Chances that Joe Biden actually wrote these tweets: <1%. Someone who has control of Biden’s Twitter feed after his bedtime tried performing a cleanup on Aisle 78 after the Democratic presidential nominee’s jaw-dropping remarks comparing Latino “diversity” to the lack of such among African-Americans. Note the time stamps on these walkbacks:

Earlier today, I made some comments about diversity in the African American and Latino communities that I want to clarify. In no way did I mean to suggest the African American community is a monolith—not by identity, not on issues, not at all.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 7, 2020

My commitment to you is this: I will always listen, I will never stop fighting for the African American community and I will never stop fighting for a more equitable future.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 7, 2020

Uh-huh. That, um, sounds suspiciously unlike the authentic voice of Joe Biden, especially these days. It sounds more like the authentic voice of crisis-management PR flacks faced with the unpleasant task of undoing a disaster.

There’s another problem with this explanation, and Grabien’s Tom Elliott points it out. Hours after Biden’s first attempt to hail Hispanic diversity by comparing to monolithic thinking by African-Americans, Biden made the exact same argument in a different meeting, emphasis mine:

This is the hill Biden's apparently going to die on. This afternoon he appeared in a virtual roundtable and doubled down on his “Latinos have a more diverse culture than blacks” take pic.twitter.com/j8azhzL5YJ

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 6, 2020

It’s about respect. It’s about honor. It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say, “Honey, everything’s going to be OK.” That’s what we’re going to do. Dignity. Honor. Treating people with dignity. We can build a new administration that reflects the full diversity of our nation, and the full diversity of the Latino communities. Now, when I mean full diversity, unlike African-American community and many other communities, they’re from everywhere — from Europe, from the tip of South America, all the way to our border in Mexico, and in the Caribbean. And different backgrounds, different ethnicities, but all Latinos. Really get a chance to do that, if we win in November.

Ahem. Does Biden not know that Africans have diverse ethnicities too? “Africa” is not a country but a continent, with its own cultures and ethnicities. Even in the US among African-Americans, the communities are diverse based on experiences, both personal and shared. Kamala Harris has a different background than Karen Bass, for instance, as Barack Obama did from John Lewis. That doesn’t mean that commonalities don’t exist too, but it’s absurdly ignorant to laud Latino diversity by comparing it to a mythical single-origin point for black voters. And to do it twice suggests that Biden’s making the Kinsleyan gaffe of mistakenly revealing what he truly thinks about African-Americans, which further calls into question who wrote the tweets after Biden’s night-night time.

Biden’s correct in a way about the path to victory is through “Latinos, especially in battleground states,” but only if one assumes that Biden has monolithic and enthusiastic support from black voters. Biden apparently assumes that, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and she was correct on a percentage basis. She failed to turn them out in the numbers necessary to win in key battleground states, however, while not being nearly as insulting as Biden is here.

This won’t convince African-Americans who planned to vote for Biden to suddenly switch to Donald Trump. It might convince them not to bother voting at all. Again.