When the Democrats’ ridiculous, fear-mongering “Rise of White Nationalism” hearing blew up in their faces, liberals went looking for a scapegoat: me.

My mere presence at the hearing turned a “serious inquiry” into a “farce,” according to Dana Milbank, the arch-liberal columnist at the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post.

“Serious inquiry?” What a joke.

That hearing was a farce from the very beginning; all I did was expose it for what it was. The entire exercise was nothing but the opening salvo of the Democrats’ 2020 election strategy, which involves getting minority voters to the polls with a combination of fear and bribery — using the specter of “white nationalism” to smear Republicans while Democrats call for “reparations” in the form of government handouts.

It was a cynical, condescending attempt to mislead black voters, and while the Democrats had a whole panel of left-wing identity politics activists and social media executives to help them, only Zionist Organization of America leader Mort Klein and I were on hand to counter their deceptions.

We had our work cut out for us, even with the very conspicuous absence of representatives from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC scammed its way to a half-billion dollar fortune by stoking racial fears among minorities, making a business out of willfully smearing conservative Christians and immigration restrictionists as “hate groups” on par with the Ku Klux Klan.

Even though recent controversies have made the SPLC too toxic for even the Democrats to risk inviting, much of the liberal media still cited SPLC propaganda in their coverage of the hearing.

The Democrats’ chosen activists, meanwhile, dragged out juiced statistics suggesting America is suffering through a wave of white nationalist violence and “hate crimes.” In reality, though, only a tiny sliver of violent crime in this country is committed by “white nationalists,” even under the absurdly broad definitions these groups use to inflate their statistics and further their fear mongering.

The activists went so far as to cite a “report” about the rise of “cyberhate” that actually defined the words “white” and “black” as racial slurs.

Representatives from Google and Facebook were on hand to concur with their Democrat patrons about the need for more censorship on their platforms to combat “white nationalism,” though they struggled to come up with a plausible justification. One of them even cited Facebook’s failure to ban every page that says “it’s okay to be white” as evidence that the government needs to step in to help Facebook suppress such sentiments.

Democrat Congressman David Cicilline was furious that Facebook did not “preemptively remove” former Toronto mayoral candidate Faith Goldy and take “proactive steps” to “identify” and ban others like her — even though the company did ban Goldy’s account shortly after announcing its new policy prohibiting “white supremacist” content.

As usual, it made no difference to liberals that Goldy has never claimed to be a “white nationalist” or called for any form of violence, because the Democrats’ only goal is to convince the public that the threat of white nationalism is so great that we must forfeit our cherished right to free speech.

One Republican committee member, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), had the guts to point this out, and when he did, a liberal activist had the nerve to complain that “this is a hearing about hate crimes and violence, not hate speech.”

Of course, the Democrats were only interested in talking about a very specific category of hate crimes and violence.

When Klein tried to widen the conversation to include the BDS movement, Islamism, and other manifestations of anti-Semitic hate that are increasingly finding acceptance on the left, Democrat Rep. Mary Scanlon dismissed his concerns and responded with a conspiracy theory about how the perception of Muslim anti-Semitism is actually part of an elaborate plot by racist whites to pit different minority groups against each other.

When I pointed out how absurd it was to claim that America is somehow more “racist” or “white nationalist” now than it was when my grandfather was a sharecropper in the segregated South, Rep. Ted Lieu put on a serious face and tried to smear me — a black woman who works for an orthodox Jew — as a Hitler-loving anti-Semite. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) then flat-out lied, banging his gavel and falsely claiming I had called Lieu “stupid” when I tried to defend myself.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) was even more outrageously out of line, accusing me of “inspiring” the mass murderer who attacked a mosque in New Zealand last month.

I’m going to give these Democrats the benefit of the doubt and assume they didn’t mean for their hearing to go so far off the rails. That would at least explain why they needed to blame me, the one who exposed their spectacular failure on live TV.

It’s rather ironic that after a whole room of Democrats devoted an entire hearing to pretending that black Americans like me need to be terrified of the white nationalists “rising” behind President Trump, it was the president and his family who came to my defense in response to their race-baiting smears. Given the Democratic Party’s long history of both explicit and implicit racism, though, it’s hardly surprising.

Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) is communications director for Turning Point USA.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.