It is customary on the Left to argue that the main threat to Western Democracies is the cancer of White Supremacy. Biden himself recently asserted as much, proposing the establishment of a commission to investigate the menace of White domestic terrorism.
In response to this charge which I have heard from several of my “liberal” acquaintances, I ask for evidence of this widespread scourge. Of course the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville of 2017 is invariably invoked, the thousands who gathered to question the logic of removing a statue of Southern icon Robert E. Lee all, apparently, being racists who considered Blacks to be little more than animals. Were there White Supremacists of truly despicable values in the crowd? Of course. But were there also thousands who simply wondered why their history was being cancelled because it did not meet the politically correct criteria of the 21st Century? Yes! Trump maintained there were some very fine people amongst the Charlottesville demonstrators and was duly vilified for saying so. But there actually were many there that day simply befuddled to discover that “progressives,” in consort with the instruments of Education, had been vilifying Western Civilization and its history for several decades. It’s complicated, but the notion that White Supremacy poses the chief threat to contemporary Western Civilization is truly, demonstrably absurd!
While the Proud Boys are vilified on the Left as a dangerous collection of racists, the truth is not that simple. Enrique Tarrio, an Afro-Latino, is presently its international chairman. He is both amused and outraged by the notion that his followers, 10 to 20% of whom are members of various racial minorities, are all White Supremacists. Originally founded by Canadian Gavin McInnes to defend Western Civilization against the stupidity of “progressive” cultural relativism, it is in fact defended by Black political scientist Wilfred Reilly of Kentucky State University who sees a distinct difference between White Supremacism and what he calls Western Chauvinism, the defense of Western Cultural Values against others that are decidedly inferior. Of course given the absurd bias of our era, should a few dozen Proud Boys show up in response to the destructive antics of Antifa or BLM, the former will invariably be held responsible for the ensuing violence.
While the members of all of the above apparently feel justified in their acts of “social protest,” none of them are entitled to break the law, though if you are on the Left you no doubt feel differently. And that is the decisive distinction between “liberalism” and the rational perspective represented here. None of the “conservatives” I admire, almost all of whom are disingenuously consigned to the “far-right” by our biased media, would ever consider supporting or giving a voice to those willing to violate the rights of others in the name of their cause, yet the mainstream Left, led on by the simplistic narrative of Marx, teems with those who see such violations as necessary to the achievement of what they have convinced themselves is “social justice.”
The Proud Boys are not a coherent, organized group uniformly given to what can legitimately be defined as a White Supremacist agenda. Those who would defend them point out the irony of the fact that while they are frequently accused of being anti-Semitic, they actually have an Israeli contingent devoted to the defense of Western values in the Middle East. And yet, as Bill O’ Reilly admitted in a recent Fox telecast, there were amongst the thugs who invaded the Capitol several who were either members of the Proud Boys or of other White militaristic groups. While absolutely condemning them, his question was whether their presence was indicative of some widespread Neo-Nazi uprising simmering beneath the surface of the American “liberal” mainstream or if the very suggestion was an exaggeration typical of the hysterical Left. He chose to use data rather than rhetoric to make his point!
In 2020, O’ Reilly points out, U.S. Federal Law Enforcement launched 5 actions against White domestic terrorists involving 14 persons. In 2019 there were again 5 cases in which 75 individuals were charged.
On the State level, 2020 saw 3 cases pursued in which 9 people were indicted while the 2019 numbers were 5 and 8.
So the greatest threat to the health of American Democracy is not, according to Joe and Kamala, the tens of thousands of destructive, hate-spewing idiots who took to streets of the U.S. throughout the summer of 2020, indeed who burned St. John’s Episcopal Church to the ground not far from the White House, but rather that dramatically smaller number [i.e., 106] of Right-Wing extremists who, over the course of two full years, managed to create but an insignificant fraction of such chaos.
If you wish to argue that the Hughes brothers rifling through the desks of their elected Senators on Jan 6 is a more worrisome issue than the approximately two billion dollars in damage and multiple deaths wrought by Antifa and B.L.M last year, I am open to that discussion.