April 16, 2021 - 5:23pm

“It is the problem of the society that produces the racist,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the National Action Network this week. “And in today’s world, that’s every society.” America’s envoy in Turtle Bay then charged that ‘white supremacy’ is ‘weaved into our founding documents and principles.”

How Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield, a black woman, sees her ascent into the highest echelons of American power from the Louisiana of the segregated South, is nothing for me, a white man, to remark upon. That’s her business.

But, plainly, nearly a year after the killing of George Floyd and the international rise of Black Lives Matter, assertions that bigotry was at the core of the American founding, something that was not a mainstream view even a year ago, let alone now, are a glaring political liability for America’s new president, Joe Biden.

Indeed, the ambassador’s comments would seem manna from heaven for Biden’s various critics, with condemnatory headlines in the New York Post, National Review and all over conservative Twitter. Notably, it’s unlikely the White House will defend Greenfield-Thomas’ remark explicitly.

Biden’s team at the highest level is seen as dominated by moderates, and it is. That is, they who are loathe to wade into America’s culture war: Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Chief of Staff Ron Klain, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Senior Counsellor Mike Donillon and Senior Advisor Anita Dunn. In other words, mainly folks who have been around Biden for years, but the reality: they’re all white.

This is a tension, and an obscenely awkward one. The moderation at the very top has made the administration seemingly bend over backwards to satisfy the Democrats’ “woke” wing anywhere else. To watch a White House press briefing is to witness constant gestures toward “equity,” never, ever defined. This sentiment has become even more pervasive in corporate America. The charlatanism is big business.

Add into that: it is not at all clear that “woke” is at all politically popular. The case could quickly be made that Biden, and 2020 Democratic runner-up Bernie Sanders, were actually the least “woke” of the major candidates for president, and that it is no coincidence that they were so. More emphasising aspirants — such as Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — got blown out of the water.

But it seems a decade happened in a year, as old guard Marxists would say, since last May. Derek Chauvin’s prime time trial in the Land of 10,000 Lakes provides testimony to that fact. The racial-political moment is a phenomenon that has plainly captured the imagination of the American elite, if not many others in the West. This will present problems for Biden.

Earlier this week, the President announced a departure from Afghanistan, long overdue. But lest anyone still believes the fable that domestic policy stops at the water’s edge, it’s worth noting that he can’t even rejoin the Human Rights Council without being dragged back ceaselessly into a wild, wicked new religion.


Curt Mills is a senior reporter at the American Conservative.

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