Stop making me do what I was already going to do anyway
By 
I doubt it will work, but the latest attempt to EMAILS! up a horserace involve trying to tie Joe Biden to ANTIFA violence, which keeps running into the inconvenient problems that 1)Biden keeps unequivocally criticizing it and 2)ANTIFA doesn’t support Biden. Nonetheless, if you’re Bret Stephens the bad faith necessary to evade these problems isn’t even a challenge:
On Thursday, as Donald Trump was about to accept the Republican nomination from the South Lawn of the White House with warnings that “No one will be safe in Biden’s America,” National Public Radio was doing its small part to make sure the president would be re-elected.
NPR’s assistance in this matter was surely unwitting. But that doesn’t make it any less effective.
The assist came in the form of a lengthy interview by NPR’s Natalie Escobar with Vicky Osterweil, author of “In Defense of Looting.” The book makes the case for looting because it “attacks some of the core beliefs and structures of cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist society”; “rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property”; and “reveals all these for what they are: not natural facts, but social constructs benefiting a few at the expense of the many, upheld by ideology, economy and state violence.”
To judge by the NPR interview, “In Defense of Looting” is not an interesting book. It speaks for almost nobody beyond the fringe left — and certainly not for looters who hadn’t thought about “cisheteropatriarchalism.” The fact that the publisher is an imprint of the international conglomerate Hachette (2018 revenues, approximately $2.7 billion) compounds foolishness with hypocrisy.
Nonetheless, the book is symbolically important. I became aware of it when several friends separately forwarded to me the NPR interview. Many of these friends, I suspect, will reluctantly vote for Trump — not out of sympathy for him, but out of disgust with defenses of looting and other things they see too often on the left.
To state the obvious, nobody who claims to be so upset about an obscure scholar being interviewed on NPR and expressing views different than Joe Biden’s that they can “no longer” support Biden was ever not voting for Trump, under any circumstances. I mean, you can nut-pick your way to justifying your Trumpism if you like, but you’re no different than the guy who’s had MAGA stickers all over his coal roller for 4 years.
Stephens does feel the need to deal with the fact that Biden has criticized violent protest, and does so with a bad faith that will be familiar to anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account:
I’ve been fairly enthusiastic about Biden’s candidacy, largely because I think he represents the best chance for the moderate Democratic wing to prevail over its left one. But his wan and sometimes unsteady speech in Pittsburgh, with its brief defense of the police and its anodyne call for healing, isn’t going to assuage the voters he needs in swing states.
Ah, yes, the old “he is supporting the positions I want him to support, but not in the right way” routine. It works from any nominal ideological position:
“Why don’t the Dems support the end of cash bail.”
“Biden explicitly supports the abolition of cash bail, and indeed it’s been a signature issue of his running mate.”
“He doesn’t oppose it using the right arbitrary magic words.”
Nobody who does this dance can be persuaded to support your candidate. They have not, in fact, got any cheese here at all. Not a scrap. They’re deliberately wasting your time.