Democrats had planned to run in 2020 on the Russia collusion ghost, but now that it’s off the table and the economy continues at full employment, they decided to manufacture a crisis. (Hmm, where have we heard that phrase before?)
Speaking in Iowa on Wednesday, former Vice President Joe Biden said President Trump “has fanned the flames of white supremacy in the nation.” Beto O’Rourke said on MSNBC that Trump has made it “very clear” that he’s a white supremacist. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Trump “has given aid and comfort to white supremacists.” Last Sunday, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said on CNN that “all evidence” suggests Trump is “trying to appeal to white nationalism.”
It’s supposedly “very clear” that Trump is a white supremacist because nearly two dozen people were shot dead in an El Paso Walmart by a man who apparently believed that Hispanics were being imported to replace whites. In what is reported to have possibly been the shooter’s online “manifesto,” he referred to an “invasion” of immigrants, a word that Trump has used to described the hundreds of thousands of Central Americans pouring in to Texas. (The manifesto also uses the terms “the” and “because,” which Trump has also been known to employ at times.)
Democrats and most subsequent reporting on the shooting have taken to excluding the part of the “manifesto” where the author said his planned shooting had nothing to do with Trump and that his views predate the 2016 campaign. But even putting that aside, the hysteria over the supposed rise of white supremacy is laughable.
As detailed in my forthcoming book Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People, the myth about rampant “white supremacy” and “far-right extremism” under President Trump is entirely fabricated by the national media.
One of the national media’s favorite studies to cite when they feel like scaring people about the mythical wave of white supremacy is the Anti-Defamation League’s January 2019 report on “Murder and Extremism” in the U.S. “Almost all of the 2018 extremist-related murders were committed by right-wing extremists,” the report says, further noting that of the total deaths that year, 78% were committed by white supremacists.
Wow, that sounds like a lot! Guess how many total “extremist”-related deaths there were in 2018, according to the report: a grand total of 50. Among those 50 were several described as “white supremacy”-related even when the victim was white, or even if the victim was killed for reasons that explicitly had nothing to do with race at all.
Included in the ADL report is the case of Virginia man Roger Melvin Tackett, who in May 2018 was charged with “fatally shooting an acquaintance following a dispute.” The “acquaintance” was Bruce Douglas Ferguson, a white man. Why did the ADL consider the attack to be motivated by white supremacy despite no evidence of it having to do with race? Because, the report says, “Tackett has multiple white supremacist tattoos.”
Also included under a “white supremacy”-related incident was the murder of 67-year-old Stephen Morris of Washington, who had his throat slashed and his things stolen by Jeremy Shaw and his wife. I can’t find a photo of Morris to see what race he is, but regardless, there’s no indication he was killed for that reason. Shaw and his wife had been plotting for weeks to take possession of Morris’ home in a weird property ownership scheme. That’s why they killed him. So why did the ADL say it was motivated by white supremacy? Because police found “a number of Nazi and white supremacist-themed items” belonging to Shaw in the married couple’s home.
The ADL study was cooked. So was the 2017 Government Accountability Office report on “countering violent extremism.” It counted the same kind of ridiculous scenarios as “white supremacy” related, with entries like “White supremacist murdered bisexual man” in 2002 and “Neo-Nazi killed sex-offender priest” and “Six white supremacist inmates beat another prisoner to death.” The races of the victims are rarely provided by the report and the motives are entirely unclear. But it must be white supremacy!
Hysterical alarmist New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned Wednesday on Twitter of “all of America’s men and women falling in the grips of hatred and white supremacy.”
She needs to give it a rest. Out of a country of 320 million people, the ADL estimates that less than 50 people were killed last year by white supremacists, and even their own data make it clear that many of those murders had nothing to do with race.
One mass shooting is not a sign that millions of Americans are “falling in the grips of hatred and white supremacy.” Democrats are trying to scare voters because they lost their other campaign issues.
