#Voting for Biden is an invitation for endless riots and other commentary

2020 watch: Appeasing Rioters Won’t Stop Them

The left insists the way “to stop violence in the streets is to elect Democrats,” who will “surely be better at calming the far-left mobs by giving them at least part of what they want,” observes Kyle Sammin at The Federalist. And it’s true “the mob would be gratified by Donald Trump leaving office.” Yet giving in to violent demands only proves “violence works and leads to more of it. A mob is never satisfied.” Americans know “a nation that votes out of fear is lost” — and would do well to remember that now. “This republic endures when people vote based on what they think will be right and good for all of us.” If they don’t, “this grand experiment in republican self-government will be headed for failure.”

Libertarian: We’re Now Truly Beating COVID

“The fatality rate among COVID-19 patients in the United States has fallen dramatically since last spring, from 6.1 percent in mid-May to 2.6 percent yesterday,” reports Reason’s Jacob Sullum. The key reason, according to new studies: We’ve mastered treatment. Controlling for age, sex, comorbidities and other factors, NYU reseachers found that the fatality rate fell from 25.6 percent in March to 7.6 percent in August — a 70 percent drop.” Similarly accounting for outside factors, “University of Exeter Medical School statistician John Dennis and several other researchers . . . found ‘a sustained decrease in mortality risk’ between the first week of April and the end of the study, amounting to a drop of 9 percent a week for patients in intensive care units and 11 percent a week for patients in high intensive units.” Three cheers for modern medicine!

Iconoclasts: A Delusional Liberal Consensus

The Week’s Matthew Walther laments how “to participate meaningfully in mainstream discourse surrounding the election, it has become necessary to deny the plain testimony of one’s senses.” As far as liberal news, academic and corporate institutions are concerned, all standards of fairness are gone. “Instead of what is good for the goose being good for the gander,” a new consensus “reflexively insists that the goose is a Russian operative.” Allegations of sexual assault that were once supposed to be taken as gospel faith now are treated with skepticism — if the accused is a Democratic presidential nominee, that is. “A few hundred Tea Party grandfathers protesting” lockdowns must be repressed, while antifa riots are A-OK. Holocaust denial doesn’t get banned on social media, but (The) Post reporting on Hunter Biden does. It all makes political life extremely difficult for those who want to “see the world for what it really is.”

From the right: Anonymous Attacks Democracy

That Miles Taylor, the “Anonymous” resistance figure passed off by The New York Times as a “senior official,” turned out to be just chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security should “embarrass” those who promoted that claim, say the Washington Examiner’s editors. “But there are also disturbing aspects” to this tale: “For all the talk of Trump upending norms of democracy,” nothing the president “has done represents a greater threat to democratic institutions than the idea that mid-level bureaucrats should have a pocket veto over decisions made by elected officials.” Taylor argued that he and others were acting to thwart the president in order to “preserve our democratic institutions,” but such attempts do the exact opposite. “Those who portray themselves as heroic freedom fighters in the name of protecting institutions from Trump are, in reality, undermining those very institutions.”

Election desk: Don’s Next Four Years?

“The odds are against him again, but Donald Trump has every intention of winning four more years in office,” Walter Russell Mead writes in The Wall Street Journal. So what will he do with his second term, if voters do hand him one? Well, for one thing, he will “look to make his mark in foreign policy,” as most second-term presidents do. Another likely product: four more chaotic years, like his first term. And it won’t be “because the president is undisciplined and indifferent to process,” but because “chaos is more than a choice or even a habit” for the president — it’s “a tool for keeping ultimate control in his own hands.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board