Joe Biden and Kamala Harris deploy the Charlottesville hoax to stir up racial pain and anger.

Here's the "Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Speech Transcript August 12: First Campaign Event as Running Mates." I watched a small part of it because the TV was on in the room I happened to be in. I myself never turn on the TV news. In fact, I often get up and leave the room when it's on. I keep my distance from the virulent news and stick to reading on line (with small doses of video occasionally). In the bit of Joe Biden's speech that I saw, I found him hard to listen to. I wondered how anyone who had English as a second language could understand him, the way he drops consonants — for example, saying "whe'er not" for "whether or not." He sounded angry but disconnected from the text he was reading.

But I'm reading the text this morning because I saw in a tweet that he was forefronting the Charlottesville "fine people" hoax. On his first day of campaigning with his running mate, he led with that. I say "he," but I don't really believe it's him. I think it's more likely that he's a foggy-minded figurehead, and other people have decided to frame the message like that. I consider these people — whoever they are — despicable. They have chosen quite deliberately to commit to a lie that is intended to make black people feel hated and they are doing it for political gain.

As my earlier post about the tweet says, I blogged in April 2019, "If Biden does not come forward and retract [a video relying on the Charlottesville hoax] and apologize and commit himself to making amends, I consider him disqualified. He does not have the character or brain power to be President." Now, more than a year later, Biden has done the opposite. He's doubled down on the lie and he's making it the centerpiece of his campaign!

Biden put up that tweet last night after the speech. This post is to look at the transcript of the speeches that Biden and Harris gave at their event yesterday and to pull out the Charlottesville quotes:

We have a racial justice crisis Donald Trump seeks only to inflame it with his politics of racist rhetoric and appeals to division. Today’s not only the day I’m proud to introduce Senator Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. It’s also the third anniversary of that terrible day in Charlottesville. Remember? Remember what it felt like to see those neo-Nazis, close your eyes, and those Klansmen, white supremacists, coming out of fields...

Fields?

... carrying lighted torches, faces contorted, bulging veins, pouring into the streets of a historic American city, spewing the same antisemitic bile we heard in Hitler’s Germany in the ’30s. Remember how it felt to see a violent clash ensue between those celebrating hate and those standing against it? It was a wake up call for all of us as a country. For me, it was a call to action. My father used to say, silence is complicity, not original to him, but he believed it. At that moment, I knew I couldn’t stand by and let Donald Trump, a man who went on to say when asked about what he thought he said, there were very fine people on both sides, “Very fine people on both sides.” No president of the United States of America has ever said anything like that, see him continuing to attack everything that makes America America. I knew we were in the battle for the soul of the nation.

That was in the middle of Biden's speech. This is from the end of Harris's speech:

Joe likes to say that character is on the ballot. And it’s true. When he saw what happened in Charlottesville three years ago today, he knew we were in a battle for the soul of our nation. And together with your help, that’s a battle we will win. Earlier this year, I said, “I do whatever Joe asks me to do.” And so now I’m asking you to do the same.

No! I'm not going to "do whatever Joe asks me to do," and I don't know why you're such a follower, Kamala. What if Joe gets something wrong? You're not going to challenge him? He's got something wrong about Charlottesville in that tweet last night when he said that Trump called the "white supremacists... with torches in hand and hate in their hearts... 'very fine people.'" You say "character is on the ballot." Show us character then! Be careful about the racial critique you put out there and why you are doing it. I see that you wrote — or your speechwriters wrote — "When he saw what happened in Charlottesville." That's avoiding specifying "what happened." I see the lawyerly loophole. What happened is what actually happened. You're automatically centered on the facts. You haven't repeated the hoax. Is that the level of character you are presenting to us? I'm not impressed.

As for Biden, I can see that the speech isn't as bad as the tweet. The tweet repeats the lie. The speech cagily refrains from asserting that Trump called the white supremacists "fine people." The speech calls upon us to pull the facts up out of our own memory where, in many cases, the lie has taken root. He tells us "close your eyes." He seems to be hoping we will dopily drift into the false memory created by politicians and the media.

He did say, "No president of the United States of America has ever said anything like that." Well, now, that is true. Because Trump didn't say it.

I can't imagine what Biden could do to win my confidence. I'm not going to bother to put in a request this time, because I feel completely hopeless that he will try. He has decided to run on — his people have decided to run him on — fomenting racial division, fear, and hatred. He could have run on just not being Trump — the simple dream to make America normal again. But he has chosen an eyes-closed nightmare.