Biden

America “must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured” and it is the duty of all of us to “defend the truth and defeat the lies,” said president Joe Biden in his powerful inauguration speech.

The president has his work cut out. He succeeded the liar-in-chief who amassed 30,573 false and misleading claims during his four years in office.

Biden will have to take on the Republican Sedition Caucus, the 147 Members of Congress, who voted to overturn the presidential election.

Nicole Malliotakis, who represents Staten Island and a slice of Brooklyn in which I live, is a charter member of that alternate reality-loving Caucus.

She responded to my letter objecting to her vote against certification by claiming there was “an unprecedented number of claims of electoral fraud” that “undermine faith in our election system.”

That's bunk. Those claims came from Donald Trump, the ringmaster of the voter fraud circus and his supporters eager to suppress the vote.

Trump based his campaign on charges of electoral fraud to delegitimize and taint a potential victory by Biden.

More than 60 court rulings dismissed the fraud allegations, while the Dept. of Homeland Security determined that the 2020 election was one of the most secure tallies in US history.

In her letter, Malliotakis tries to downplay the impact of her objection to certification.

“In fact, even if every member of Congress voted to object to the certification of Arizona and Pennsylvania’s electors, President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris’s victory would still have been certified with over 270 valid electors behind them,” she wrote.

She misses the point.

By their vote, Malliotakis and the Sedition Caucus enabled Trump’s fiction of a stolen election, which triggered the mob attack on the Capitol.

She voted for the lie that had Members of Congress running for their lives on Jan. 6.

Malliotakis claims to be “appalled by the actions of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. If anything, their actions undermined our peaceful effort to mitigate the concerns of millions across our country regarding electoral fraud.”

The Congresswoman has jumped headfirst into the rabbit hole of truth denial. There was no electoral fraud. The only fraud here is Malliotakis' fraudulent claim.

In the Jan. 17 New York Times Magazine, Yale professor Timothy Snyder wrote: “Members of Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional mission.”

He warned that an elected institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow.

Biden promised that he will always “level” with the American people and that “democracy and hope, truth and justice” won’t die on his watch.

The nation should rally around the president’s mission because as Snyder wrote: “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”

Porter Novelli, in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol by a white supremacist mob, launched a justice, equity, diversity and inclusion unit.

That attack “shed light on the serious and deeply rooted realities of inequity, systemic racism and bias in this country,” according to PN.

The firm’s research shows that more three of four (76 percent) of Americans believe business must recognize its role in systemic racism and about half (48 percent) of workers are considering quitting their jobs because they feel their employer is not doing enough to internally address JEDI.

Good luck with the unit, PN.