Joe Biden has long had a penchant for taking the low road. For instance, think about the 2012 speech in which he, by way of attempting to demonize Paul Ryan's budget proposal and Mitt Romney's support of it, took a protectionist stance ("We're going to give a tax break to any company that unbolts their factory stuff and brings it back to Danville") that, ironically, later became a core element of Trump's economic "policy" and further gave it a Trumpist flavor by demonizing Wall Street and then letting loose with the big line clearly aimed at those in the audience who happened to be black that has followed him through the years:
Romney wants to let the — he said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.
He's still at it.
In his recent commencement address to Howard University graduates, he claimed, with a straight face, that white supremacy was the country's most dangerous domestic terrorist threat.
Wilfred Reilly, writing at National Review, makes clear that this is a lot of disingenuous divisiveness uttered solely to burnish his identity-politics boon fides:
. . . according to the centrist and well-respected Center for Strategic and International Studies, the average number of annual deaths caused by all American-based terrorists between 2014 and 2021 was 31.
Even this represents a jump from the period between 1995’s Oklahoma City bombing and 2013, during which the domestic terror toll topped eight only twice. Saying that white supremacists are the biggest “home front” threat means in practice that all of them combined kill perhaps 20 American citizens annually, versus a toll of maybe ten for antifa/black bloc, the “Not F***ing Around Coalition,” and the like. CSIS records 38 white-supremacist and “like-minded” terror attacks in the fairly typical year of 2021, versus 31 for “anarchists” and so-called anti-fascists.
Let’s put this in more context. Obviously, almost all serious terrorist groups are international in range, and very many are specifically Islamic — the stereotype of the Arab terrorist has been around for decades and didn’t come from nowhere. At present, al-Qaeda, the group responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks, has cells worldwide and controls a considerable amount of territory in Mali, Somalia, and Yemen. ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is based in those troubled nations where once Eden lay. New player Boko Haram is Nigerian and in practice controls much of the northeast of that rising Motherland power.
Obviously, none of these truly major terror organizations — some of which, in practice, come frighteningly close to being unrecognized nations — qualifies as a U.S. domestic actor. And, speaking frankly, terrorism overall is probably no longer a top-five security threat to the United States — when compared with the rapid rise of China, the opiate and fentanyl epidemic (which killed 110,000 Americans last year), surging crime(murders hit 20,000 annually back in 2020), and so forth.
So, why the national-level focus on the rather niche problem of white supremacy — on 20 deaths per year as vs. 20,000? I sincerely think it’s because what some see as white conservative perfidy can safely be targeted in modern America, with little fear of “cancellation” or political backlash, at least from the Left. Since the civil-rights era of the 1960s, working-poor white Yanks have been very much cemented into liberal mythos as an enemy group: the whey-faced, dirty-handed rioters screaming abuse at sainted MLK. And, unlike other groups that may sometimes be unpopular — “hood” black dudes, “slut-walking” feminists, Muslim Islamists, the over-the-top Pride partiers we’ll all see in a month — they form a population that can generally be attacked without significant social risk. They are the Default Villains of the Prevailing Narrative.
This reality helps explain a phenomenon that is facially baffling to my Asian and West African friends: the constant near-beatification of unsympathetic black criminals killed during violent conflicts with whites or the police. My recent column on this topic discusses this phenomenon in the context of the death of Jordan Neely, a vagrant with 42 previous criminal arrests who was tragically killed during an incident on a New York City subway train. However, the trend dates back more than a decade, encompassing the cases of Jacob Blake, Alton Sterling, Michael Brown, and dozens more.
On the surface, objectively, this pattern is genuinely hard for many citizens to understand. Any death or serious injury is unfortunate, to be sure. But most or all of the deaths just listed seem legally justified. Jacob Blake, for example, had been accused of sexual assault and returned to the home of his purported victim despite her protests (the charge was later dropped). He was non-fatally shot by police after he fought them for several minutes. For his part, Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown, was cleared of any wrongdoing on self-defense grounds by multiple agencies — including the Obama Justice Department.
Even if you disagree with applying the word “justified” on some case-by-case basis, it remains fair to ask why such a hysterical level of mourning invariably erupts around what empirically are unremarkable local crime stories. Frenetic national media coverage of the Blake shooting, recall, helped kick off the Kenosha riots, which made Kyle Rittenhouse a household name. Objectively speaking, why should George Floyd — and not, say, hero cop David Dorn — be buried in a golden casket after four televised funerals? Why are there statues of Floyd in several cities?
The answer is that certain deaths and harms feed into a preexisting narrative: that the United States of 2023 is a white-supremacist country, where the political Left continues to struggle alone against this entrenched evil, and where those killed by the “white power structure” should be presumed to be heroes or at least martyrs. Biden, by searching out some technical category within which he could call white supremacy our greatest national foe, served this self-same narrative during his Howard speech.
The big problem here, bluntly, is that the story line Mr. Biden just promoted on the national stage has been false for decades. Per the proud HBCU faculty of Tuskegee Institute, the last recorded U.S. lynchings took place in 1964. Violent crime involving both blacks and whites is today just 3 percent of all serious “Index” crime . . . and it slants 80–90 percent black on white. What of the police “genocide” we keep hearing about, from presumably serious people? Well, in the most recent year on record, the total number of unarmed black men killed by on-duty U.S. law-enforcement officers was twelve.
The country would be better off if the president spent the rest of his term just being a doddering empty suit and lay off the activist schtick. We'd be less inclined to base policy on lies.
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