OPINION:
And just like that, the whole reason Joe Biden ran for president goes down the drain.
One of President Biden’s most ardent left-wing peddlers of disinformation and conspiracy theories has finally recanted the single most important lie of Mr. Biden’s long, dishonest career.
In 2016, Mr. Biden was finished. He had been drummed out of presidential politics numerous times for lying. Former President Barack Obama successfully shunted him to the side at the end of his term, realizing the mistake he had made in picking Mr. Biden as vice president in the first place.
To any outside observer, Mr. Biden’s career in politics was over. But he had one more big lie to tell.
In 2019, he announced he was running for president against Donald Trump because, he said, Mr. Trump had embraced racist neo-Nazis during a violent clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, two years earlier during Mr. Trump’s first year in office.
“That’s when we heard the words of the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation,” Mr. Biden said when he announced his campaign for the presidency. “He said there were, quote, ‘some very fine people on both sides.’”
Of course, anyone paying attention knew this was a lie. The conflict began as a protest over a statue in a public park between people who wanted the statue torn down and those who wanted the statue protected as a monument to history. Mr. Trump said there were “good people” on both sides of that debate and went out of his way to explicitly condemn the wacko neo-Nazis who crashed the protest.
“I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White nationalists,” Mr. Trump said at the time, “because they should be condemned totally.”
Still, Mr. Biden repeated the lie because it was useful to his political career. He said Mr. Trump’s manufactured statement inspired him to run for president.
“In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,” he said. “I wrote at the time they were in the battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that’s even more true today.”
Of course, the media — ever desperate to spread lies about Mr. Trump and prop up Mr. Biden’s campaign — have run with the conspiracy theory ever since. They are even willing to drag into their dishonest political conspiracy theories an innocent woman named Heather Heyer, who was run over and killed in Charlottesville after the protest.
Even after Mr. Biden became president, the political press kept their lying drumbeat going.
“After the rally and Ms. Heyer’s death, Mr. Trump declared that there were “fine people on both sides” of the conflict and defended the actions of the right-wing mob,” political reporter Astead Herndon wrote in The New York Times, intentionally lying to readers and clearly implying that Mr. Trump was defending the man who killed Heather Heyer. (Seriously, Mr. Trump is so right when he calls liars like Mr. Herndon “the enemy of the people.”)
Lying to his readers and sliming Mr. Trump to push his own twisted political agenda was not enough, however, for Mr. Herndon and The New York Times. He went on to accuse Mr. Trump of doing what Mr. Biden was actually doing.
“It was all a harbinger of things to come: the mix of misinformation and prejudice that Mr. Trump had inspired among a segment of Republicans; the reliance on false equivalency with progressive protestors; the willingness to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to inflame tensions; and the continued episodes of violence.”
Now comes the left-wing “fact check” website Snopes.com, finally correcting the record and explaining why Mr. Biden, The New York Times and left-wing hacks like Astead Herndon should be drummed from the public square for lying.
“While Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be ‘condemned totally.’ Therefore, we have rated this claim ‘False.’”
But do not wait for The New York Times to run a correction. The newspaper still has not returned the Pulitzer Prize it won for its dishonest coverage of the Trump-Russia hoax, a wild conspiracy theory that has been thoroughly debunked.
The question now is why Snopes.com would decide to suddenly correct this lie that is the cornerstone of Mr. Biden’s presidency.
Is the left turning on President Biden? Or has his big lie become such an implausible and shameful burden that even they no longer want to be associated with it?
Luckily for Mr. Biden, The New York Times is happy to keep carrying his lies for him.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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