As Americans who recognize the equal place under God of every person, and under law of every citizen, whatever his background, would we find it acceptable if conservative organizations started cooperating with white nationalists?

What if Republicans organized protests against left-wing campus speakers employing violent gangs of whites who wanted to stop non-whites from having children, because they regard other races as a plague on our species?

What if a conservative newspaper employed a spokesman for a radical white racist group, and he wrote on social media that all black men are a threat to public safety? Or if the co-founder of that organization described non-whites as genetically defective, the result of destructive mutations? Imagine if groups with racist agendas like these had instigated riots after the election of President Obama.

No one would need to wait for the social justice left to be outraged at such uncivil, hateful, and destructive abuse of free speech. People from all across the spectrum, including every Christian conservative leader in the country, would step forth to distance themselves from these ideas, and demand that the relevant GOP officials and conservative leaders who’d cooperated with those racists be removed from their positions.

So why are we hearing crickets from Democratic and liberal leaders about the thuggish tactics of the “Antifa” (supposedly anti-fascist) demonstrators who rioted at UC Berkeley when Milo Yiannopolis tried to speak by invitation? Since these groups’ attack on Constitutionally protected free political speech at a college campus doesn’t seem to bother anyone on the high-minded left, maybe this news will: The “Antifa” group in Seattle appears to have posted fliers warning white people not to have children:

We’ve been warned, everybody! pic.twitter.com/yEVlejHHHp

— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) February 3, 2017

Just an isolated incident that might have been a fake? Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so. But there’s evidence that such attitudes go far beyond Seattle. The Toronto Sun reports that Yusra Khogali, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, revealed the same racist agenda, aimed at eliminating white people:

Even professional journalists feel emboldened to engage in such dangerous talk. Shaun King, a highly visible activist in Black Lives Matter who works for a mainstream liberal tabloid, The New York Daily News, responded to the appalling news that former Penn State athletic coach Jerry Sandusky’s son has been arrested for sexually abusing children (as his father did) with this uplifting reflection:

Until white men are banned from America, I will never believe that Donald Trump really cares about making America safe. https://t.co/xxsYb9aQYQ

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) February 13, 2017

We have already seen that colleges are removing writers like Shakespeare and Milton from reading lists, solely because they are white men. MTV published a public service announcement in which non-whites and women told white men how to rectify their misbehavior in public. (You might enjoy The Stream‘s tongue-in-cheek response: “My 2017 Resolutions for Minorities and Women.)

But really, there’s nothing funny at all about this kind of divisive rhetoric, or the dangerous undercurrents of group hatred that underlie it. What we’re seeing is the tip of the iceberg, the statements and actions of those who feel bold and secure enough to vent their secret feelings in public. Such open expression of ethnic hatred, unrebuked and virtually unanswered, is profoundly destructive. It’s the kind of talk we saw in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, as the prelude to organized violence.

The whole point of the Civil Rights Movement was to remove the question of race from issues of citizenship, to exorcise at last the demon of tribalism from American public life. Those claiming to speak on behalf of minority groups, who lapse into language that would have made racists like Margaret Sanger proud, are betraying everything that Civil Rights demonstrators worked, fought, and died for.