Tribalism & The White Supremacist Canard
The claim of a significant white supremacist threat (led by Trump, no less) is the latest cynical canard of a left that seeks to divide the nation into competing tribes.
Over the past weekend In El Paso, a terrorist inspired by many things, including ecology (Mother Jones characterizes the shooter as an “eco-facist”) — but not by Trump — committed a mass shooting, killing twenty and wounding twenty-six. In Dayton, Ohio, a Liewatha-supporting Antifa Satanist committed a mass shooting, killing nine and injuring twenty-seven. And unreported in the national news of the day, in Chicago, a series of murders and shootings injured fifty-two and claimed the life seven. But that was a fairly normal weekend in the Windy City. All or almost all the violence there was committed by inner-city blacks, and almost all of it was committed against inner-city blacks, so the progressive left merely yawned. And what do we hear about in the news but . . . Trump inspires mass murders by white supremacists?
Yes, as Spartacus, Fauxcohantus and Betaboy will tell you:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) joined fellow Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke in describing President Donald Trump as a white supremacist.
The Massachusetts Democrat agreed the president was a racist, and said he had emboldened other white supremacists, in an interview with the New York Times.
Joe “they’re gonna’ put y’all back in chains” Biden, never one to be out demagogued, “on Wednesday blamed President Trump for several high-profile incidents of racial violence in the U.S., accusing the president of inspiring deadly hate crimes by embracing white nationalist extremism.” Democrat Rep. Joaquin Castro doxed contributors to Trump living in his district, saying that they needed to be shamed for being active supporters of white-nationalism and, by extension, now responsible for mass murder led by Trump. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace accused the President of seeking “to exterminate Latinos.” The Washington Examiner rolls up the many examples of how the media has become “unhinged” in their progressive bias over the shootings.
In addition, of course, there are inevitable appeals by the proggie left to repeal the Second Amendment. Never a good idea, that.
Perhaps the best take on this “white supremacist” nonsense comes from Tucker Carlson and Victor Davis Hanson
That segment on the issue sent the left into a bed wetting frenzy, and no one more so than CNN’s Don Lemon:
https://youtu.be/RAQJDhDX-_w
So who is telling the truth. Let’s start with a reality check. The Christopher Ray soundbite certainly sounds ominous. But does what Ray said regarding “domestic terrorism” mean that white supremacist idiots are a large part of a small problem, or does it mean, as the left wants to portray it, it is the dominant problem at root in America today. Let’s go to facts, not generalities or sound bites. Take a look at the mass shooters from so far in 2019 (h/t American Digest).
Given that whites are almost 73% of the population, they seem distinctly underrepresented in that chart. Are you noticing a pattern . . . that on its face isn’t a white supremacist threat? That visual pattern is also reflected in the crime statistics. White privilege is not the problem; white supremacy is not an increasing threat to this nation. According to clinical psychologist Christopher Ferguson writing at FEE, the data does not support any claim of a sudden explosion of white supremacist mass shooting, nor, for that matter, have the number of mass shootings increased over the past several decades.
The problem for the progressive left is that racism is no longer in the mainstream of society (on the right at least), and Donald Trump is leading a prospering administration that is doing more for blacks and Hispanic Americans than Obama or the progressive left ever did.
The whole canard of an overwhelming white supremacist threat is a creation of the left designed to further their baseless race-centric political arguments, nothing more. We are living in the dark fantasy world of the progressive left that black author Coleman Hughes calls “The Racism Treadmill.” The simple reality is, if you are looking to find an actual act of racism against blacks in the news, it will inevitably be on the fringes and the odds are better than two to one that it is a race hoax perpetrated by progressives. Paging Jussie Smollett.
This portrayal of the white supremacist menace as being a huge threat in America is just the latest, and biggest, of all the race hoaxes. It’s been created by people putting their thumb on the scales in what passes for studies in the field. For instance, in a 2017 GAO Report, Countering Violent Extremism, the authors chose a definition of “right wing extremist” so broad that it encompases virtually every conservative in America:
Far right violent extremist[s] . . . are characterized . . . as having beliefs that include some or all of the following:
• Fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation) [Hey, I’m a soldier who loves my country and think that it is, for a host of reasons, the best on the planet. Thus I am a far right violent extremist?];
• Anti-global;
• Suspicious of centralized federal authority;
• Reverent of individual liberty (especially right to own guns; be free of taxes);
• Belief in conspiracy theories that involve a grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty [because concerns about government overreach are without foundation don’t you know];
• Belief that one’s personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack and is either already lost or that the threat is imminent; . . .
That’s outrageous. As Eddy Scarry writes in “The obsession with ‘white supremacy’ violence is based on cooked studies”
. . . [i]t’s all a hoax. Every news story about right-wing violence or “white supremacy”-linked violence is based on the same set of joke studies that count each and every murder involving a supposedly racist white person, no matter how ridiculous the circumstances, as racially motivated.
One of those studies is put out by the Anti-Defamation League every year. Take this one from last year that said 2018 “was a particularly active year for right-wing extremist murders.” It further said that “extremist-related murders in 2018 were overwhelmingly linked to right-wing extremists.”
Unfortunately, the report obscures the most crucial information. It doesn’t list all of the violent incidents that it takes in to account, but even in the few concrete examples that the Anti-Defamation League does provide, you get examples like this: “Richard Starry shot and killed four relatives at a local nursing center and at his home in an apparent act of domestic violence before killing himself. According to local media, Starry had been a member of a white supremacist group while in prison.” Or like this: “James Mathis, a member of the Georgia-based white supremacist prison gang Ghostface Gangsters, and his wife, Amanda Oakes, allegedly killed their six-month-old son and put his body in a freezer in a hotel room.”
So when white people kill their own family members, even their own babies, that’s the kind of “white supremacy”-linked violence the Anti Defamation League is looking at. It’s not a rash of Ku Klux Klan members lynching blacks and Latino immigrants in the streets.
The white supremacist canard is nothing but raw identity politics. It is cynical, and if it ever succeeds, it will mean the fracturing of this nation into tribalism and the end of the American experiment. As Jeff Greenfield explains, we are living now in what Obama deliberately wrought in his second term:
Facing a more challenging political landscape after his original victory, Obama pivoted from universal appeals to racial nationalist rhetoric. “Punish your enemies,” he urged Latinos. Joe Biden told black people that Republicans would “put y’all back in chains.” The racial nationalism became more strident as the political position of the Democrats weakened. Race riots were stirred up from Ferguson to Baltimore. The violence spiraled into mass shootings of police officers and white people.
. . . .
The hate group revival was tapping into polarized racial attitudes. Their growth was not an outlier, but an expression of the deeper sickness of identity politics. Polls showed that perceptions of race relations on both sides had cratered. Politics had become driven by naked appeals to racial interests. America had become a fractured country whose inhabitants identified as members of warring tribes. . . .
And as Greenfield concludes:
Lessons about tolerance, white privilege and racial consciousness don’t end racism. They spread it.
What inhibits racism isn’t leftist politics, it’s nationalism. We are less likely to view each other as the enemy if we are all on the same team. When nationalism declines, then tribes arise. Identity politics is the politics of tribalism. Its group nationalisms are not positive affirmations of a common strength, but negative identifications of a common enemy without and a common weakness within the victim group.
And it’s only natural for warring tribes, taught that they are the victims of oppression, to turn violent.
Nations make war on rival nations. When a nation fractures into rival nations warring with each other, acts of racial terror become commonplace. That is what is happening to the United States of America.
The only way to stop racism is by rebuilding our common purpose as a nation.
Amen.
