Al Perrotta, like a lot of the rest of us, finds it hard to believe that Biden won on the up and up.

Joe Biden won crucial swing states fair and square — despite getting blown away in bellweather Ohio and Florida, despite being down by hundreds of thousands of votes until the mysterious shutdowns in counting, despite Trump outperforming Biden campaign’s own expectations, despite underperforming Hillary Clinton everywhere else in the country, despite not campaigning, despite having no ground game, despite having zero enthusiasm, despite losing support among minorities, despite pushing policies at odds with the desires of the public, despite aligning himself with BLM and Antifa. And despite having trouble executing a coherent sentence.

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HT: The News Junkie.

Ann Althouse read the transcript of Joe Biden’s press conference statement and the dear girl went up like a bottle rocket.

[Quote Biden:]

[W]hat’s becoming clear each hour is that a record number of Americans of all races, faiths religions chose change over more of the same. They’ve given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism.

Oh, now that’s a stretch. He’s barely won, if indeed he’s won. We still don’t know. But if he’s won, he wants you to know, that there’s the mysterious thing called “a mandate.” And he specifies the components of the mandate — “a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism.” Wasn’t it more of a vote just to be rid of Donald Trump? But that’s the claim, the 4 elements of what we supposedly want — do something about COVID, the economy, climate change, and systemic racism. …

The people spoke, more than 74 million Americans and they spoke loudly for our ticket….

It was so loud we’re still straining to hear it after 4 days.

Look, we both know tensions are high, they can be high after a tough election, the one like we’ve had but we need to remember we have to remain calm, patient. Let the process work out as we count all the votes… In America, we hold strong views, we have strong disagreements and that’s okay. Strong disagreements are inevitable in a democracy and strong disagreements are healthy, they’re a sign of a vigorous debate of deeply held views. But we have to remember the purpose of our politics isn’t total, unrelenting, unending warfare, no. The purpose of our politics, the work of the nation isn’t to fan the flames of conflict but to solve problems, to guarantee justice, to get to improve the lives of our people. We may be opponents but we’re not enemies, we’re Americans. No matter who you voted for I’m certain of one thing, the vast majority of them, almost 150 million Americans who voted they want to get the vitriol out of our politics.

That would sit better with me if he hadn’t begun and ended his campaign by portraying President Trump as a racist. I think Biden fanned the flames and relied on dividing us. All winners claim to represent all of the people. It’s a convention to say that after you’ve won… or after the votes are in and you’re perceiving victory just out there in the near future. But I have no confidence that the Democratic Party will use whatever power it’s managed to scrape together to unite this country. Let them prove it… with clear and convincing evidence.

We’re certainly not going to agree on a lot of issues but at least we can agree to be civil with one another.

And that’s where you get my “civility bullshit” tag. You’re only calling for civility to get your opponents to stand down. “Civility” is a value that comes and goes.

We have to put the anger and the demonization behind us.

Now that you’ve been successful at demonizing Trump, you want the demonization to stop. We “have” to do it. You should have set an example when you risked something in declining to demonize. Now, it’s in your interest to put demonization off limits. Talk about things that are predictable.

It’s time for us to come together as a nation to heal…. We don’t have any more time to waste on partisan warfare.

You haven’t won yet, and I think there’s some partisan warfare left. You’re not nonpartisan for saying let’s stop fighting at the point when you are ahead.

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Salena Zito points out that, if he wins, Biden won’t be healing anything and that the era of nation-wide division is not really about Trump.

Many voters going into this election next month believe if Biden wins the presidency, the constant disruption, chaos, and social unrest will recede because Trump will no longer be president. Some of them are actually hinging their vote on that. Those exasperated voters and every reporter who spins that reasoning are as wrong about that as they were in their belief that the 2016 election was all about Trump. It never was.

Trump was never the cause of the conservative populist coalition that put him in office. He was the result of it. After decades of voters’ dissatisfaction with both political parties, institutions, government, and culture, they voted for themselves and their communities over both party’s establishments. It wasn’t about voting for Trump.

A lot of very smart people keep missing that critical nuance.

If Trump’s opponents, or those who cover him, spent any time listening to voters and not making fun of them, categorizing them as a cult, racists, stupid, or whatever word of the day they are using to describe them, they would understand that.

