The left now roundly denounces anyone to the right of Jeb Bush as a “white nationalist,” which it appears is now being equated with “white supremacist,” with the apparently immortal Adolph Hitler acting as the once-and-future ringleader of a group of bad guys and gals that includes everyone from George Washington and Betsy Ross to John Wayne, as well as every single Trump voter, white or not.

In hearings before Congress last year to address the perceived threat of white supremacy, corporate bigwigs representing internet and social media platforms, who have not exactly been lax in their suppression of the right, including the vegetarian mainstream “conservative movement,” duly gave the Congressmen assurances they would do more to suppress speech by putting a high-tech gag on folks that both the Al Sharpton and Che Guevara wings of the Democratic Party—and Chamber of Commerce Republicans, for that matter— regard as “Nazis.” That is, anyone who still risks life, limb, and career by espousing political and social views once held by all conservatives, as well as a number of liberals, until very recently.

While it’s true that some Republican panel members did defend free speech, it was black conservative Candace Owens who got around to telling us what the left is actually up to. Owens noted that the “hearing” was meant to be a kangaroo court, it wasn’t about “hate crimes,” but about “fear-mongering, power, and control.” The hearing was, in fact, “a preview of a Democrat 2020 election strategy—the same as the Democrat 2016 election strategy.” The left, said Owens, feared that it had lost control of the “narrative,” and wished to censor dissent. Owens also correctly pointed out that if it’s political violence you are looking for, then look no further than the thuggish activities of the largely white militant group Antifa. What Candace Owens was getting at, of course, is that the left seeks to rally its unstable coalition of competing grievances around an anti-white and implicitly (when not explicitly) anti-Christian banner, which acts like a red cape waved in front of a bull. Resentment, envy, and old hatreds can work wonders for a coalition whose diversity threatens its stability.

The message is pretty clear by now: the old America was wholly evil and deserves to be finished off. This is the America that, for all its faults, some of us recall fondly as an oasis of stable families, regional cultures, a still largely healthy popular culture, and a politics of decorum and respect. The old Americans must be overwhelmed by mass immigration to achieve their aim. It’s small wonder that the “white death” (a wave of opioid overdoses and suicides that have helped push life expectancy downward, with white America’s death rates outpacing births) is greeted with glee by some and silence by others. The silence is telling, as telling as the fact that our Congress now includes people like Ilhan Omar (of “some people did something” on 9/11 fame), who represents a district in what used to be Minnesota, and that the hearing included a spat between post-Americans Mohammad Abu-Salha and Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, arguing over what was worse, “Islamophobia” or the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement directed against Israel. It’s too bad that Andrew Yang, the only presidential candidate to bring up the disaster of white mortality rates, wasn’t around—and it’s also too bad that only an Andrew Yang can bring up the crisis without instantly being labelled a “white nationalist,” though surely Yang has set himself up for at least a struggle session over his sympathy for “white supremacy.”

It’s also unfortunate that core Americans, or “Middle Americans,” if you prefer, don’t have a name for themselves. “White” is considered a dirty word nowadays, and the time when a reference to “Americans” meant the George Washington-Betsy Ross-Daniel Boone prototypes, as well as subsequent European immigrants who assimilated into the country they made, is long past. These are the people who, in late January, were mocked on CNN by Republican political strategist Rick Wilson as “the credulous Boomer rube demo[graphic] who backs Donald Trump.”Encouraged by CNN host Don Lemon’s hysterical laughter at these insults, Wilson continued, calling the base of Middle Americans who voted for Trump too stupid to read, do math, or understand geography.

All polities that exist as structures established by and for a particular people have an ethnic core. The core may absorb outsiders in manageable numbers if the others are not too dissimilar to the core group, and pre-1965 America likely reached the outer limits of what was possible for a core ethnic group’s assimilation of large numbers of immigrants. Race is a part of ethnicity, though not the whole of it, as language, religion, shared history, and culture, right down to the clothes they wear, the foods they eat, and the stories they tell, all figure as integral parts of a people’s identity. As our country’s ethnic core is steadily reduced to just one group among an increasingly fractured and diverse “majority minority” society, what remains is a volatile collection of often mutually antagonistic tribes occupying the same geographic space.

For comparison, think Afghanistan, Iraq, or the racially stratified states of Latin America. The left appears to think this balkanization of America is a desirable state, chanting their mantra, “Diversity is our strength!” Meanwhile, a large part of the economically focused right is incapable of conceiving of people of any race or ethnicity as anything more than economic units in a produce-and-consume nexus.

The fact that ethno-national groups are fuzzy around their racial-ethnic-cultural edges, and can overlap with other groups —think of the “Anglo-sphere,” for example—does not mean that they do not have a real existence. And the fact that African-Americans or American Indians are part of our national story does not negate other facts: the national core of the country is Western and white, and the social, economic, and political structures that make up America as such were established by that core. Thus, the attacks on “white supremacy” include arguments that cultural inheritances of Western culture are “white”: that freedom of speech is “white,” the presumption of innocence is “white,” the rule of law is “white,” even timekeeping and mathematics are “white” and therefore illegitimate. This follows because “the white patriarchy” responsible for those cultural artifacts is the agent of all oppression, at least according to the ideology of cultural Marxism that has possessed and replaced conventional liberalism and even old-fashioned leftist class-based politics.

As the postmodernists relentlessly remind us, words matter. The lack of a widely accepted word for core Americans leaves them largely defenseless to the cultural Marxist onslaught—or has forced them to capitulate to the ideological premises of their enemies, and descend into self-loathing. “White” has been seized by the left as a hate term, while the term “American” is now largely equated with citizenship, undercutting core Americans’ sense of ethnic identity. This is why core America tends to defend itself only feebly by clinging to constitutionalist procedural and political language, Reaganite “free market conservatism,” and thanking the troops for their service. These are all statements of a patriotism they take to be clear of racial overtones, but are, as our enemies recognize, implicitly expressions of core American identity. This latent sense of identity was also evident in core Americans supporting George W. Bush, and then voting for Donald Trump eight years later. These same people tend to idolize Ronald Reagan. A large number of them have probably never grasped the policy contradictions that at least superficially separate these men—their votes for them were not so much expressions of explicit policy support as they were largely unconscious expressions of identity. Thus, to the cultural Marxists, Trump’s civic nationalism built around the concept of “Make America Great Again” is also supposedly racist, and a black conservative like Candace Owens is herself cast as a tool of “white supremacy,” as she expresses her viewpoints in core American political language.

The deconstruction of America thus continues apace. We can call ourselves “Core Americans” or “Middle Americans”—or even White Americans if we dare—but whatever we call ourselves, we had better realize that our enemies will not be satisfied by anything less than our complete capitulation and the subversion, if not extirpation, of all our institutions, which are inescapably part of our ethnic heritage.