Law enforcement officers from multiple agencies work the scene on Bourbon Street after at least ten people were killed when a person allegedly drove into the crowd in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day on January 1, 2025, in New Orleans, Louisiana. | Source: Michael DeMocker / Getty
We all knew or should have known that the second it was revealed that the man who drove a pickup truck into New Year’s Eve celebrators in New Orleans, killing 15 people, was an Islamic terrorist white conservative America was going to lose its mind and go full fire and brimstone, demanding the outright upending of the Muslim world in the United States. We knew that the same people who respond to every mass shooting that happens in America with a collective shrug and a passionate unwillingness to do anything about the tragedies that include even a hint towards gun control would be in full force demanding the most extreme government actions to eradicate the Islamic threat, which doesn’t rear its ugly head nearly as often as the aforementioned shootings, many of which have been carried out by white supremacists, not Muslims.
And the MAGA minions did not disappoint. Just hours after the name Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar was released to the public and it was revealed that Jabbar had an ISIS flag on his truck, President-elect Donald Trump delivered another loud and provably wrong post suggesting the 42-year-old was an immigrant when Jabbar was actually a U.S. citizen from Texas and a veteran of the U.S. Army. Trump insisted that the actual “fake news” that he wholeheartedly believed validated the hate speech he spent his entire campaign spreading against Black and Latino migrants, much like his supporters now believe their collective Islamaphobic bigotry is now validated. In fact, MAGA supporters, Republican officials and right-wing news sites like Fox News and Newsmax are now taking shots at President Joe Biden for previously repeating that white supremacists represent America’s greatest terror threat.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday that the Biden administration was focused on “nonsense” leading up to the attack in New Orleans instead of what white conservatives consider the real threat to be, which is Islamic extremism.
“They told us … for four years that the number one threat was so-called ‘racially motivated extremism.’ It was nonsense. This is the thing that we were all concerned about,” Johnson told Fox &Friends.
“This is why we raised the alarms. This is why we passed H.R. 2, the strongest border security act ever passed by Congress, and Chuck Schumer and the Democrats in the Senate would not put that through and make it into law,” Johnson continued.
Again, Jabbar was a naturally-born U.S. Citizen and a veteran of our armed forces. The GOP’s little “I hate brown people” border security bill is irrelevant to what happened on New Year’s morning because the attacker — and I’m just going to go ahead and switch to all caps for the low-IQ, fact-averse conservatives in the back — WAS NOT AN IMMIGRANT!!!
For the record, the Biden administration was not the first to declare that white supremacists now represent America’s greatest terror threat. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security both declared it while Trump was still serving in his first term as president. Top law enforcement officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, continued to declare it during the first year of the Biden administration. And since then, a myriad of studies have also indicated that the biggest domestic terror threat in the U.S. is, indeed, that of rabid white supremacists.
But let’s say none of that is true — there’s still one glaring question: If Jabbar’s attack validates the idea that Islamic terrorism is our greatest threat, then why don’t the white supremacist attacks that have happened on U.S. soil validate the opposing narrative?
It was just two and a half years ago that white supremacist Payton Gendron gunned down 10 Black people in Buffalo, New York, and left a manifesto that showed he is a believer of the same white nationalist Great Replacement Theory that Trump and many of his supporters, including GOP officials, also adhere to. How is it that, in the MAGA mind, Jabbar is proof that Islam is the threat we should be concerned about, but Gendron isn’t proof of anything? In fact, we don’t even necessarily have to compare shootings to weaponizing vehicles since, in 2017, a white supremacist rammed his truck into counter-protesters at the “Untie the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, killing a woman in the crowd. But, again, neither that killing nor the rally itself was looked to as evidence of the white supremacist terror threat by white conservatives who think what happened in New Orleans vindicates them.
But if we’re going to fall down that bottomless rabbit hole of Caucasian hypocrisy, then we have to ask, again, why mass shootings don’t inspire the same right-wing calls to action that any single instance of Islamic terrorism does. A white supremacist like Gendron or Dylan Roof commits a racist mass shooting and Republicans won’t so much as entertain even the most common sense firearm restrictions, but whenever there’s an attack committed by a Muslim person, America needs to be taken by its ankles and turned upside down so every perceivable radical Muslim in the country can be shaken out like loose change.
Right-wing author Michael Savage made an appearance on Newsmax Thursday to declare that when Trump takes office on Jan. 20, he “not only reinstate the travel ban from these Muslim-dominated nations, but he must deport all radical imams in this nation before it’s too late.” Savage added that Trump “must also close all radical mosques in this nation.”
Of course, we shouldn’t expect these xenophobic, propagandizing bigots to be so consistent that they would also call for a Gestapo-style purging of any entity that radicalized white supremacists. That just isn’t how white nationalists operate.
Otherwise, who would be left to secure the MAGA vote?
SEE ALSO:
‘DEI Hire’: Racists Target FBI Agent Alethea Duncan, A Black Woman, After New Orleans Car Attack
Trump Wrongly Suggests New Orleans Attacker Was Immigrant Amid More Lies About The Crime Rate
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