I don’t mean parachuting in for a day at a diner and calling that understanding of a community. But walking in their shoes and their community’s streets to see how government has either failed them or passed their communities by. It wouldn’t hurt to stay in town for a couple of days, attend church with people, go to work with them, or watch them coach little league.

Look someone in the eyes on the very ground they walk on, and not from the bubble of your life experiences, and you might experience a little empathy.

As for Biden, despite his wistful assertion that he is going to bring this country together, anyone with a smidgen of understanding of the Democratic Party knows he will be hard-pressed to bring his own party together, let alone an entire country.

The hard and very vocal Left will demand climate change legislation, defunding or deep restructuring of our nation’s police forces, free college tuition, a $15 minimum wage, “Medicare for all,” and a restructuring of our education system to include radical lessons like the 1619 Project as part of the curriculum.

They will take their demands to social media, the streets, and to Washington until they get what they want. That is not a threat; that is just a reality. Biden is not the far-Left’s candidate, but he is the means to an end of Trump. Once elected, there is a valid expectation of a far-left reward for voting for Biden.

The moderate Democrats, independents, and suburban Republicans who may put Biden into office won’t go willingly along with sweeping government changes to satisfy activists, nor the higher taxes needed to support them. They won’t take to the streets, but they will silently move away from the coalition they decided to dip their toe in. The result will be an instantaneous shift back toward Republican candidates for the 2022 midterm elections, and the wildly swinging wave elections we’ve been experiencing since 2006 will continue.

In short, there is no exit from the roller coaster anytime soon.

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The Left isn’t going to change, and neither are the Americans who refuse to be swept along by the whims and caprices of the community of fashion.

My classmate, Chicago Law Professor Charles Lipson, is justifiably indignant at the shameless partisan behavior of the Establishment Media and the Social Media giants.

[T]he Biden family’s corruption as part of th[e] entrenched system is why the social-media censorship of that story should not be seen as a separate, stand-alone scandal. It is integral to understanding how the Swamp’s ecosystem operations, how it defines our politics.

The operation is visible in the New York Post exposé of Biden family corruption. The FBI has had those documents for months, so they should be either verified or discredited by now. Those findings, if they exist, have not leaked. If the emails are legitimate, they are bombshells. If they are false, they are worse than duds. They are a major disinformation campaign — an assault on our election — and we need to know who is behind it so we can hold them accountable.

Twitter and Facebook have prevented dissemination of the Post story on their platforms. The reason, they say, is that they have not substantiated it themselves. They decided to block all users, including members of Congress and the President’s press secretary, from sharing links to these published stories. Big Tech Knows Best.

Remember, this story was published by a major newspaper, a reputable one with a large circulation, subject to libel and defamation laws. Notice that the Biden presidential campaign has not denied the documents are authentic. They did deny, sort of, one item in one email, namely that VP Biden met with a Burisma executive, despite years of denying any involvement with Hunter’s business dealings. The campaign issued a carefully worded statement, saying only that the vice president had not listed on his official schedule any meeting with a senior Burisma official for the day in question. Later, they acknowledged that there were long gaps in the schedule and that a meeting could have taken place. Maybe it did; maybe it didn’t. We just don’t know as yet. We do know, quite apart from these emails, that VP Biden met with his son’s Chinese business contacts without listing them on his ‘official schedule’.

The New York Post has disclosed a great deal about its sourcing for these Biden stories, far more than other newspapers did when they published anonymously-sourced attacks on Trump. The social media giants didn’t block those. It didn’t even block discredited stories, like one from BuzzFeed that was demolished with an unprecedented public statement from Robert Mueller’s Office of Special Counsel. Today, you can post links to that discredited story on Facebook or Twitter. If you are an Iranian or Chinese propaganda ministry, you can post your stories, too.

To put it bluntly: the ‘verification standard’ isn’t standard and doesn’t require verification unless the social-media czars say it does. It should be called the Alice in Wonderland Standard. ‘“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”’ And so it is with Facebook and Twitter’s ‘verification standard’.

Why did Twitter and Facebook blackout news about Hunter Biden? The obvious answer is that those companies have a dog in the fight, and they are walking behind him with a giant pooper-scooper. It’s impossible to say if they picked that dog for ideological or financial reasons. Perhaps both. Most employees favor Biden, while higher-level executives want to preserve their networks of political power and influence. Both motives point in the same direction.

