The current President’s record of lying is alarming. In 1988, Biden lost his first bid for the Presidency because the media actually reported he was a repeat plagiarist. He became president this time around at least in part because, in 2020, the mainstream media did not report his record of plagiarism. The Democrats of today also either chose to ignore his history or did not research their candidate, instead accepting the left-leaning media’s narrative at face value.

As a candidate, Biden announced his campaign with the “Charlottesville Lie”: The claim that President Trump was referring to Nazis and White supremacists when he said there were “were very fine people, on both sides.” In reality, President Trump was referring to people on both sides of the debate about removing the Robert E. Lee statue. One hopes this blatant and despicable untruth was shredded once and for all by David Schoen’s explication of the issue during the second impeachment trial.

As President, a couple of weeks ago Biden made a statement about Georgia’s election law. in which every allegation is untrue. The new law does not end voting hours early, end early voting, place restrictions on casting absentee ballots that deny “countless voters” the right to vote, reduce the number of polling sites, or criminalize providing water to voters waiting in line. I believe in redemption, but Biden’s behavior as a candidate and as president has not indicated he is anything but a bald-faced liar.

Which brings us to Biden’s “Speech to the Joint Sessions of Congress” in which he said, “We won’t ignore what our intelligence agency has determined to be the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today: White supremacy’s terrorism.”

Along with almost all Americans, I condemn White supremacist and anti-Muslim groups and the crimes they commit, as well as all hate groups, and all criminal and destructive behavior!

Biden’s statement, however, is designed to manipulate people’s emotions and understanding. While the remark is literally true – insofar as America’s intelligence agencies claim that White supremacy is a problem, at the same time it insinuated into the minds of millions of Americans the suggestion that White supremacists are killing vast numbers of Americans. Statistics indicate this is not true.

The information on which Biden based his statement first appeared during the Trump presidency in an October 6, 2020 report from the Department of Homeland Security. DHS Acting Secretary Chad Wolf tweeted,

You can read the Department’s first-of-its-kind homeland threat assessment. This is as close as you will get to seeing and understanding the information that I see as acting secretary and that our employees see in the national security missions.

and

The American people should have faith knowing these threats were identified using the best intelligence, operational information, and employee knowledge available to the Department.

As of June 3, 2020, the Department of Homeland Security had identified 199 white supremacist groups in the U.S. According to the most recent statistics I can find:

In the 2015-2019 period, U.S. White nationalist groups were held responsible for 34 separate attacks, resulting in 64 deaths. Anti-Muslim extremists were linked to 32 attacks resulting in five deaths.

According to the FBI, during that same 2015-2019 period, there were 6,111,199 violent crimes and 72,781 murders throughout the U.S. Therefore, during this five-year period, terrorist attacks by White supremacist and anti-Muslim groups accounted for .001% of violent crimes and .09% of murders – a minute proportion. These crimes are terrible -- no decent person can deny that. However, if these groups are the “most lethal terrorist threat” to our country -- even more deadly than the threat of Islamist terrorism -- law enforcement agencies are doing a good job of preventing attacks as the crimes committed by these groups are a very small percentage of overall criminal attacks and death.

Contrast these statistics from a five-year period across America with Chicago in 2021. As of April 21 – that is, less than four full months into the year -- there have been 785 shooting incidents and 181 murders. Or look at Philadelphia, where year-to-date figures as of April 28 stand at 505 nonfatal and 141 fatal shootings and 165 homicides (a 33% increase from 2020). It should also be noted that most of these incidents have been Black-on-Black crimes. While terrorism from White supremacist and anti-Muslim groups may be an increasing concern, it pales beside the gun violence, committed predominantly with illegal firearms, in urban America.

To put these figures into further perspective, contrast .001% of all violent crimes and .09% of all murders committed OVER A FIVE-YEAR PERIOD with the Islamist terrorist attack on 9/11. Muslim terrorists murdered 2,977 people in one day translates into 2% of the 1.4 million violent crimes and 16% of murders committed in the US in 2001. Again, while terrorism by White supremacist and anti-Muslim groups may have overtaken other types of terrorism as a threat to our country, it has not reached a fraction of the record held by the Islamist attack that took place on 9/11. With God’s help, and the vigilance and hard work of the Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies, I hope it never will.

As DHS Acting Director Chad Wolf said in another October 6, 2020 tweet, these terrorists are “lone offenders and small cells of individuals.” For many people, however, Biden’s words created the impression that these individuals and small groups are increasing exponentially, posing an imminent threat to vast numbers of Americans. And without naming the pool of people from which these terrorists are being drawn, the unstated implication is they are members of the Republican party -- the party of Lincoln, the anti-slavery party, the party that, rather than divide the nation, struggled to keep it together.

Earlier in his career, Biden said of his plagiarism, “my intent was not to deceive anyone, for if it were, I would not have been so blatant.” As his recent statement about “the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today” was so subtly misleading -- a case of not placing the information within context as opposed to a blatant lie -- one can reasonably extrapolate that his intention this time was, in fact, to deceive. It’s horrific that, in a Speech to the Joint Sessions of Congress, an American President should deliver a message purposefully designed to promote suspicion and encourage division among Americans. It appears that Democrats are unable, or perhaps unwilling, to see what the current President, a man for whom they voted, is doing.

This article has been edited to correct a typo that had Biden running for president in 1998, rather than 1988.

IMAGE: Joe Biden caricature by DonkeyHotey. CC BY 2.0.

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