Commentary
To the Ruling Class’s communications arm doing business as the corporate media, America is besieged by white bigotry, not a nation that has more successfully integrated diverse peoples into a common culture of liberty and justice than any other in human history. It is imperative to explain away any and all evidence to the contrary. It is also critical to champion one’s political allies in this project, no matter their own potential villainy.
NBC News recently provided a textbook example of such mendacity, and odiousness, while inadvertently undermining the favored Ruling Class narrative of American deplorability.
A recent headline blares: “‘White Lives Matter’ rallies flop as hardly anyone shows up.” You would be forgiven if you were unaware that there was such a thing as White Lives Matter (WLM), let alone that it has planned one or several rallies. Further, you might assume that if said rallies were duds, it would be a non-story.
The sub-headline gets at why NBC believes such a non-story is worthy of coverage: “The poor turnout underscores how the country’s unpopular and disorganized extremist movements have been driven underground.”
One implication is that the radical groups are still there, lurking. They have just been shamed or scared into hiding—presumably just like those who never stormed state capitols on inauguration day, or attacked the U.S. Capitol on multiple occasions thereafter, in spite of the hysterical warnings of impending danger.
But is sheepishness, or fear, really the explanation for these non-events? Or could it be that the likes of “White Lives Matter” barely constitute “movements” at all?
We do not know because Zadrozny, like the media she represents, and political establishment that increasingly seems to share her view, fails to provide evidence to justify her position, about which more momentarily.
In a past era, perhaps there would have been an attempt to create at least a veneer of balance to the editorialization with which NBC leads. But not in today’s America, stuck in the throes of an ongoing anti-cultural revolution. As Zadrozny’s colleague Lester Holt recently declared, “fairness is overrated.” Further, “the idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in.” So as pertains to the WLM beat, the Science is settled: You live in a country surrounded of irredeemable bigots.
This is what we are told notwithstanding the fact that by an authoritative measure of national animus like the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) hate crime statistics, the latest annual figures from 2019 show some 8,812 victims of bias, 4,930 of which suffered from single-bias incidents concerning race/ethnicity/ancestry, in a country of 330 million, where the number of interactions between different peoples are virtually infinite. To put these numbers in perspective, the FBI reported nearly two times as many estimated murders—16,425—as hate crimes in 2019. Victims of all hate crimes, whether classified as concerning one, or multiple biases, represented .00269 percent of the total U.S. population.
Now, what of the perpetrators of these crimes? Of the 6,406 known offenders identified in 2019, 23.9 percent were black or African American, almost two times the 13 percent of the country this population comprises. That is, blacks committed disproportionately more hate crimes than did those of any other race, including whites, who committed 52.5 percent of all hate crimes while comprising 60 percent of the country.
Left-wing putative civil rights groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which Zadrozny cites in her piece, routinely cook the books to inflate the threat of white supremacism in America, while de-emphasizing the threats posed by less politically convenient demographics.
Claims that said supremacism is not overt, but even more insidious, subconscious, and systemic—unseen, but ubiquitous—betray an even weaker case.
It is worth stopping, acknowledging, and appreciating: In a country as large and heterogenous as ours, and in a world rife with hatred, America stands as a uniquely and exceptionally harmonious, decent, and tolerant place—in spite of the efforts of the identity politics-obsessed true believers and self-serving cynics, who try and pit us against each other in arguing otherwise.
Nevertheless, their narrative looms over American life because those atop the commanding heights of society increasingly speak in the dialect of the Woke. Our Ruling Class claims we face a massive threat from “white nationalists,” or “right-wing extremists,” or pick-your-adjective group—provided they are not aligned with progressives—demanding a mass of civil liberty-imperiling policies from a domestic war on terror, to pervasive Big Tech censorship, and the conversion of civil society institutions into Maoist bastions. The ambiguity in describing the size, scope, and nature of the threat is seemingly by design. Being imprecise means not having to show your work—never having to prove your case. Imprecision also provides flexibility when it comes to identifying who to target.
But the target is becoming clear. In an era in which the president of the United States champions “equity” over “equality,” “Antiracism” is ascendant. Antiracism divides America into two camps: Racists, and those actively working to implement the most radically racialist of progressive agendas to equalize outcomes. All but the most Woke, can, and may well be, deemed bigots, and branded actual or would-be domestic extremists. You will be made to bend the knee to the Dogma of DiAngelo and Kendi, or you will be hounded out of public life, if not worse.
