#Biden’s ‘bigot’ smear vs. Trump voters: Devine

Joe Biden is America’s biggest troll. 

His speech in Tulsa could not have been more disunifying, dishonest or more designed to inflame. 

Who is the president’s speechwriter? Goebbels? 

No, white supremacy is not a threat worse than ISIS. 

No, Texas’ voter ID bill is not “a truly unprecedented assault on our democracy.” 

Biden could have given an uplifting speech on Tuesday at a ceremony marking 100 years since the Tulsa race massacre. 

Instead, he wheeled out his now-familiar refrain that democracy “in peril” from the enemy within. 

“Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today.” Not ISIS, not al Qaeda, white supremacists, he declared, citing “the intelligence community.” 

Does he remember ISIS? 

The images of its atrocities are etched into the memories of the rest of us. 

ISIS gang-raped Yazidi women. It ethnically cleansed whole swathes of Iraq and Syria, slaughtering Christians and driving them out of their homes. It threw homosexuals off buildings. 

It set victims alight and burned them in cages. It beheaded hostages. It displayed severed heads on spikes on street roundabouts and public squares in Raqqa, the capital of its pretend-caliphate. 

Its reign of terror, which lasted roughly from 2014 to 2018, was like a throwback to the barbarism of the Middle Ages. 

We minimize its evil at our peril. 

Or how about al Qaeda, the other terrorist organization the president claimed was not as bad as the white supremacy he won’t stop talking about but never defines. 

Nothing more needs to be said than 9/11. How can we forget the poor souls who leaped to their deaths from the Twin Towers. 

How can we forget the smell of burning jet fuel, the photographs of the 3,000 dead plastered across the city, the hundreds of firefighters and police who ran into mortal danger that day. 

When you downplay the evils of ISIS and al Qaeda, you trivialize the suffering of their victims. You assault their memories. 

In any case, if white supremacy is such a threat, tell us where it is, so we can be on guard. 

The phrase conjures up images of white hoods, neo-Nazi skinheads and swastika tattoos. Where are these people and why hasn’t the FBI rounded them up? 

But you get the feeling that for Democrats, “white supremacy” means Donald Trump voters who are opposed to Biden’s agenda. 

If white supremacists are such a clear and present danger, then Democrats and their media allies wouldn’t have to invent crimes for them, like the Atlanta massage parlor massacre in March. Or the violent attacks on Asians in New York, most of which appear to be committed by black males. 

The Capitol riot also is being rebranded as a white-supremacist event, but it had nothing to do with race, unless you buy the line that Trump was a white-supremacist president. 

In order to claim that white supremacy is the greatest threat to our democracy, you have to widen the definition. 

Essays in The Atlantic are typical of this bracket creep. It took Ta-Nehisi Coates mere months to declare “Donald Trump is a white supremacist.” 

So of course, anyone who would vote for such a monster has to be a white supremacist, too. 

“Whiteness brought us Donald Trump . . . [and] whiteness as an ­existential danger to the country and the world,” Coates wrote in 2017. 

In case you wonder what “whiteness” is, it’s not really about skin color, because black people who don’t go along with the left’s talking points are deemed to be afflicted by “whiteness,” too. 

An exhibit at The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture defined “whiteness” as “self-reliance,” “the nuclear family,” “the scientific method,” “objectivity,” “hard work,” “Christianity,” “delayed gratification” and “respect for authority.” 

These attributes are a recipe for success and a happy life, but somehow dependency, family breakdown, superstition, laziness, Godlessness, disrespect for authority and instant gratification are positive attributes to be cultivated in black people. 

What an insult. This is the destructive message Biden sent on Tuesday: “Young black entrepreneurs are just as capable of succeeding given the chance as white entrepreneurs are, but they don’t have lawyers, they don’t have accountants.” 

It’s a cartoon view that doesn’t comprehend a world in which black people have agency, and can be successful in their own right — or even are capable of showing ID at a polling booth. 

That brings us to another repellent part of Biden’s Tulsa speech. 

He exploited the moment to push his party’s “For the People” Act, which attempts to hijack state elections and cement Democratic rule in perpetuity. 

“This sacred right [to vote] is ­under assault with an incredible intensity like I’ve never seen . . . 

“It is simply un-American,” he declared, as if it’s an outrage to roll back emergency-voting measures sneaked through by clever Democratic lawyers last year under cover of the pandemic. Tilting the playing field helped Biden win the election but Republicans won’t be railroaded again. 

That’s what Biden’s hyperventilating on new voting laws is all about. 

The president could have used his Tulsa speech for healing and pointed out how far we’ve come in the past 100 years. 

Instead he continued to mislead half the country into thinking the other half is the enemy. 

It’s a dangerous game, and history will not look kindly on him if he keeps it up.

Get real, Trump backers

The idea that Donald Trump is going to take back the White House this year is just crazy. But that’s what the most fanatical Trump adherents are saying. 

They see last year’s election as like a heist at Tiffany’s. You have to get the diamonds back. 

Really, what happened in 2020 is more like a football game you lost because — you suspect, but can’t prove — of suspect practices by the other team cheated — but which you can’t prove it. You accept the officials’ rulings and wait to play another day. 

Republicans must work out why they lost and make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

But they also must adhere to reality. The most important thing is to win the next election. Indulging a fantasy about Trump’s restoration to the throne will ensure that won’t happen.

Times Square hard sell

The CD sellers in Times Square are as aggressive as ever, just two weeks after one was arrested for allegedly shooting three tourists during a territorial dispute. 

A friend this week was accosted by one of the peddlers who would not take no for an answer. “Are you a racist,” he snarled when my friend refused to buy a CD. 

Where once the vendors used to be controlled by police and boxed into one corner of the square, now they roam free and menace everyone who walks by. 

Police patrolling the area say they are powerless to stop them, and now that they have lost their qualified immunity, they aren’t even willing to try.