Trump has framed this New York Post story and its suppression on social media by saying ‘Biden is corrupt’ and ‘Big Tech is biased’. He’s right, of course, but he should go further. Oddly, he is overlooking the very idea he has campaigned on since 2015. Biden, Burisma, Chinese banks, Twitter and Facebook are all faces of the Washington Swamp. Next week, the faces may be different, but the Swamp itself will be the same. The buyers and sellers who populate this fetid ecosystem have powerful reasons to sustain it. For some, that means taking payments from foreign oligarchs and then opening doors for them. For others, that means suppressing news about who opened the doors and why. That is exactly what Big Tech is doing now. They, like the politicians they are protecting, want to retain their power and line their pockets. In Washington, that’s the Circle of Life.

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I just saw an ad from Joe Biden. He said he was going to treat us like family. I can’t wait to go to China and come back a millionaire and have a job that pays me $150,000 a month.

— Darlene (@djf510) October 11, 2020

There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night. pic.twitter.com/Q3VZTW1vUV

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 30, 2020

The democrat party left is systematically using its control of the media to fabricate a completely imaginary racist and dangerously violent right-wing movement supporting Donald Trump and poised to initiate street combat at his command.

It’s total bullshit, designed to establish a kind of co-equal guilt and responsibility on the part of Trump and his Republican supporters for all the violence and destruction going on all over the country at the hands of BLM and ANTIFA thugs. This is nothing other than the classic Big Lie. But note how Biden even shamelessly references Kyle Rittenhouse as a case of “White Supremacism.”

Ann Coulter marvels:

After four months of looting, arson, window breaking, vandalism, intimidation, physical assaults, stabbings and shootings by Black Lives Matter and antifa, the first thing on the media’s mind is … getting Trump to condemn “white supremacists”!

It would be as if, on the morning after Pearl Harbor, the League of Nations demanded that FDR condemn American aggression in the Pacific.

Why on earth was Trump being badgered by both debate moderator Chris Wallace and Democratic nominee Joe Biden to denounce “white supremacy”? And why wasn’t Biden ever asked to condemn the nonstop violence by antifa that actually has been consuming the country for more than 100 nights now?

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Evita Duffy, at the Federalist:

If Chris Wallace’s goal during Tuesday night’s debate was to deflect from the months of left-wing violence from Black Lives Matter extremists and Antifa and instead blame it on President Donald Trump and his supporters, he did an excellent job.

“You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left-wing extremist groups,” Wallace, the debate moderator, said to Trump. “But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland?”

Ignoring for a moment that Trump’s criticism of Joe Biden was absolutely warranted and that Wallace asked Trump to condemn white supremacists but did not ask Biden to condemn Black Lives Matter arsonists and looters, the question itself was specious. The violence in Kenosha was spurred by left-wing extremist groups, not white supremacists. We know — because we were there. …

Wednesday it was announced Rittenhouse is pursuing a libel case against Biden and his campaign for the advertisement suggesting he is a white supremacist. Rittenhouse’s attorney, Lin Wood, said he plans to “rip Joe into shreds.”

Not only was Wallace’s debate tactic dirty, but it is factually wrong to say the violence and destruction that consumed Kenosha was spawned by “white supremacists,” given that the overwhelming majority of arrests were of left-wing rioters. …

Many voters and residents of these torn cities aren’t buying it. “You’re telling me you’re going to burn down my neighborhood?” Valerie, a 25-year-old black woman and former Democrat from the inner city of Milwaukee, told the Federalist in Kenosha of Black Lives Matter. “No, I don’t want to be a Democrat anymore.”

So MSNBC can keep standing in front of burning cities and calling them “mostly peaceful” protests, and Chris Wallace can keep pretending the right is to blame for the violence. But we were in Kenosha. We talked to people on the ground. Voters know who the peaceful protesters are and who the rioters are.

Katha Pollitt, at The Nation, says:

I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them. He wasn’t my candidate, but taking back the White House is that important. Four more years of Trump will replace what remains of our democracy with unchecked rule by kleptocrats, fascists, religious fanatics, gun nuts, and know-nothings. The environment? Education? Public health? The rights of voters, workers, immigrants, people of color, and yes, women? Forget them. And not just for the next four years: A Trump victory will lock down the courts for decades. I cannot believe that a rational person can grasp the disaster that is Donald Trump and withhold their support from Biden because of Tara Reade.

HT: Weasel Zippers.