The Racism-Industrial-Complex needs it that way.

The agents of the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC) have been having a field day ever since Charlottesville: Here, for the whole world to see, as they would have the rest of us think, is proof that “white supremacy” or “racism” is alive and well.

Of course, in reality, the mayhem in Charlottesville proved no such thing. However, the hysteria over it should provoke the rest of us to ask of the self-appointed guardians of racial orthodoxy: How, in your eyes, does your average white person differ essentially from the most vicious of neo-Nazis or members of the Aryan Brotherhood?

In other words, for decades, hard leftists (and some who aren’t all that hard) have spared no occasion to castigate America—or, more specifically, AmeriKKKa—for its incorrigible and intractable “racism” or “white supremacy.” To hear the cogs in the wheels of RIC tell it, all white people are, ultimately, no better and just as bad as the worse of Klansmen and Nazis.

This is no exaggeration. Consider the following:

(1)University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill supplied a keen, if warped, insight into the leftist’s view of Western civilization generally, and America in particular, when, back in 2005, he in effect characterized all of those Americans who perished in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 as Nazis.

Specifically, Churchill called them “little Eichmanns.”

(2)Marc Lamont Hill, an academic and one-time Fox News contributor, agreed with Churchill’s assessment.

(3)Two black American law professors co-authored a piece with the title, “Charlottesville is America Everywhere.” Charlottesville is significant only because it signals the “normalization of the white supremacist movement” in America and “its intimate synergy with the administrative and institutional leadership in Washington D.C.”

What the authors call “white supremacy” is and has always been omnipresent in America. Now, though, it is being normalized once again.

(4) On CNN, Bakari Sellers and Nina Turner told Jake Tapper that the neo-Nazis and “white supremacists” in Charlottesville were just “the tip of the iceberg,” that they are, as it were, just more blatant manifestations of the “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” that are endemic in American life. Examples given include the “mass incarceration” of blacks, Hispanics, and “poor people;” income and wealth “inequality;” and “inequalities” in the quality of education that white children receive versus that received by blacks.

(5) At the Daily Kos, Kelly Macias writes that Charlottesville “served as yet another reminder for us that black bodies, bodies of color, and other marginalized people are not safe in America.”

“White supremacy is violent.” Macias, mind you, didn’t make this remark about Charlottesville. She made it about two white “progressive” activists who attended the same workshop that she attended. A white, female Democrat representative who supports charter schools and vouchers was invited to speak. Some of the black women in attendance decided that she was insufficiently “progressive” and decided to disallow her from speaking. Two white attendees, a man and a woman, shouted at them to allow the politician to speak.

Macias claims to have felt threatened by the white liberals’ demeanor.

(6) The ACLU too sees “white supremacy” as being omnipresent. Initially, it tweeted a photograph of a small white child holding a little American flag. The caption read: “This is the future that ACLU members want.”

A Temple University professor who (surprise, surprise!) specializes in the study of “race, gender, religion, and their intersections,” responded: “A White kid with a flag?!”

The ACLU was quick to offer a mea culpa in a subsequent tweet. “When your Twitter followers keep you in check and remind you that _white supremacy is everywhere_” (emphasis added).

These are just some more recent illustrations of the left’s insistence that “white supremacy” and “racism” are wedged into every nook and cranny of America. Yet there are plenty of other examples of this worldview stretching back decades.

If you are white and you voted for George W. Bush, you voted for a “racist.”

If you support military action in the Middle East (and beyond), then you are “racist.”

If you voted for George H. W. Bush, then you’re a “racist.”

If you voted for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, then you are a “racist,” and a “fascist” to boot. (After all, as no less a figure than Coretta Scott King remarked: “I am scared that if Ronald Reagan gets into office, we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party.”)

If you voted for Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Sarah Palin, then you are “racist.”

If you like and want to fly the American flag, then you are a “racist.”

If you belong to the GOP, then you are a “racist.”

If you belong to the Tea Party, then you are a “racist.”

If you are Christian and conservative, then you are a “racist.”

If you are a Texan caught in Hurricane Harvey then you are a Republican and a Trump supporter who deserves to die because you are a “racist.”

If you advocate race-neutrality or “color blindness,” then you promote policies that are “racist.”

If you advocate for “equality of opportunity,” then you advocate for “racism.”

If you think that immigrants should assimilate to American society, then you are “racist.”

If you deny race, maintaining instead that there is but one race, the human race, then you are “racist.”

This list could be multiplied ad infinitum. If you support capitalism, Israel, the Fourth of July, America’s Founders, The Dukes of Hazzard, Gone With the Wind, Western civilization, drinking milk, or any number of other things, then you support “racism.”

The point by now should be clear: Ultimately, from the perspective of the RIC merchants, i.e. the left, there is no basic difference between the most aggressive and hate-filled of Klansmen or neo-Nazis and the most seemingly innocent of white children. In kind, there is no difference between the color-blind ideal of equality under the law and the swastika, slavery and the free market, a burning cross and opposition to “affirmative action” or the American flag.

The reaction to Charlottesville is moral-political theater. In the left’s mind, we are all guilty of “white supremacy.”

The Racism-Industrial-Complex needs it this way.