Speaking in Tulsa this afternoon, Old White Joe declared: “Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today.” You know what they say about the Big Lie: it gains acceptance through relentless repetition. That’s certainly what’s happening with the claim that “white supremacy” is the biggest terror threat the nation faces today.
A bit of reality: It wasn’t “white supremacists” who rioted all last summer in Portland, Seattle, Kenosha, Wisconsin, New York, Atlanta, Washington, DC, and numerous other cities that I have already forgotten, and who are still at it in Portland, and casting a long shadow over the entire nation, with the strong hint that violence will ensue after any racial injustice, however exaggerated, misrepresented, or fabricated. The ones casting that long shadow are not “white supremacists” but Leftists: antifa and Black Lives Matter.
When Biden talks about “white supremacy,” what he really means are ordinary citizens who oppose the dominant political philosophy. Lies like what Biden is spreading here are in service of solidifying the hegemony of that philosophy.
Whoever wrote this arrant and divisive agitprop for Biden is echoing a common line on the Left these days. Former New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton told Shepard Smith recently that “for the last 20 years our biggest concern was international terrorism — ISIS, Al Qaeda,” but “now it’s here and it’s us, and it’s the citizens of the United States, some of whom are rebelling against everything we thought we believed in for the last 300 to 400 years.” (Apparently Bratton subscribes to the 1619 Project, which dates America’s founding not from 1776, but from 1619, so as to add on 150 extra years of slavery and oppression.)
Former FBI director James Comey has also repeated this nonsense. Asked by a British broadcaster if he thought “far-right extremism in the US” was “a greater danger to the country than Islamist terrorism,” Comey answered in the affirmative, and added: “The threat has slowly risen as Donald Trump and those around him have withdrawn the control rods. America has always had a radioactive stew of racist conspiracy-minded misogynist people oriented towards violence. We’ve always had that in this country. But we’ve managed over generations to contain it inside a containment building as you would with a nuclear waste pile and put control rods down into it which were cultural. And that calmed the radiation. And over the last five years Donald Trump and those around him have pulled the rods out with signals and dog whistles and sometimes explicitly.”
A former Homeland Security Department counterterrorism official, Nate Snyder, likewise also affirmed that the biggest terror threat the nation faces today comes from “violent white supremacists, neo-Nazis, sovereign citizens, militia movements.”
Yeah, sure, Nate. We remember “white supremacists” rioting and burning down cities all over the country. We remember all those “white supremacist” terror attacks.
The real terrorists only get mentioned to claim that the “white supremacists” are even more dangerous. Last September, the far-Left hate site Raw Story took the opportunity of the 19th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 jihad terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people to advance the claim that nowadays, the foremost threat the nation faces is not from jihadis, but from – of course – “far-right white supremacists who love Trump.” It’s as predictable as it is absurd.
The Raw Story piece, written by Alex Henderson and picked up from the even loonier AlterNet, claimed that “although the 9/11 terrorist attacks underscored the dangerous fanaticism of far-right Islamist groups, countless Republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump have ignored or downplayed another terrorist threat from the far right — white supremacy and white nationalism — and that threat is alive and well in the Trump era.”
Henderson’s claim wasn’t original, either. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu), in a 2018 interview, fed the fires of the “white supremacist terror” hysteria when she asserted that “our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country.” Omar also offered a ready solution: “Profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.”
Sure. Because there are a lot of radicalized white men. They’re virtually all in Antifa, but who cares about the details?
As ubiquitous as this propaganda is, insistent repetitions of Big Lies don’t make them true – even when they’re repeated by Old Joe himself. The Leftist propaganda demonizing all opponents of the Left’s agenda as “white supremacists,” and painting those “white supremacists” as some massive threat, is especially insistent these days. And the propaganda is a prelude to action.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member