"The anti-fascist protesters known as antifa have committed violent acts but aren’t known to have ever killed anyone, while right-wing extremists have killed hundreds." He substantiates that claim by quoting from the Center for Strategic & International Studies: "Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020."
Also from Kristof:
"Trump and his proxies used the G.O.P. convention to defame Democratic-run parts of America as caldrons of violence. In fact, the single state with the highest rate of violent crime is Alaska, a red state with Republican leaders. The state with the lowest violent crime is Maine, a swing state that currently has a Democratic governor."
And:
"'Don’t let Democrats do to America what they’ve done to New York,' Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, pleaded in his convention speech. Hmm. Let’s just note that there were 319 murders in New York City last year under Democratic leadership; when Giuliani was mayor, the lowest annual total was 649, under a police commissioner who later went to prison."
Finally:
"This is an old game that the Trump campaign is playing," said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard scholar and co-author of How Democracies Die. "It is out of the authoritarian’s playbook."
***
But the Washington Post's media correspondent, Margaret Sullivan, recalls that "scholars have observed [that] calling out falsehoods forcefully may actually cause people to hold tighter to their beliefs. That’s the 'backfire effect' that academics Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler wrote about in their study "When Corrections Fail" about the persistence of political misperceptions."
That's what makes attacks such as the "swift-boating" of John Kerry in 2004 so effective, even if he did unwisely stall his counterattacks. Still, the mainstream media and commentators' corrections of all the swift-boating lies only intensified the Kerry-haters' "ideologically grounded factual beliefs," and persuaded not a few non-ideologues.
Straight out of the "authoritarian's playbook," Trump is attempting the same in a fusillade of malicious falsehoods about Joe Biden. The lies are so extreme and equally absurd, most Americans find them laughable. Yet the president isn't trying to persuade or intensify the preexisting hatred of most Americans — only a winning percentage of intellectually stunted voters among all those who "bother" to vote, which means the exhausting, herculean act of dropping a completed ballot into their daily mail.