You might think after a cargo ship smashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on March 26 that the focus of media and political commentary would be on the still unknown underlying reason the ship lost power. Or perhaps how soon it will take to rebuild the bridge, given that it will cost the local economy approximately $15 million per day it remains closed. But no. The real story about the Baltimore bridge, according to corporate media, is about racism.

“Baltimore mayor weathers racist attacks after bridge collapse,” was the title of one March 31 Washington Post article. “‘DEI mayor’ insults prove that unapologetic racism is back,” read the title of an op-ed by longtime WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson. “Baltimore Bridge Collapse Creates More DEI Attacks: How Allies Can Push Back,” read a March 27 piece in Forbes. Speaking of his detractors, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott declared on MSNBC: “We know what they want to say, but they don’t have the courage to say the N-word.”

Yet what this faux controversy over Baltimore’s mayor really demonstrates is that our establishment elites will always look for an opportunity to cry “racism” to distract and redirect criticism and to silence critics with baseless ad hominem.

The Racist Controversy That Wasn’t

Despite corporate media’s extensive coverage and commentary on racist attacks against Baltimore Mayor Scott, there’s an incredible paucity of evidence to support these claims. The WaPo “objective” coverage of this incident cites two anonymous users on X (formerly Twitter). You read that right. Two Twitter users. And neither responded to WaPo requests for comment. “Despite the online attacks, Scott said, he is trying to stay focused on the crisis,” the WaPo reported. Oh good — we wouldn’t want the mayor of a city of more than half a million people to be unnerved by two anonymous social media users.

Some Republican politicians — such as Utah state Rep. Phil Lyman and Florida congressional candidate Anthony Sabatini — have criticized Scott and his self-professed progressive management of Baltimore as connected to the bridge collapse. Whatever the merits of those claims, which seem premature and unsubstantiated, they’re hardly “racist,” as commentators contend, but the kind of opportunist rhetoric one finds on both sides of the political aisle.

Who in 2024 doesn’t presume events like these won’t be exploited (often cynically) for political gain? But that didn’t stop Scott from terming them “race-baiting” too. “We’ve been the bogeyman for them since the first day they brought us to this country,” he declared, as if such claims are somehow also not incendiary bluster.

An All-Too-Familiar Trend

Not that calling one’s critics racist is just the province of Baltimore mayors in 2024. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis sought to distract attention from her obvious ethical malfeasances in prosecuting former President Donald Trump by accusing her detractors of racism. Corporate media jumped on that narrative as well, as the National Review observed, jokingly commenting: “Let she who has not hired her boyfriend to prosecute a former president on the taxpayer dime cast the first stone.”

Or how about former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who attempted to redirect from her disastrous testimony during a congressional hearing by claiming her critics were, of course, motivated by racism? Once it became clear that her academic career was based on her penchant for plagiarism and data falsification, or attempting to destroy the careers of fellow (black) academics whose research undermined the dominant DEI narrative, Gay only doubled down on her allegations of racism against her.

Then, of course, there are the many racial grievance grifters who make their fortune off anti-racism. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has charged more than $500 per minute for public speaking fees, accuses even the most tempered criticism of her professional work as racially motivated. Bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi similarly calls his opponents bigots. And Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors — who siphoned BLM funds to bankroll her luxurious lifestyle — claims her critics are not only racist but also attempting to assassinate her.

And those are just the stories you’ve heard about. There are, apparently, hordes of racists running wild all over America, disrupting the women’s college basketball tournament, offering bigoted dramatic portrayals of Agatha Christie novels, and writing offensive things in high-school bathrooms. Could it possibly be that, in a country of more than 330 million people there are a few idiots out there saying and doing stupid, racist things? There are more than 25,000 homicides and hundreds of thousands of cases of robbery or aggravated assault every year. But it’s the handful of morons spewing racist rhetoric who are the real threat to America.

Playing the Corrosive Racist Card

Far more than being overrun with racists and their bigoted sympathies, America is overwhelmed with faux crises manufactured by elites claiming America is on the verge of a totalitarian coup by a supposed conspiracy of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi sympathizers. It is absurd, but it’s certainly a good way to rally the leftist base for the next election cycle. But whatever short-term gains this archives for the left, its effects on our body politic are disastrous.

A growing number of citizens, particularly among the younger generation, truly believe that America is systematically racist and that millions of conservative Americans do not simply possess different political opinions but are contemptible racists. Thus everything these conservatives think and say, somehow, is ultimately explained by racism. And conservative criticism of incompetent bureaucrats or ideological grifters isn’t motivated by, say, justice and truth — or perhaps a competing political vision — but vicious hatred of nonwhite people.

Though there is a certain analogy to the old parable of the boy who cried wolf, this paradigm is far more perverse. Constant accusations of racism seem to only further impress upon a cohort of Americans that their political opponents really are evil bigots. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times the likes of Fani Willis, Claudine Gay, or Nikole Hannah-Jones are proved to be embarrassingly unethical and inept — the presumption is only ever that criticism of such public figures must be false and bigoted. Until our establishment elites can move on from this destructive narrative, there is little hope for productive political discourse in this country.