Searching for White Supremacists on the Moon: How the Democrats’ New Moral Panic Could Backfire

In light of President Biden’s first joint address to Congress and continued commitment to the Jan. 6 commission, it has now become abundantly clear that the Democrats are adopting the playbook of the woke (or regressive) left. Unlike the old left, which was more concerned with workers’ rights and ending discriminatory policies, the woke-regressives—born in academia but not remaining there—are obsessed with radical identity politics, which means they need to find evidence of racism and sexism everywhere. Keeping this in mind, it should come as no surprise that during the joint address, Joe Biden named “white supremacy” as “the most lethal terrorist threat” facing the United States today.

The obvious problem with President Biden’s claim is that actual white supremacists (i.e., people who believe whites are superior and thus should dominate other groups) are a statistical aberration in the U.S. That doesn’t mean they can’t still be a threat, but the fact remains that when they do organize in public, their crowds are as diminutive as you’d see at a Backstreet Boys reunion show. While the now-infamous “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 attracted around 500-600 supporters (.00018% of the U.S. population), the reunion in 2018 only saw around 20 attendees. Furthermore, it should be noted that during both years in question, the white supremacists were far outnumbered by counter-protestors.

It appears, then, as if the white supremacists have been pushed back into their mothers’ basements. But we can never let the truth get in the way of a good narrative! If you can’t actually find a substantial number of white supremacists, just create more by expanding the definition and actively employing rhetoric that pushes centrists further to the right. I like to call this the “everyone I disagree with is a Nazi” strategy. It has been a tactic of woke cancel mobs within and without higher education for many years now, and it is finally being mainstreamed by the candidate who was sold to Americans as both a moderate and a unifier.

Step one of this strategy involves stretching the meaning of a word or category so far that it can easily subsume any and all dissidents. This step was brilliantly mastered by the likes of Robin DiAngelo, who claims that all white people are inherently racist because they are complicit in a system that produces disparate outcomes between races. If you aren’t actively working to dismantle such a system, you’re a racist. And if you are a dissident voice who challenges such an insane claim, you might even be a white supremacist or a gateway to the alt-right.

This is how figures such as Ben Shapiro and Christina Hoff Sommers got labeled fascists and white supremacists, despite their Jewish heritage. This is why Antifa thought it would be a good idea to shut downan “Ending Racism” event in New Jersey, where Daryl Davis (a black man who deradicalized KKK members) was scheduled to speak with some libertarians. This is why the city of Boston, at the behest of BLM rioters, removed a statue of Abraham Lincoln. No one is safe from the “everyone I disagree with is a Nazi” strategy, and the Democrats are now using it to label anyone who attended the January 6th protests as a possible white supremacist.

As if stoking satanic panic-level paranoia about white supremacy wasn’t bad enough, the Democrats are also ramping up their divisive rhetoric—which will inevitably drive moderates away from the left and exacerbate reactionary white identity politics. This is why the Biden administration’s recent push to reintroduce Critical Race Theory (CRT)—another product of academe—in both classrooms and in the federal government will inevitably backfire. Shaming whites and teaching them that they are uniquely flawed and responsible for the sins of their ancestors—that their very culture and racial identity need to be abolished—will only create more division and dissent. There has already been significant pushback against the teaching of CRT in schools, and MSNBC’s Joy Reid quickly denounced these concerned parents as racists.

But if you expand the definitions of “racist” and “white supremacist” to include anyone who disagrees with woke-regressive ideology, all those centrists who move away from the left or dare challenge its orthodoxy will now become prime suspects in the Democrats’ new witch hunt. Some will, of course, be shamed into silence, but others will be pushed into the dark corners of the internet, where they eventually find some common ground with what remains of the actual alt-right. This phenomenon is perhaps best described in Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies (2017), and I find it hard to believe that none of Biden’s handlers are aware of how their strategy could exacerbate the very problem they claim to be fighting.

With rumors suggesting the Democrats may be outsourcing domestic surveillance to private companies, the “everyone I disagree with is a Nazi” strategy could result in the largest moral panic since the Red Scare. Don’t be surprised when they claim to have found a secret colony of white supremacists hiding in Antarctica or on the moon. In time, the term “white supremacist” might even come to include any person who thinks African Americans still need help from their predominantly white government. This may come as a surprise, but some critical whiteness scholars and “anti-racist” gurus already consider paternalism and white saviorism to be parts of “white supremacy culture,” so don’t be appalled when they come knocking at Nancy Pelosi’s door before it’s all over with.

All joking aside, racism and white supremacy should be taken very seriously, and for that reason, the Democrats should be more careful with how they define these terms and who they allow to conduct their surveillance. Unfortunately, the word “racist” has already been stretched to the point of no return, thanks in no small part to the academy, but hopefully the meaning of white supremacy, as well as the threat posed by it, can remain grounded in reality.

Image: History in HD, Public Domain