To break a nation, one doesn’t need invading armies, nuclear missiles or even a cyber warfare attack that fries the electrical grid. An incessant marketing campaign will do.
Rebranding the United States as “racist”—allegedly systemic, structural or some other impossible-to-pin-down modifier—advances a false narrative. The objective is to demoralize proud Americans.
Historically, radicals have used self-justifying promotional techniques to seize power. Nazis rode their “stab-in-the-back” conspiracy explanation of Germany’s World War I defeat from obscurity to total control in just a few years. In the name of “the people,” a small Bolshevik party pursued elastically defined “class enemies”; success allowed them to impose Soviet tyranny.
Now a defuse movement, incubated on campuses for decades, grabs for power in the United States. Conjoined triplets—academia, Hollywood and partisan journalism—operate as a de facto “Ministry of Truth.” Apart from dissident conservative outlets, the movement to convict America as intrinsically racist has obtained what psychological warfare practitioners call “information dominance.”
Hence, the appearance April 14 in the country’s leading newspapers of a two-page ad, signed by hundreds of leading corporate executives. The lofty-sounding promo was intentionally vague. That enabled it to parrot by implication the Democratic Party’s slander as racist Republican efforts to repair slack state voter identification, mail-in ballot deadlines and “ballot harvesting” rules.
No matter. Facts are not allowed to contradict accusations of systemic racism. In 1948, President Harry Truman integrated the military. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed “separate but equal” public schools. Then followed 1964’s Civil Rights Act and the start of the War on Poverty (more than $25 trillion spent so far to uplift poor blacks and whites), 1965’s Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. The United States ended Jim Crow racism more than half a century ago, but this reality goes down the Orwellian memory hole.
That way, those marketing the campaign to delegitimize America, with Big Tech as their enforcer, virtually monopolize the megaphone. The public doesn’t learn, for example, that in 2020, in a country of 330 million people, of whom 44 million are African Americans, the number of unarmed blacks killed by police was 15. This includes George Floyd, whose death sparked what major media are pleased to call the nation’s “racial reckoning.”
Invoking the name of Daunte Wright, killed by police on April 11 while fleeing arrest and on whom a firearms violation warrant was outstanding, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), declared “policing in our country is inherently and intentionally racist.”
Really? When Tlaib opined, 10 unarmed people—five whites, three blacks, two classified as Hispanic—had been killed by police in 2021. That’s a disproportionately high number of blacks and Hispanics compared to their shares of the total population, but far too small to show “intentionally racist policing.”
Nevertheless, true believers of the sort Eric Hoffer warned us against march on. In a country of decreasing traditional religious affiliation, woke progressivism increasingly fills a theological need. Secular fundamentalist priests like Tlaib present their orthodoxy as the only path to national salvation.
“Racism” is the Democrat-progressives’ god-word. “Anti-racism” justifies their impatience with the Constitution, with federalism, with checks and balances on centers of governmental authority and with Bill of Rights’ elevation of the individual over the state. If “new and improved” used to be the single most-employed phrase in advertising, then today charges of racism and white supremacy fuel an illiberal ascendancy.
A marketing campaign to delegitimize a nation was tested, with considerable success, in the 20th century. In 1973, the Soviet Union’s Arab allies, Egypt and Syria, failed to defeat Israel in the Yom Kippur War. So, two years later, the 21-country Arab League pushed the Soviet-inspired “Zionism-is-racism” resolution through the United Nations General Assembly.
Repealed by a U.S.-led effort in 1991, the psych-war campaign to smear Jewish national liberation—a people’s reaction to racism—as racist still resounds. It does so not only in the oxymoronically-named U.N. Human Rights Council but especially on the left in the West. Explaining why Israel remains targeted by the boycott, divest and sanctions (BDS) movement but not the United States or United Kingdom, left-wing anti-globalist Naomi Klein has said, boycott “is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried [against Israel but not America or Great Britain] is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.”
Now, after two generations of its long march through the institutions, the left believes demanding Americans submit to its rule to atone for systemic racism “could actually work.”
Eric Rozenman is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and author of Jews Make the Best Demons: “Palestine” and the Jewish Question. Any opinions expressed above are solely his own.