THE GLARING PROBLEM WITH BIDEN’S WHITE-SUPREMACY WARNING:
Let’s put this in more context. Obviously, almost all serious terrorist groups are international in range, and very many are specifically Islamic — the stereotype of the Arab terrorist has been around for decades and didn’t come from nowhere. At present, al-Qaeda, the group responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks, has cells worldwide and controls a considerable amount of territory in Mali, Somalia, and Yemen. ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is based in those troubled nations where once Eden lay. New player Boko Haram is Nigerian and in practice controls much of the northeast of that rising Motherland power.
Obviously, none of these truly major terror organizations — some of which, in practice, come frighteningly close to being unrecognized nations — qualifies as a U.S. domestic actor. And, speaking frankly, terrorism overall is probably no longer a top-five security threat to the United States — when compared with the rapid rise of China, the opiate and fentanyl epidemic (which killed 110,000 Americans last year), surging crime (murders hit 20,000 annually back in 2020), and so forth.
So, why the national-level focus on the rather niche problem of white supremacy — on 20 deaths per year vs. 20,000? I sincerely think it’s because what some see as white conservative perfidy can safely be targeted in modern America, with little fear of “cancellation” or political backlash, at least from the Left. Since the civil-rights era of the 1960s, working-poor white Yanks have been very much cemented into liberal mythos as an enemy group: the whey-faced, dirty-handed rioters screaming abuse at sainted MLK. And, unlike other groups that may sometimes be unpopular — “hood” black dudes, “slut-walking” feminists, Muslim Islamists, the over-the-top Pride partiers we’ll all see in a month — they form a population that can generally be attacked without significant social risk. They are the Default Villains of the Prevailing Narrative.
At this point in his (p)residency, there are only a few choices Biden has to argue about:
