Why is it so hard for Leftists to get the least little thing right about anyone who disagrees with them? On September 5, SALON.com published a hair-raisingly ignorant article about “white supremacists” by a professional writer who presumably also knows how to read. Lucian K. Truscott IV [Tweet him] is a West Point graduate and best-selling novelist whose books have been made into movies. And yet the article he published, They’re Not White Nationalists, They’re White Supremacists, is a childish attempt to smear the entire Republican party (and me) as “white supremacists.”

Mr. Truscott starts out like this:

There was a time when you didn’t run across names like Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, Jason Kessler, Arthur Jones, and Russell Walker in the press as often as you do these days. Who are these fine, upstanding Americans, you might ask? White supremacists, that’s who.

Mr. Truscott confidently tells us what these “white supremacists” are up to: They “believe that white people make up a superior race, and that all other races are inferior.” They propose “various ‘solutions’ to the ‘race problem’ in the United States, everything from sending all African Americans ‘back to Africa’ to denying anyone who isn’t white basic civil rights.” They “believe that blacks shouldn’t be allowed to vote.”

Mr. Truscott does not supply hyperlinks to justify this. He includes a link only when he calls Jason Kessler, who organized the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, a “self-described neo-Nazi and white supremacist.” Please click on the link. Mr. Kessler doesn’t describe himself that way at all.

And, of course, Mr. Truscott is wrong about me. I don’t have any of the views he ascribes to “white supremacists,” but Leftists seem to take pleasure in spreading their ignorance. Mr. Truscott also says I am a board member of the Council of Conservative Citizens—yet another error—this one straight from the unthinking-man’s-guide-to-the-dissident-right, Wikipedia. I served on the C of CC board in 1999 and 2000, so this information is out of date by only 18 years. Not bad for Wikipedia, which is notoriously resistant to correction from the Right.

I’m used to having my views distorted, and I suspect Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer are, too, but the purpose of Mr. Truscott’s article is not to convince SALON readers that we are moral inferiors; it’s to attack the Republican Party. You see, the other two people he mentioned in the opening line—Arthur Jones and Russell Walker—are Republican candidates who, for all I know, may even fit Mr. Truscott’s definition of a white supremacist.

Arthur Jones, running in the Illinois 3rd District, is a former leader of the American Nazi Party who won the Republican nomination only because no one else wanted it. He is a perpetual candidate and has never held office.

Russell Walker is running as a Republican for state rep in North Carolina’s 48th District. He has reportedly said on his website, “Well someone or group has to be supreme and that group is the whites of the world.”  (This, for the record, was Abraham Lincoln’s position.) He did win the Republican primary, but it is such a heavily Democratic district that Republicans don’t even campaign; Mr. Russell won with a total of 824 votes. Needless to say, the Republican Party has vigorously denounced both these men and is taking the very unusual step of asking Republicans not to vote for the Republican on the ballot.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop Mr. Truscott from writing as if the Republicans are foursquare behind them: “The Republican Party is fielding numerous candidates around the country who claim white supremacist views. Not the Democrats. The Republicans.” Mr. Truscott continues to tuck in to Republicans:

Voter suppression is real, and it’s a result of white supremacist beliefs. Our current immigration policy is racist and xenophobic and white supremacist at its core. . .. Efforts to end affirmative action in admissions at colleges come from a white supremacist urge to cling to power. . .. Now we have a president . . . who can’t wake up in the morning without drawing a white supremacist breath.

Mr. Truscott is no doubt at Donald Trump’s bedside every morning, monitoring his first waking breath.

And this leads to a climactic conclusion:

Impeaching Trump or defeating him in 2020 isn’t going to solve the problem of white supremacy. But voting against the white people’s party and driving their white supremacist followers back into the ratholes they came from is a good start.

A vote for Democrats is a vote against “white supremacy.”

This sort of thing says nothing about the Republicans, who are by no means “white supremacists.” If it says anything at all—which I would prefer it did not—it is exclusively about Lucian K. Truscott IV and the silly people who published him.

Mr. Truscott is an odd choice as a standard bearer for righteous indignation. He has admitted that when he was at West Point he smoked marijuana, and that as a commissioned officer he took mescaline. At the academy he was caught making $600 worth of long-distance calls on a stolen credit card number. He was such a poor soldier that he received an other-than-honorable discharge after only one year, at a time when the Vietnam War was still raging, thus wasting the military education that American taxpayers invested in him. Instead of fighting for his country, he made millions writing insulting books about the US Military Academy. [A Writer Once Shunned Returns to His Alma Mater, West Point, by Frank Bruni,  NYT, August 14, 1998]

Perhaps this is why Mr. Truscott goes on at such length to explain why, at age 71, he is now a moral authority and guide to “white supremacy”: He was one of the first white descendants of Thomas Jefferson publicly to champion the now-fashionable view that the third president sired a family of mulattos with his black slave Sally Hemings. Twenty years ago, he writes, “DNA results were published establishing with a high degree of certainty that Thomas Jefferson had fathered the children of his slave, Sally Hemings.”

Oh, dear. Anyone who has looked at the DNA evidence knows it proved only that Jefferson was not the father of Thomas Woodson—whose descendants made that claim—and that Sally’s youngest son Eston was fathered by some Jefferson.

There is a host of reasons, detailed here, here, here, and here, to suspect that Jefferson’s brother Randolph was Eston’s father. But the most definitive rebuttal of the Monticello-as-illicit-love-nest theory is The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission, first published in 2001 and reissued in 2011. With just one mild dissent, a group of eleven distinguished historians concluded that “our individual conclusions [about Jefferson as baby-daddy] range from serious skepticism to a conviction that it is almost certainly false.”

But why should Mr. Truscott let the conclusions of scholars prevent him from blackening the reputation of his ancestor in the hope that this makes him an expert on “white supremacy”?

I would like to believe that even “progressives” realize that though there really are people in America who disagree with them on the vexed question of race, it doesn’t justify deceiving themselves or their readers. Alas, one of the ugliest human instincts appears to be the compulsion to think of one’s opponents in the foulest terms. Mr. Truscott accuses “white supremacists”—including me, no doubt—of “denying people basic civil rights.” But if he believes that a vote for Democrats will drive me back into the “rathole” from which I came, I must wonder how he feels about granting me “basic civil rights.”

This is the problem with every crusade to rid the world of “hate.” It turns into the worst example of the very thing it fancied it was fighting.

Jared Taylor [Email him] is editor of American Renaissance  and the author of Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. (For Peter Brimelow’s review, click here.) His most recent book is If We Do Nothing: Essays And Reviews From 25 Years Of White Advocacy. You can follow him on Parler and Gab.