Either former Vice President Joe Biden is deliberately lying about what President Donald Trump said after what happened at Charlottesville three years ago, or he is someone who is so callous about actual facts that he it would be dangerous to entrust him with the vast powers of the presidency.
Yet, in his acceptance speech for the nomination for that high office Thursday night at the virtual Democratic National Convention, Biden repeated the same old falsehood that both he and multiple others on the Left and their collaborators in the national media have persisted in a demagogic effort to portray Trump as a sympathizer of the Nazis, skinheads, the Ku Klux Klan, and so forth.
Biden said:
Just a week ago yesterday was the third anniversary of the events in Charlottesville.
Remembering seeing those neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists coming out of the fields with lighted torches? Veins bulging? Spewing the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the 30s?
Remember the violent clash that ensued between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it?
Remember what the president said?
There were, quote, “very fine people on both sides.”
It was a wake-up call for us as a country.
And for me, a call to action. At that moment, I knew I’d have to run.
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Biden added, “At the time I said we were in a battle for the soul of the nation.”
One would think that being concerned about the soul of our nation should include telling the truth about the president of the United States, but Biden has evidently decided winning the election is of greater importance than telling the truth. The theory behind the usefulness of the Big Lie is that if one repeats it long enough, and forcefully enough, it will be believed.
The truth of the matter is that Trump was referring to those who were peacefully defending the monument of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and those who were in peaceful opposition when he said that there were “fine people on both sides.”
He was not saying there were fine people in the crowd of neo-Nazis, nor over on the Left in the crowd of Antifa. “What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs?” Trump said at a press conference in the aftermath of the violent clash, and after one protester was run over by a car, and killed.
“I watched that very closely, much more closely than you people watched it. You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say that right now,” Trump continued. “You look at both sides. I think there is blame on both sides. I have no doubt about it. You also had some very fine people on both sides.”
Unless one is a moron, he can quickly understand that — even if that is all that the president said — Trump was saying there were bad people on both sides, and there very fine people on both sides.
But Trump was explicit. “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally,” he said.
Steve Cortes, a commentator for Real Clear Politics and CNN, wrote, “These Charlottesville statements leave little room for interpretation. For any honest person, therefore, to conclude that the president somehow praised the very people he actually derided, reveals a blatant and blinding level of bias.”
Yet, that is exactly what most of the national media has done ever since, in what Cortes had rightly called a “damnable lie.”
Trump, in commenting on the death of Heather Heyer, the protester who was run over by a car driven by one of those very people that Trump roundly condemned, said, “Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
Despite Trump’s explicit denunciation of racists such as the neo-Nazis and the Klan, the nominee of the Democratic Party has chosen to disregard the clear truth and instead accuse the president of praising those very same people. It is beyond belief that Joe Biden is simply ignorant of what Trump actually said. If he is really that uninformed so as to persist in perpetrating a narrative that is so clearly not true, he has no business being president of the United States.
Photo of Joe Biden giving his acceptance speech: AP Images
Steve Byas is a university instructor of history and government and the author of History’s Greatest Libels, a book that challenges some of the greatest lies told about historical personalities such as Christopher Columbus, Marie Antoinette, Thomas Jefferson, and Joe McCarthy.
