, the resurfaced video underscores how the political tactics of progressive Democrats can prove problematic for the party's front-runner.

Critics of the former vice president were also quick to accuse Biden of hypocrisy since he launched his own campaign attacking President Trump for his controversial "very fine people on both sides" comments during the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

A problem for Biden with progressives

Biden's praise for members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1993 could create problems for his presidential campaign today among the Democratic Party's progressive base.

On its website, the UDC describes itself as an organization dedicating to "honoring the memory of its confederate ancestors." In December the group issued a press release defending Confederate monuments—of which, they have sponsored 450—arguing "they simply represent a memorial to our forefathers who fought bravely during" the Civil War.

Although the UDC says it "denounces any individual or group that promotes racial divisiveness or white supremacy," the organization has been a frequent target of the left over the years.

For instance, the far left Southern Poverty Law Center (which itself has been ripped by conservatives as a "hate group") has branded the UDC as a "neo-Confederate" organization:

"Neo-Confederacy" refers to a reactionary, revisionist predilection for symbols of the Confederate States of America (CSA), typically paired with a strong belief in the validity of the failed doctrines of nullification and secession — in the specific context of the antebellum South — which rose to prominence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The group is said to have had Klan ties

Further complicating matters for Biden is that it was public knowledge that the UDC had strong ties to the Ku Klux Klan at the time that he praised its members.

As the Daily Beast noted last year, the organization erected a monument to the KKK outside of Charlotte in the 1920s. "The UDC always had ties to the Klan," Heidi Christensen, a former president of the Seattle UDC chapter, said the publication.

"But the connection became more overt in the 1910s. You've got "Birth of a Nation," and then the second rising of the Klan, and you see [the UDC] openly revering the KKK and defending them as saviors of the white southern race during Reconstruction," she added. "Those things made it clear they were loyal to the Klan and saw them as heroes. And in some ways [the UDC was] sort of like the KKK's more feminine, genteel sister organization."

This is also not the first time the presidential candidate has been blasted for similar comments. In June, Biden reminisced of "civility" in the Senate while invoking his interactions with two southern Democratic lawmakers who opposed desegregation efforts.