“Are you now or have you ever been a ‘white supremacist’?”
The spirit of Tailgunner Joe lives on.
This article came out the other day, demanding that white people “speak out against White Supremacy”.
OK. White Supremacy sucks.
Now what?
There are indeed “white supremacists” out there. Like all racial supremacists – Nazis, Hutu, HAMAS, the Japanese of the 1930s – they believe something that is deeply, intensely evil. Every rational person of all races has condemned them for over a century.
And the objective record shows that that condemnation has had an effect. The number of people in “white supremacist” groups has been dropping by roughly an order of magnitude every generation. In the 1920s, there were several million members; the Klan drew 50K to a rally in Rochester, MN. In the 1940s, the American neo-Nazi “Bund” party filled a couple nights at Madison Square Garden.
By the time of the Civil Rights movement, membership had dropped to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands; by the 80s and 90s, a few tens of thousands (some of whom were exceptionally militant). According to the FBI, organized white supremacist groups mustered under 5,000 members in the 2010s.
In 1988, a Gallup poll showed that 1/3 of black Americans believed racism was to one degree or another a powerful force. In 1992, William Raspberry, a man who grew up under Jim Crow in Mississippi, covered the Civil Rights movement, and became the first black national syndicated news columnist, wrote a column (that, coming out as it did juuust before everything in the world got put online, has proven to be impossible to unearth) that racism wasn’t dead, per se, but was the province of the stupid and ignorant, and should be mocked and taunted, akin to the moral flat earthers they were. [1]
Suddenly, in the late 2000s, after the election of the first black president, the political class discovered racism again. The Obama Administration spent its entire time in office warning that a “white supremacist wave of terror that would dwarf 9/11” was on the way, yessirreebob. Obama’s handling of several police shooting incidents in the early 2010s could have hardly been better designed to stoke racial division – it’s what the approach was designed to do.
By 2015, that same Gallup poll showed 2/3 of black Americans felt racism was a dominant fact in their lives – doubling in 27 years.
Did America get more racist between the LA riots and the election of Barack Obama?
More on point – did more racists fall out of the trees in 2017? Or is it suddenly in the interest of the political class’s narrative to not only focus on a tiny class of deviants, but to try to create more of them, so they could have a boogieman to wave around to scare the ignorant into line?
Is there a story that our political class’s dominant narrative doesn’t try to squeeze a “white supremacist” into? Governor Klink and Mayor Frey and the Strib all preposterously blamed “white supremacists” for the rioting after the murder of George Floyd; the Strib fingered the infamous “Umbrella Man” – who disappeared without a trace. MPR reporter Jon Collins famously sent out a tweet asking – fairly begging – for any evidence of white supremacist involvement in the riots; his record of stories over the past two years shows no follow-up on that tweet (Collins has ignored questions – as, indeed, all MPR reporters do, these days. It’s official policy. I have the email). Several government “stings” of “white supremacist terrorists” (remember the “Hutaree”? The “plot” to “kidnap” Governor Whitmer?) came and, when shown to have been government shake and bake operations, went.
And today – after a retrograde idiot shot ten people (whom, he gleefully noted in his manifesto, could not effectively resist him, due to New York gun control laws), the WaPo op-ed writer Michelle Norris says all white people are accountable for “white supremacy”.
Of course, when people like Norris say white people should “speak out” against something, they don’t want speaking out; they want silent acquiescence.
If you read the article – I did so you don’t have to, but go for it anyway – she harps on the notion that the shooter was driven by fear of the “Great Replacement Theory”, or GRT. GRT, Norris notes, is the idea that white conservatives believe that there’s a plan to replace white voters with voters “of color”.
And of course, there’s no such plan, and you’re a racist to think so.
Except that our dominant political class was celebrating the idea, before they started telling us that not only is there no such thing, but you’re racist for thinking it exists at all:
Which is, of course, the political class’s MO these days; promote something radical and utterly fractious – CRT, Schools primacy over parents, election integrity, third trimester abortion, gun control, the Disinformation Bureau – and then cry “That doesn’t EXIST, and you’re being paranoid” when called on it.
So – why are “white supremacists” suddenly everywhere?
Because, despite four years of “white supremacy is everywhere – who are you gonna believe, us, or your lying eyes?”, more black and latino voters pulled the level for Donald Trump than any Republican in sixty years – because, notwithstanding all the alarmism about “white supremacy”, their lives got better. After four years of hearing Trump’s border policy called “Racist” and “White Supremacist”, Latinos – who favor a tough border policy at levels that make white Republicans look like Oberlin humanities sophomores – voted for Trump at levels Republicans may have never seen. And the ever-more-extreme Democratic party is running with one of the worst two year records in memory; stagflation, collapse in Afghanistan, Covid not eradicated, five dollar gas, no baby formula, a looming recession and Europe at war – they’ve got to convince the black and latino parts of their base that if they don’t vote Democrat, there are going to be guys in pointy white hoods and swastikas parading down their streets.
So let’s cut the crap; articles like this aren’t about people “speaking out” – literally everyone that matters has been speaking out against “white supremacy” for a century, now. They’re like the “Ninety Seconds of Hate” from Orwell’s “1984”, they’re about ensuring people are reacting to stimuli with sufficient zeal, and shaming or removing those that don’t parrot the chanting points on cue.
Holding entire racial groups accountable for the behavior of their most aberrant members is exactly the same sort of evil that brought us “white supremacy”, and every other race-based evil of this wretched past century.
[1] Raspberry – a center-leftist straight out of the 1980s, would be cast out of today’s hard left for writing things like this and this. Indeed, you see some leftist columnists labeling Raspberry a “conservative”, which I’m sure would have amused him, were he around to defend himself; he died in 2012.
