The Racist Craze Hits Full Tilt

Rep. Steve King is facing criticism for comments made in an exchange on MSNBC widely — and wrongly — interpreted by liberals as evincing a belief in white supremacy.

If stating the fact that “Westerners”are predominantly responsible for their own civilization is racist, then the left has gone further off the politically correct cliff than many have realized.

“A GOP Congressman Just Made an Argument for White Supremacy” read a headline on The Huffington Post. “Congressman Steve King Makes White Supremacist Comments on Live TV” echoed Vanity Fair. “This is literal white supremacy” according to a Clinton campaign email.

This is literal madness.

White supremacy is the belief that white people are inherently superior to non-white people and therefore have a right to rule them — it is the belief in denying certain civil rights to non-white people based on the notion that they are incapable of self-government. Notable examples of white supremacy would be the South in the U.S. in the 1920s, Apartheid South Africa, and Rhodesia.

Even a cursory glance at King’s comments reveals to anyone with a fraction of a functioning brain that King was not advocating white supremacy. “I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

Had King maintained that whites contributed more to “civilization” as a whole, it may have been a white supremacist comment — but it would also have been a completely absurd comment as there is no such thing as “civilization.” There are and have been a multitude of civilizations, established by a multitude of different peoples with different cultures in different parts of the world.

Regardless, King nearly immediately corrected himself and made clear he was talking about Western civilization. “Than, than Western civilization itself,” King continued. “It’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.”

King is clearly guilty of ineloquence, but to charge that the man is advocating white supremacy is absurd. If stating the fact that “Westerners,” — i.e. Europeans, i.e. white people — are predominantly responsible for their own civilization is racist, then the Left has gone further off the politically correct cliff than many have realized.

Of course cross-cultural contributions exist and are frequently vital in the development of a particular civilization, but the people of Europe played the largest role in building the civilization that arose in Europe. Stating this fact should be no more controversial than stating that East Asians made the majority of the contributions to civilizations that arose in East Asia.

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But no, in Obama’s racially charged, rabidly anti-white America, stating historical fact is apparently an expression of racism. What makes the uproar over King’s comments even more astonishing is that King made them in response to a blatantly racist comment by Esquire Editor-at-Large Charles Pierce.

“If you’re really optimistic, you can say that this is the last time that old white people will command the Republican Party’s attention, its platform, and its public face,” Pierce said. Pierce — who is white and clearly wrestling with serious issues of racial self-loathing — celebrated on national television the fact that a particular racial group in America is dying out.

But as far as American liberals are concerned, the controversial part of that conversation was King’s stating a demonstrable historical reality. It’s becoming uncomfortably clear that the unofficial campaign theme of the Democrats in 2016 is “Racism: It’s only real when white people do it.”