Fresh from denouncing Republicans as “semi-fascists” and “violent extremists,” President Joe Biden will host a White House “United We Stand” summit Thursday: Our president will assure Americans (or at least the media) that he is totally opposed to hate notwithstanding any sentences that recently scrolled across his teleprompter.
Hatred is simply another issue conscripted for a desperate Democratic “Get out the vote” drive.
For Team Biden, “hate” is a flag of political convenience. In announcing the summit, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stretched back a decade to list a “disturbing series of hate-fueled attacks, from Oak Creek [Wisconsin Sikh temple, 2012] to Pittsburgh [synagogue, 2018], from El Paso [Walmart shootings, 2019] to Poway [California synagogue, 2019], from Atlanta [massage parlors, 2021] to Buffalo [grocery store, 2022].”
The common element in those attacks is that the killers are white — fitting the Biden administration theme that “white supremacists” are the biggest terror threat in America. Yet, while those killers deserve the harshest punishment, the Biden scorecard ignores 99.9% of the murders committed in America.
Permitting politicians to showcase certain “hate crimes” implicitly entitles them to dismiss or downgrade other crimes as morally irrelevant. The flip side to “hate crime” is “Never mind” or “Move along, nothing to see here.” This switcheroo makes the suffering of the vast majority of crime victims and the recent sharp increase in homicide rates politically irrelevant.
The more hype that hate crimes receive, the more fraudulent many of the claims become. Remember actor Jussie Smollett’s 2019 tale about two MAGA guys attacking him in Chicago because he’s black and gay? Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) howled that it was an “attempted modern day lynching” — and then Smollett’s ludicrous tale fell apart.
Beginning the following year, the homicide rate soared 50% in Chicago. But the 799 people killed in Chicago last year (648 were black) will be ignored at Biden’s summit because none of them was labeled a hate-crime victim.
The summit will overlook the fact that “young Black men are the main killers of young Black men,” as The Washington Post recently reported, and that the black homicide rate is 500%+ higher than the white homicide rate, per the Justice Department.
The event will be the latest episode of the Biden Salvation Show. According to the White House press secretary, Biden will talk about how “in the battle for the soul of our nation ‘we must all enlist in this great cause of America.’” Soul-saving prattle seeks to sway Americans to view Biden as Moses, waiting to lead his people out of the chains of hatred. Neither Biden nor any other prominent politician has the moral credibility to lecture us about either our souls or our values.
Hate crimes are profitable for politicians, so they seek to continually expand the definition. On Sunday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) equated participants in the Jan. 6 Capitol ruckus with the 9/11 terrorists. Vice President Kamala Harris also equated Jan. 6 with 9/11 and threw in Pearl Harbor to score a trifecta.
Democrats have sought to continually broaden the notion of hate crimes to vilify almost all the opposition to President Biden. Collective guilt is the key: Anyone who shares any opinions with people accused of hate crimes will be tacitly labeled an accomplice or at least an enabler.
Democrats are relying on a slippery-slope argument. First you doubt the president, then you buy an AR-15 and shoot up the nearest house of worship. When will Team Biden formally designate distrusting the government a “pre-hate crime”?
Thursday’s summit is also being hailed as an “anti-extremism conference.” But Team Biden has a problem: There aren’t enough wacky “extremists” to frighten voters into voting Democratic in the midterm elections. So the Democratic Party is using donors’ dollars to “spend tens of millions amplifying far-right candidates in nine states,” The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
This is like firefighters going on an arson spree to get a budget boost.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who is also a Senate candidate, epitomized that mindset with his declaration Tuesday morning: “We have to kill and confront that [“extremist” Republican] movement.” “Kill all the extremists” is the natural conclusion of Biden’s demonology.
Every sane person already opposes mass murder and vicious attacks on innocent people, so there will be nothing to learn from the White House summit. But denouncing hatred is one of the best ways to spur hatred — especially if you identify the “haters” to include practically half the US population. Americans can condemn hatred without putting Biden or any other politician on a pedestal.
James Bovard is the author of 10 books and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors.