Why I’m voting for Joe Biden: he won’t retweet conspiracy theorists and white nationalists

August 30, 2020

I’m voting for Joe Biden this fall because he won’t retweet conspiracy theorists and white nationalists.

I’m setting a low bar here, but it’s an important one. And I’m not being glib. The President of the United States should not foment hatred or division, should not promote lies and half-truths, and should never promote violence in America.

Whether his tweets are personal attacks on other politicians (Ted Cruz’s dad, Marco Rubio’s citizenship, Obama’s birth certificate), demonstrable lies (largest ever inauguration audience in history, charges that mail-in voting causes fraud), or just plain idiocy (vaccines cause autism or windmill noise causes cancer), his words are not acceptable for someone holding our highest office.

QAnon is a conspiracy group that believes Trump is saving the world from a satanic cult of Democrats who are pedophiles and cannibals. (I’m not making that up.) Trump’s reply to this: “Is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?” He refuses to denounce them. Instead, he has retweeted their accounts at least 216 times as of August 20, 2020.

Trump’s response to the murder of a protester and the injury of 19 others by a white nationalist in Charlottesville in 2017: “You had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

Trump retweeted (and has since deleted those tweets) a conspiracy theorist who promoted the widely debunked Pizzagate story about a cabal of Democrat child molesters involved in a human trafficking and child sex ring at a pizza restaurant. (Again, I’m not making that up either.) That story ended with an alt right North Carolina man firing his AR-15-style weapon into the pizza restaurant.

Followers of Trump will say that they like his policies and his accomplishments and make excuses for his tweets. They say that they wish he wouldn’t tweet so much. But he does, and he’s not going to stop, and those tweets and his own words reveal the true content of his character.

I’m voting for Joe Biden because I expect more.