All of which brings us back to Zadrozny’s “report.” We know that the foregoing is the broader subtext of her piece because she makes sure to link the non-existent White Lives Matter rallies to the Capitol Riot. While the narrative of a murderous armed insurrection has collapsed, the Capitol Riot has remained the primary data point leveraged to target and smear the Ruling Class’s political adversaries—the accelerant for the War on non-progressive Wrongthinkers. That means the tens of millions of Americans who supported President Trump. Zadrozny connects these dots in noting that the non-rallies “were planned on the encrypted app Telegram after many aligned groups were alleged to have taken part in the…storming of the U.S Capitol.”
Instead of making the case that the likes of White Lives Matter and other white supremacist groups comprise large numbers of people, who pose a credible national security threat, and enjoy wide backing in American life, Zadrozny gives away the game of her hackery by using the bulk of her piece ironically to describe how mercifully pathetic and incompetent the individuals are who claim allegiance to these groups, while reporting on their infinitely more powerful opponents—without questioning how and to what extent those powers might be abused.
She notes, without self-awareness, that the WLM rallies were “the first major real-world organizing efforts by white supremacists since 2018.” She speaks of their activities being sabotaged by more sophisticated counter-activists. Quoting an Elon University tracker of online extremism, Megan Squire, she writes of the North Carolina cohort of non-ralliers that:
The online organizers of the…rally were uninformed about state law governing protests, including laws that disallowed firearms…The organizers were also generally inept at using Telegram, where the event was announced, and unable to identify “obvious trolls in their midst.”
The efforts behind Sunday’s rallies were “haphazard and ill-informed,” Squire said. “They’re not sending their best.”
If what Zadrozny says is true, why cover these clowns?
Beyond the political imperative to continue injecting concerns over white supremacy into the national dialogue, the answer appears to be that Zadrozny wants to make a separate case, not about the power of the domestic extremists, but their opposition.
She suggests that the likes of radical and violent Antifa, the media, Big Tech, and law enforcement are all aligned in seeking to silence and chill “extremists”—which again may well be anyone who opposes their agenda, not just the neo-Nazis and skinheads that the charge of white supremacism conjures up, and who Americans universally loathe.
Of Antifa, Zadrozny speaks to their sabotaging the rallies—”Two of the largest Telegram channels dedicated to events in Philadelphia and New York City were shown to be traps created by anti-fascist activists—and turning out in large numbers to counterprotest. She also speaks of their doxing of individuals associated with “far right” and “racist groups”—which she does not define—and which she fails to disclose is an activity she herself has engaged in. Why such modesty? In fact, as Glenn Greenwald has written, Zadrozny is part of a clique of reporters who:
devote the bulk of their “journalism” to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention). These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world’s loudest media companies when they do not.
Is this piece actually an attempt to take a victory lap?
Not surprisingly, Zadrozny also highlights that “Mainstream online platforms where extremists were once welcomed have also tightened their policies about violent extremist content and groups.” In a sister opinion piece on the site, the leader of a group dedicated to pressuring such platforms into deplatforming people touts such efforts.
And Zadrozny speaks to a potential chilling effect of the increasingly chilling prosecutions—which look like political railroadings as the charges fall apart—against those involved in the Capitol Riot.
Ultimately, one is left to ask the question: Should Americans fear more the sorry white supremacists that Zadrozny describes, or a united Antifa—which along with Black Lives Matter did incalculably more damage to American cities across the country over the last year than any other domestic groups, correlating with a massive rise in violent crime—an anti-free speech media colluding with a censorious Big Tech, and a seemingly hyper-politicized law enforcement apparatus?
That actual white supremacists, as Zadrozny’s reporting shows, seem to lack power in this country provides less comfort when one considers that on the other hand stands a Ruling Class bigoted against tens of millions of Americans who dissent from its orthodoxy, and actively working to crush them.
Racial supremacism, or indeed any other kind of supremacism, like all totalitarian ideologies, ought to be, and largely is, rejected in America. But so too ought we to reject illiberalism, the evisceration of our rights, and the shredding of our civil society under the banner of fighting evil—led by Woke activists and weaponized Woke institutions.
Ben Weingarten is a fellow of the Claremont Institute and co-host of the Edmund Burke Foundation’s “The NatCon Squad.” He is the author of “American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party” and is currently working on a book on U.S.–China policy and its transformation under the Trump administration.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
