In the upcoming piece, Karlyn and I are working on, there is always a delicate balance between being technically accurate and being able to reach your audience. For me, it has been an interesting internal battle throughout my whole career. It is the reason I detest my colleagues in the journalistic field — not the exclusive reason! — when they use the incorrect one-size-fits-all phrase 'White Supremacists' for anyone the narrative threaders describe as being on the far-right — increasingly anyone to the right of Mao. This is at best lazy and at worst, damaging.

'White Supremacy' has been diluted by the left to the point where it lacks all meaning or authority. I have been called it many times, to my dismay. One must learn that it no longer means what it once had and denying it the permission of having any impact is the only way to deal with that situation. In its purest form, the term defines a very specific ideology and is one strand of 'Supremacy'. A supremacist believes a particular genetic — race in the case of White Supremacists — or cultural characteristics are superior to all others.

White Nationalism on the other hand is one strand of the overarching tent of Nationalism. Nationalism itself was born out of the French Revolution and in the past was associated with liberal and progressive movements. While most would align with nationalism — Civic Nationalism, to be precise — it is only when one places an adjective as to describe who one defines the nation to be for — as seen in ‘White’ Nationalism — it moves towards ethnic nationalism and as a result, becomes exclusionary and fascistic. White Nationalism is the belief that the nation should be exclusively for whites, just as Chinese Nationalism believes that the Chinese people are the nation. Same for Black Nationalism.

Of course, this is a very simplistic summation of the heritage of these two words, however, it stands to illustrate the necessity for accurate language when language is the most powerful tool both we and our adversaries wield.