Posted on May 17, 2022

No Data Supports Threat of ‘White Supremacists’

Julie Kelly, American Greatness, May 16, 2022

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. {snip}

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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? {snip}

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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.

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