by Adam Mill
Led by the queen bee New York Times, where the woke clichés are endless, the hive of drone-level leftists in the media and the Democratic Party are easily pivoting from the Russian collusion hoax to the next one: “white supremacism!”
As normal people try to evaluate this latest round of charges, it’s worth remembering one critical and universal characteristic shared by genuine white supremacists: They proudly proclaim their beliefs; they aren’t shy about them.
A political enemy should never be deemed a reliable authority about whether his opponent subscribes to noxious bigotry. One can hardly claim that Elizabeth Warren (to give just one example) is speaking from personal knowledge when she assigns the president the “white supremacist” label. Warren has a bad track record as an honest broker of race issues. She famously and unsuccessfully sought to enlist Native American outrage over Trump nicknaming her “Pocahontas,” as he jeered at her false claims of Cherokee ancestry.
It doesn’t matter that the president repeatedly has condemned political violence and racism. The Left and the media repeatedly twist and distort his words into vile racial epithets. Consider the common mischaracterization of his remarks at Charlottesville where the media is relentless in insisting that the “very fine” people Trump acknowledged there were the Neo-Nazis, people he explicitly condemned. The whole “very fine people” hoax has been debunked thoroughly.
Recall, too, that Trump allegedly told members of Congress to “go back to where they came from.” In truth, he merely (and sarcastically) told them to share their supposed good policy ideas with the governments of their countries of origin—not that they should leave the U.S. permanently. He specifically added that they should “come back and show us how it is done.”
And don’t forget that Trump is supposed to have made a “racist” attack against the residents of Baltimore by pointing out (accurately) their city has a rat infestation problem. It’s racist, too, we’re told, to refer to the massive influx of illegal immigrants into the United States as an “invasion” but this is not an incorrect term for the illegal border crossing of a large group of people seeking to resettle permanently.
Desperation to “hear” Donald Trump say white supremacist things led MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi to interpret a presidential proclamation as a secret message to Nazis. “The president said that we will fly our flags at half-mast until August 8. That’s 8/8. . . .The numbers ‘88’ are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movement. Why? Because the letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet and, to them, the numbers ‘88’ together stand for ‘Heil Hitler.’”
But a funny thing happened on the way to the outrage party at which privileged (often white) elites demand racial minorities join their condemnation of presidential “racism, bigotry, and xenophobia!” These calls have been met with eye-rolling, not applause.
Political Correctness Hurts the Country
For some time now, Americans have been concerned about the role political correctness plays in fomenting divisions within America. Political correctness has many definitions. But Americans increasingly see it as the art of contorting every conversation into a reason to be offended. Donald Trump is a magnet for P.C. outrage and this latest effort to interpret everything he says as a secret message to white supremacists is the “going nuclear” of the politically correct.
The study “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” quoted one of the liberal respondents, “I have liberal views but I think political correctness has gone too far, absolutely. We have gotten to a point where everybody is offended by the smallest thing.” Jamal, one of the African-American respondents, expressed dislike for the way people are defined by labels, and he resists defining himself in terms of race or gender.
As Reason magazine noted, 80 percent of Americans in general believe political correctness is harmful to our country. Surprisingly, these numbers are even higher among non-whites. The Atlantic, meantime, found that 82 percent of Asians, 87 percent of Hispanics, and 88 percent of Native Americans perceive political correctness as a problem. Three-quarters of African Americans also oppose political correctness.
Perhaps the most shocking and surprising result may be found in a recent Zogby poll finding a whopping 49 percent of Hispanics approve of the job Trump is doing. A subhead in the Zogby poll reads, “Trump is winning urban voters and has record support with African Americans.”
How is it possible that an alleged white supremacist president could draw “record support” from African Americans? It’s a strong indication that the Left’s effort to paint the president as a racist is failing. While these results may seem totally counterintuitive to those drunk on the nectar of the popular narrative, the results should not be a surprise when one considers the impact of unrestricted immigration on these communities.
For the first time in decades, America’s historically under-employed are seeing unemployment decrease to a point where wages are rising. The most direct threat to the upward-trend of wage growth, of course, is unrestricted admission of new workers competing for those same jobs. Trump’s efforts to protect these wage gains by limiting immigration has a considerable impact on the elites who depend on cheap labor to sustain their lifestyle. Perhaps it’s why cries of “racism” by these elites do not seem to resonate outside their own circles.
Cheapening the Currency
Consider another possibility: Americans often date, marry, and have children outside their race. As workplaces become increasingly integrated, fealty to the cult of racial victimization can present obstacles to healthy interracial personal and workplace relationships from which everyone benefits.
Maybe most Americans of all races just want to get along and do business with each other. As the “Hidden Tribes” study indicates, “[83] percent of Traditional Conservatives and 79 percent of Devoted Conservatives say they have generally warm feelings toward African Americans, and 82 percent of Devoted Conservatives and 88 percent of Traditional Conservatives report warm feelings toward Hispanic Americans.” The Left’s demagoguery does not match the day-to-day experiences different races have with each other.
The abuse of the terms “racist” and “white supremacist” could have lasting unintended consequences, not only for our ongoing unity as a country but also on our ability to challenge real racism in our midst.
For years, Jews have fought casual comparisons to Hitler or the holocaust in political debate because of the corrosive and desensitizing effect it has on the historical lessons we must learn from that period. This is because they correctly feared the “boy who cried wolf” effect as politicians cravenly exploited this painful history to bludgeon their enemies. Real opponents to racism and white supremacy should be appalled by the Left’s desperate attempt to take down the president as it trivializes the terms.
Racial demagoguery is a frightful evil in a democracy regardless of whether it originates on the left or right. It divides citizens and invites violence. One hopes that our American elites will someday follow the example of the governed who have learned to love each other regardless of race.
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Adam Mill is a pen name. He works in Kansas City, Missouri as an attorney specializing in labor and employment and public administration law. Adam graduated from the University of Kansas and has been admitted to practice in Kansas and Missouri. Adam has contributed to the Federalist, American Greatness, and the Daily Caller. Adam’s greatest pride is his 12-year-old son, who shares a love of deep political discussion and hiking in the alpine as often as possible. Adam believes that individual liberty is both the means of obtaining and purpose of collective greatness. Adam may be reached at [email protected]. He is not accepting new clients or consulting arrangements.
Photo “Black Trump Supporter” by Johnny Silvercloud. CC BY-SA 2.0.
