According to an internal memo from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, U.S. embassies throughout the world have been authorized—i.e. required—to raise a Black Lives Matter banner throughout the year, especially in the month of June and on the anniversary of George Floyd’s death. The State Department’s website does not appear to have the memo, but neither has Blinken or his press secretary disavowed it.
Why should America’s image abroad reflect Floyd, a petty criminal with many deep-seated problems, simply because a jury declared him a victim of murder by an arresting policeman? It is as though the flag of a foreign country—a hostile one in the eyes of many—now represents America to the world.
But we knew all along that the State Department often represents the interests of foreign nations over those of America. The Black Lives Matter flag is just another version of the State Department’s old, long-apparent elitist inclinations to favor the exotic over one’s own—the opposite of “America First.”
The Most Powerful Group in the Country
Times are different. The BLM banner makes its appearance in a radical administration that attempts to replace the American principle of equality with the sweeping scythe of “equity.” Biden insisted during the campaign he would be a radical on race, but few took him seriously.
All the racial preference appointments and programs were predictable—and predicted—but the few things could have been as egregious as speaking out against violent attacks on Asian Americans while masking the race of the assailants—an act of extreme hubris. The Biden apologists knew the cowardly Asian American groups would play their part in the Kabuki theater production that condemned white racism. All pretended that President Trump had somehow incited black hoodlums to assault elderly Asian men and women and that the proper term for this is “white supremacy.”
The Biden Administration’s racial radicalism in making Black Lives Matter the face of America to the world has clearly gone too far for most Americans.
With Biden’s approval, BLM has become the most powerful political group in the country. Its reach extends from Minneapolis to the Middle East. BLM favors the Palestinians over Israel in the latest Hamas rocket attacks on the Jewish state. The Washington Post helpfully explains that “As Israel has become more powerful, its politics have become more hawkish and right-leaning, dismaying many former Democratic supporters,” who of course have revealed their true identity in favoring the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel.
But at this point, some Biden apologists realize that blessing this anti-American hate group is taking the Democrats to politically untenable places. So there quickly follows a series of attempts to disguise the BLM madness or at least distract from it. These racialized attacks only exacerbate the racial politics upon which Democrats historically have feasted. They might get away with discrimination against Asian Americans in admission to elite public high schools and at Harvard, but abandoning Israel to Iran and its allies would attract bad press.
Victims of Imposed Identity
The first Post item in the Democratic strategy of playing one group against others, with the purpose of demonizing “white Americans,” is a lengthy frontpage feature on a rogue counterintelligence unit in the Department of Commerce. Among other mischief, this internal security outfit allegedly collected data on employees to determine whether they might be aiding foreign, in particular Chinese, espionage. The feature ridiculed the 17-employee unit called the Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) for its ineptitude, lawless conduct, and “monitoring of many Asian American employees over benign correspondence.”
ITMS also opened files on people who came to their attention, such as a former congressman who questioned the work of the Bureau of the Census, which operates under the Department of Commerce. Arbitrary power, of course, is always to be feared in the era of the administrative state. But dismissed out of hand is the documented espionage committed by Chinese Americans. Instead, the problem at Commerce, and presumably elsewhere, is incompetent white racists in power determined to impugn the loyalty of Asian Americans.
Next, the Post defends Kamala “the chameleon” border guard Harris in a piece that generously defends her from charges that she has forsaken India, the land of her mother (and an aunt and uncle) by not speaking out more forcefully about its COVID suffering. But what else could her mixed nationality mean, which she exploited politically as either black or Asian, depending on the occasion. (She is never seen in the company of her black Jamaican father, a Marxist economist.)
Furthermore, Harris spent the bulk of her teen years in Montreal, Canada, where her mother worked in medical research. But for now, in the Post’s view, she is a victim of identities imposed on her from a white privileged world.
About That Wuhan Lab
But the greatest retreat from sympathy for Asian Americans is Biden’s acknowledgment that the Chinese may have been lying by insisting the COVID-19 outbreak originated with a fresh-food market in Wuhan. Instead, as the Trump Administration contended, the virus more likely came from a Wuhan government laboratory.
And Democrats say the departure of former president Donald Trump, who often talked about the pandemic in racially charged terms, makes it easier to consider the theory without potentially offensive undertones.
The shifting terrain highlights how much of the early debate on the virus’s origins was colored by America’s tribal politics, as Trump and his supporters insisted on China’s responsibility and many Democrats dismissed the idea out of hand—when the origins of the virus were in fact wrapped in uncertainty.
“America’s tribal politics” is not some specter aroused by Trump but is rooted in Democratic political strategy, as it has been throughout American history. Since the 1790s the Democratic Party has been cleverly constructed from conflicting groups united in their hatred of their opposition.
The BLM summer of 2020 makes clear the hatred of “white privilege” (viz. white people) at the core of the Democratic Party—seemingly quite an achievement for the party of Stephen Douglas. But the key is not the race being despised but rather the political use of race or nationality. Trump, in fact, was and yet might still be the key person in transcending racialized politics because he has been the most honest of major politicians when he speaks about race. There are, in fact, good people on both sides of racially divisive issues.
The Post and the Democrats cannot allow such a thought without denying the self-righteous basis of their own authority. Having China as an enemy puts the Left’s dishonesty about race and BLM loyalty to the test, but the Left will do all it can to ignore this latest challenge, even though it comes from science.