OPINION:
The Biden administration’s race war continued this week with the president’s deceptively named “United We Stand” summit to expose the supposed widespread threat of violent extremism and White supremacy in America. The government website stokes fear and division in stark terms. “Americans cannot participate in the basic activities of everyday life—like shopping at the grocery store or praying at their house of worship—without the fear of being targeted and killed for who they are, our democracy… is at risk.”
In an effort to convince Americans that we don’t have a crime wave, a mental health crisis or rampant societal rot due to welfare’s broken promises, President Joe Biden is again manipulating and demonizing the population. As we saw with pandemic reporting, there’s fuzzy math and deliberate information management being utilized to drive the narrative that White supremacists are somehow a significant threat to society. The contrived hysteria will be used to target the administration’s opponents like the dictators of some third-world Banana Republic or fascist regime.
Like the left’s anti-cop narrative about indiscriminate killings of Black men, the facts about extremism decisively expose the left’s subterfuge.
According to the FBI, in 2019 there were more than 10 million arrests in the United States, excluding traffic infractions. There were more than 1.2 million violent crimes and more than 6.9 million property crimes with the remainder being other miscellaneous offenses.
That same year there were 6,455 hate crimes reported against persons and property. If all of those led to an arrest, that amounted to only .06% of all arrests in 2019. In 2020, the number from the FBI was 8,263. The year-over-year increase amounted to two, one hundredths of a percent of all arrests.
Like his climate change alarmism, Mr. Biden’s race war is part of a pattern of behavior designed to deliberately create anxiety, fear and social unrest for political gain. There have been increases in bias-related crime, but to suggest that it is a commonplace occurrence driven by large numbers of extremists is pure manipulation.
Without evidence, the Biden administration wants you to think there is a White supremacist living next door to you, that you should be afraid to go about your daily life and that extremists are lurking around every corner.
The facts show, however, nearly all crime in this country is gang related, economic or domestic in nature.
With the rise in social media, the small extremist groups that do exist have been able to increase their chatter, but there is still no evidence of any widespread coordinated effort to perpetrate hate crimes by any group, let alone White supremacists.
Antisemitic attacks and attacks on churches, have been on the rise. But those numbers should not be used to justify the claim that extremism is rampant. Those attacks, interestingly enough, are likely more a consequence of the left’s war on religion and its vehement anti-Israel stance than anything else.
Just like with the CDC data during the pandemic, Americans should question whether the incidents are truly increasing dramatically, or the reporting methodology has changed to drive a political narrative.
A recent FBI whistleblower told The Washington Times that the White supremacist threat is overblown. The whistleblower said the Bureau’s agents are being pressured to “create domestic terrorist cases and tag people as White supremacists to meet internal metrics.”
For instance, robbing an Asian business owner, known to have cash on him, is now considered a hate crime if a racial slur is uttered by the perpetrator even though the money was the motive for the crime.
A recent Pentagon report commissioned by Mr. Biden’s White House found White supremacy and extremism in the military, was also virtually nonexistent.
The administration has already attempted to imbed divisive racial preferences into everything from farm subsidies to loans to paving roads and more. The president is running around calling Trump supporters a threat to democracy. They’ve charged Americans who don’t want a federal takeover of elections with supporting “Jim Crow 2.0.” They’ve targeted parents who opposed CRT.
Now they’re cooking the books yet again over hate crimes to justify expansive investigations.
Mr. Biden’s race war is a smoke and mirrors psychological operation meant to obscure the realities of America’s real challenges, ignored by the Left for decades.
If you have the Gadsden Flag on your license plate watch out. The left is just getting started and they haven’t even staffed up over at the IRS.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax Television, an author and a former Bush administration official.
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