I'm going to devote a larger post to articulating the main flaw in Biden's rhetoric regarding white supremacist organizations. As it happens, poster HK227 in post #345 touches on my concerns regarding tribalism, though our interpretations of the matter may not be identical.
So for sake of argument, I will concede that if you go down a list of violent acts in the past four years-- the period roughly following Christopher Wray's 2019 remarks, from which Biden draws-- you are going to find a preponderance of white actors. This preponderance, though, is at least partly ascribable to there being more white people in the country. I don't think either Wray or Biden presented any proportional analysis; they present their argument on the basis of sheer quantity.
I will also concede that said violent acts, whether one labels them "terrorism" or not, probably have increased since 2019, and that even if all the perpetrators can't be linked to white supremacy rhetoric, there might well be a majority of them that are.
HOWEVER, does that mean that if, as you suggest, we could just somehow banish or even just marginalize the sources of white supremacy, these so-called acts of terror would just go away?
Here's a link to the DOJ's "Justice News" page, which I'm looking at through the filter of "Hate Crimes," since that's what we're talking about. Let's see if all of these fit the Wray-Biden paradigm.
The newest link, dated May 11 2023, concerns a perpetrator, David Chou. a Taiwanese emigrant to America who formed a grudge against Taiwanese independence and assaulted a Laguna Woods church populated by Taiwanese emigrants, endangering forty-plus churchgoers and killing one.
In March, two "persons of color" on the Hawaiian island of Maui were sentenced for a 2022 assault on a white guy for moving into their neighborhood.
Curiously omitted-- and presumably slotted into some other list-- is the November 2022 assault by Anderson Lee Aldrich on an LGBT club. While Aldrich may have been triggered in part by conservative dialectic, the root cause of his attack appears to stem from his having experienced accusations of being homosexual himself.
Also omitted is the 2019 Jersey City shooting, in which several Jews, as well as policemen, were murdered by two members of the Black Hebrew Israelite cult. Possibly they didn't make the list because both fanatics were killed shooting it out with police.
Again-- yes, a lot more hate crimes by white people, like the Buffalo shooter from 2022. But what do these incidents, three of which were committed by nonwhites, have in common with the others? Clearly all are motivated by some form of tribalism, one that cannot be confined to the paradigm of "white supremacy/nationalism."
Now, if Joe Biden cared about promoting racial harmony in America, he wouldn't just play to his base by stressing the numerically superior numbers of persons linked in some way to some form of supremacist thought. (The Buffalo shooter has not been shown to have been a member of any specific group, but was radicalized by supremacist thought on 4chan.) A President wanting racial harmony would attack tribalism in all its forms. But Biden is a political hack, whose only concern was to project the image of Not-Trump-- not an actual reaction to Trump himself, but to the Liberal construction of Trump as the Insidious Source of Racist Empowerment.
And every time a politician rants about one only form of tribalism, or even seems to apologize for lawlessness by persons of color (paging Jordan Neely), the white supremacists say, "See, the Liberals are supporting White Replacement." Thus they're far more empowered by guys like Biden than they ever were by Trump.
Peyton Gendron proved himself to be garbage, but so too did David Chou and the two Black Hebrews. I've had posters here call me a tribalist because I have fun mocking Mad Liberals. But I'm a guy spouting off on a messboard, not a politician entrusted with the public good. Joe Biden is not only a racist, he's also the best friend white supremacists ever had.
