OPINION: BY JOHN HAWKINS

Liberals are incessantly telling us that white supremacy is a major problem in the United States and they’d be absolutely right if this were the 1920s when Klan membership was over 4 million people and the KKK was able to gather 25,000 members to walk through DC. That number is even more staggering when you consider that the population of the United States back then was a little over a 1/3 of what it is today. In other words, imagine a 12 million-strong Ku Klux Klan that was able to gather 75,000 members for a public march and you have an idea of what a cultural force the KKK was back then.

Today, the Ku Klux Klan is still America’s most prominent hate group and purveyor of white supremacy, but they’re estimated to have around 3,000 members. Meanwhile, the most notorious gathering of white supremacists in recent years was at Charlottesville, where a mere 500-600 tiki torch-carrying racists showed up.

Although the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is essentially a fundraising scam at this point, claims there are over a 1,000 hate groups in America, their numbers fall apart once you give their list of hate groups even the most minimal amount of scrutiny:

A “Holocaust denial” group in Kerrville, Texas called “carolynyeager.net” appears to just be a woman called Carolyn Yeager. A “male supremacy” group called Return of Kings is apparently just a blog published by pick-up artist Roosh V and a couple of his friends, and the most recent post is an announcement from six months ago that the project was on indefinite hiatus. Tony Alamo, the abusive cult leader of “Tony Alamo Christian Ministries,” died in prison in 2017. (Though his ministry’s website still promotes “Tony Alamo’s Unreleased Beatles Album.”) A “black nationalist” group in Atlanta called “Luxor Couture” appears to be an African fashion boutique. “Sharkhunters International” is one guy who really likes U-boats and takes small groups of sad Nazis on tours to see ruins and relics.

Put another way, in a nation of 327 million people, it’s not a shock that there are people that believe in just about anything, including white supremacy. However, the fact that a tiny percentage of the population believes in out-of-the-mainstream ideas shouldn’t be cause for alarm in a healthy society.

Yet the more irrelevant white supremacy has become in America, the further the media has gone to try to convince everyone it’s incredibly important. Just to give you an example of that, back at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference, I was surprised to see a surging gaggle of liberal press surrounding someone I didn’t recognize. Who was this person the media was treating like a rock star? It turned out to be white nationalist Richard Spencer, who wasn’t invited, wasn’t a speaker, and was kicked out by the people running CPAC because they didn’t want to be associated with him.

This goes to a larger point which is that the only relevance people like David Duke and Richard Spencer have is the relevance given to them by the liberal press. Fox isn’t having them on to spread their views. Breitbart isn’t telling people that they’re power players in the conservative movement. It’s the liberal mainstream media that treats white supremacists like they’re important, gives them a platform to spread their ideas, and often accidentally portrays them as outlaws that are willing to fight fire with fire by being as nasty, violent, and rule-breaking as the worst elements of the Left. If the mainstream media gave white supremacists about as much attention as they give the MUCH MORE NUMEROUS percentage of the population that believes in Bigfoot, the hoods and sheets crowd would fade into obscurity where they belong.

It’s also the Left that does everything they can to blur the lines between conservatives and white supremacists. If you tell everyone that listens that Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, and multi-racial, explicitly anti-white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys are white supremacists, there is a real danger that you are going to convince some people that white supremacists aren’t so bad. This is why, for example, groups like the ADL make such a big stink when someone compares something trivial to the Holocaust. It’s because it cheapens the significance of the real thing, thus making it seem much less horrifying. Similarly, the more liberals that try to tell people that some run-of-the-mill working-class guy is really a white supremacist because he voted for Donald Trump and wears a MAGA hat, the more they risk convincing people that white supremacists aren’t so bad.

Even worse, liberals have decided that we need to go back in time 60 years to embrace the same racist mentality that led to separate schools and water fountains. For most of America’s history, too many people believed that race trumped everything else. That way of looking at the world was happily replaced in America by an attitude popularized by that famous line from Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Because Americans moved away from viewing everything through the prism of race and started judging individuals on character and merit, we became a much less racist society. Without that development, for example, Barack Obama could have never become President. Yet today, many liberals are explicitly rejecting the idea of a colorblind world. In fact, liberals have taken to calling this idea that changed the country for the better “colorblind racism.” Instead, liberals encourage people to look at everything through a racial lens – except for white people. White Americans are expected to grovel and apologize for the “privilege” they supposedly have even as they’re incessantly insulted on social media and in the liberal press for the color of their skin.

An obvious problem with that sort of liberal tribalism and identity politics is that it is inherently hypocritical. It’s just as morally justifiable for white people to take pride in their race, vote for a candidate because of the color of their skin, or make decisions explicitly designed to benefit their race as it is for any other group to do the same thing. So, is that really a road we want to go down again as a society? Let’s hope not. Additionally, white supremacists are on the fringes where they deserve to be, but can the same be said about similarly race-obsessed liberals like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Shaun King, Louis Farrakhan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cornel West, and Michael Eric Dyson among many, many others? When you pretend that what Shaun King and Michael Eric Dyson do for a living is fine while Richard Spencer and David Duke are bad people for playing the same game, you’re not being intellectually honest, you’re just cheering on “your side.” This sort of hypocrisy is a gift to white supremacists because the real message you’re sending when you cut away the dishonesty is, “Don’t join those white supremacists and do the same things we’re doing because you should be better than us.” History shows us that is a risky game to play with any group of human beings.

Racism has always existed and will continue to exist for as long as human beings walk the earth. The good news is that by any objective measure, there is less racism and white supremacy in the United States today than there has been at any point in our entire history. Unfortunately, liberalism’s desperate desire to find a white supremacy Satan to fight, even if they must create it from whole cloth, could turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Liberals are working very hard to divide Americans by race and if they keep it up, unfortunately there is a chance they may eventually succeed and help bring a white supremacy that is nearly dead and buried back from death’s door.

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BizPac Review.

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John Hawkins

John Hawkins created Rightwingnews.com in 2001 and became one of the most popular conservative columnists in America. He was published all over, including National Review, Human Events, Townhall, The Hill & more. Hawkins wrote a book 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know that was at one point top 50 in the self-help section on Amazon. He's a popular radio guest and runs a men's website, Brass Pills and his Planet Hawkins podcast.

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