No data supports claims of ‘white supremacists’ threat
By Julie Kelly
Joe Biden will travel to Buffalo on Tuesday, ostensibly to join the upstate New York community in mourning the murders of 10 people at a local grocery store over the weekend. It is, of course, appropriate for Biden in his role as president to grieve with Americans devastated by such a brutal massacre of innocents, especially an attack that from all accounts was racially motivated.
What’s not appropriate is for Biden to use the atrocity as a platform to fuel even more hatred and division in a country ripping apart at the seams in so many ways—but that’s exactly what he will do. The man who launched his 2020 campaign for president touting the lie that Donald Trump commended “very fine” white supremacists after a 2017 protest in Charlottesville can be expected to promote another lie; violent white supremacists and domestic extremists pose a heightened threat to the country.
That tired mantra remains an animating feature of the Biden regime. On his second full day in office, Biden instructed his national security team to devise a whole-of-government approach to combat “domestic terrorism,” largely using the events of January 6, 2021 as the pretext. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki promised a “fact-based analysis upon which we can shape policy” when she announced the initiative on January 22, 2021.
But the 32-page report, issued by Merrick Garland’s Justice Department during a public ceremony in June, was long on rhetoric and very short on facts.
While noting mass shootings committed by white men in Charleston, Pittsburgh, and El Paso, the analysis failed to prove what it described as a “persistent and emerging” threat of domestic terrorism. (The authors also claimed the “victims [of] the U.S. Capitol” join the “tragic history” of American terror attacks including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people including children.)
Further, the unrelated handful of acts took place over a six-year period, hardly representative of a systemic pattern of white-on-black violence. Horrible and sickening? Yes. Carnage that merits the harshest punishment possible for the perpetrators? Yes.
But is it representative of a pervasive threat requiring the use of intrusive government and private sector surveillance tools once reserved for foreign terrorists? No.
Of course, “domestic violent extremists” or “white supremacists” is political code for Trump supporters. What else could explain the report’s omission of violent extremists associated with Black Lives Matter or Antifa? It’s not an accident that on the one-year anniversary of the most destructive riots in the nation’s history, Biden’s missive failed to make a single mention of the damage, death, or nationwide campaign of terror unleashed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020.
No matter how hard Democrats, the news media, and establishment Republicans such as U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.)—who blamed Republican House leaders on Monday morning for enabling “white nationalism, [and] white supremacy”—try to twist the matter, the data simply does not support these accusations.
The most current figures available are from 2020, one of the most tumultuous years in U.S. history. And rather than telling the story of a country under siege by bloodthirsty white supremacists, the metrics, if accurate—and that’s a big if considering the designation of a hate crime is based on the subjective determination of the charging agency—contradict the narrative. With more than 15,000 local law enforcement agencies reporting, the FBI tallied 8,263 hate crime incidents for that year.
Roughly half, according to the FBI’s crime data explorer, were motivated by anti-black or anti-African American sentiment. And of the 4,082 offenses against blacks in 2020, the top offense was “intimidation.” A little more than 1,200 offenses were for assault; just five were categorized as murder or manslaughter.
And 1,710 out of 2,353 perpetrators were white.
Racially motivated crime would be nonexistent in an ideal world, however, that’s not the world in which we live—particularly as the ruling class, corporate news organizations, and social media platforms bang the drums of a race war on a daily basis. The individual cases may be troubling but in no way do they incriminate an entire race or political party, much less do they support the narrative of a rampant “white supremacist” crime spree.
Information from the Justice Department is even more unconvincing. On its hate crime home page, the agency listed 30 examples of federal hate crime cases for 2021. Of the nine offenses related to race, four took place in 2021; the rest occured in previous years but were adjudicated in 2021—hardly a compelling trove of evidence for a department attempting to persuade the public that dangerous white supremacist terrorists are ready to strike at any moment.
More specific data isn’t forthcoming. Overall crime statistics for 2021, including racially motivated crimes, may not be made available to the public this year—a timely gift to Democrats as voters continue to list crime as their top concern ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
Since the FBI switched to a new reporting system, many local law enforcement entities are opting out of the voluntary program, bringing the agency participation well below the mandatory 60 percent threshold. The FBI already skipped the first quarterly report of 2022, usually issued in late March. If participation doesn’t increase, there’s a chance subsequent reports will be missed, too.
How convenient.
There is, of course, a more political reason why the FBI won’t release crime statistics from last year; the results will contradict the administration. According to an independent analysis of three dozen police departments, hate crimes rose by 39 percent in the nation’s largest cities in 2021 with the top 10 metropolitan areas reporting a staggering 54 percent increase over 2020.
The rise, however, is due to a huge uptick in hate crimes against Asians and Jews. Data crunched by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino shows a 224 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes; a 58 percent increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes; and a 51 percent increase in anti-gay hate crimes. News reports out of major cities support the data; a wave of recent attacks in Dallas has the city’s Asian business community in a panic. Police are looking now for a black man suspected of shooting three Korean women at a hair salon last week.
But Joe Biden will not discuss any of those facts during his visit to Buffalo on Tuesday. Instead, Biden will rage against an imaginary menace. He will blame Republicans and Fox News. And he’ll demand more stringent measures, including online censorship, to prevent another attack. Biden will use the blood of innocents to paint millions of Americans as “white supremacists” and wannabe terrorists simply for supporting the other political party. Rather than comfort the heartbroken loved ones, Biden will exploit their loss for his own gratification.
There is no stoop too low for old Joe.
Originally published by American Greatness. Republished with permission.
For more great content from Budget & Tax News.
For more from The Heartland Institute.