Rev. Mark Thompson Defends Joe Biden From ‘Right-Wing’ Satchel Paige ‘Negro’ Claim: ‘This Is What They Do’

Podcast host Rev. Mark Thompson defended President Joe Biden from the false accusation that during his Veterans Day address, Biden called baseball legend Satchel Paige a “negro.”

On Thursday night’s edition of Black News Channel’s The World Tonight with Kelly Wright & Nayyera Haq, Rev. Thompson — host of the Make it Plain podcast — told co-host and former Obama campaign official Nayyera Haq that conservatives have made “woke” a “dirty word.”

“There’s a tendency in mainstream media to take its cue from what Fox News and the right wing does,” Thompson said, and gave the Biden smear as an example.

“Just a few minutes ago, I was asked to do an interview in London on the Times of London radio,” Thompson said. “It hasn’t gotten much pick-up, but Joe Biden mentioned Satchel Paige today, and he said, in these words, he was ‘a great Negro, a pitcher in the great Negro Leagues.”

“Now those of us over here know Joe Biden has a stutter. He meant to say ‘League’ the first time,” Thompson explained, and said “Right wing Twitter is aflame now because they think Joe Biden still uses the term Negro. Clearly, he doesn’t, and he referred to the Negro Leagues.”

“We haven’t stopped referring to the Negro Leagues in that way. It’s not a bad word, but you would have thought he actually said the N-word,” Thompson said. “But this is what they do. They blow things out of proportion. This is what they’ve done with woke.”

He concluded by saying that “The challenge for all of us is to figure out ways to prevent the right-wing from taking our terms off phrases and literally our language, language and vulgarizing it.”

Thompson’s account of Biden’s remarks is accurate, the president did explicitly refer to the Negro Leagues in recounting a favorite anecdote about the late Mr. Paige, and was not using the term to describe the baseball legend. But Fox News, while shying away from explicitly making the charge that Biden referred to Paige in this way, did deceptively edit the clip to remove the reference to the Negro Leagues.

Watch above via Black News Channel.