Earlier this week, Sen. Cory Booker said he wept “tears of rage” upon hearing about alleged comments from President Trump. He made the admission while berating DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for not remembering whether Trump had referred to certain countries as “sh–holes.” Trump denied making the statement, but as Ben Shapiro has explained, it wasn’t necessarily racist even if the reports were true. That didn’t matter to Booker.    

He went on to mention the president’s response after last year’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, arguing that those “words fester, they become poison, they give license to bigotry and hate in our country.” Booker next claimed that of the 85 extremist attacks resulting in death since 9/11, “73 percent were with people that hold hateful, bigoted ideas about minorities” while the remainder were perpetrated by Islamic terrorists. According to Booker, minority communities “live in fear,” and he seemed to suggest they’re the only ones confronted by racist violence.

The facts say otherwise.

For support, Booker cited a 2017 Government Accounting Office report, but that document has some flaws. As David French discovered, it incorrectly identified a black mass shooter as a white supremacist. What’s more, it contains no examples of racist attacks on whites; that’s not because they don’t happen.

In 2013, a Florida woman was beaten and burned alive; one of her killers said part of his motive was that he “hates white people.” A California man gave the same reason for murdering 3 whites the month that the GAO report was released. An Indiana suspect was charged in 2016 with killing an 82 year-old victim; he had previously made anti-white social media posts. Earlier that year, five cops were shot to death in Dallas by an individual wishing “to kill white people, especially white officers.” In Missouri, a man is suspected of killing as many as 5 white men between 2016 and 2017; he made comments online about wanting to “kill all white people.” These incidents aren’t exactly surprising, as the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report shows that whites are more often the victims of interracial killings than they are the perpetrators.

Further, minorities aren’t the only ones targeted by hateful rhetoric. Professor Johnny Eric Williams tweeted out that whites are “inhuman a–holes” who should “f—king die” (he remains employed at Trinity College). The founder of Toronto’s Black Lives Matter chapter labeled white people “genetic defects” as well as “sub-human.” And last year, a college newspaper in Texas told whites that their DNA “is an abomination” that “shouldn’t exist.”  

It’s true that racist violence is a horrific evil that no one should experience. What’s also true? No one is immune from it, either. That’s a truth Sen. Booker would do well to learn.