On Wednesday, it was learned that federal investigators had arrested a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant on weapons and drug charges last Friday. Lt. Christopher Paul Hasson, a self-identified white nationalist, had been stockpiling weapons in his Silver Spring, Maryland, apartment in preparations for his plan to instigate a race war. The charges referenced Hasson as “a domestic terrorist” who intended to “murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country.” In his own words, Hasson was “dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth.”

Hasson had created a specific hit list of “traitors” that included congressional Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, as well as Leftmedia personalities such as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and CNN host Don Lemon.

In a 2017 letter to “a known American neo-Nazi leader” following the deadly violence at the infamous racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Hasson wrote that he was “a long time White Nationalist, having been a skinhead 30 plus years ago before my time in the military. I fully support the idea of a white homeland… We need a white homeland as Europe seems lost. How long we can hold out there and prevent ni**erization of the Northwest until whites wake up on their own or are forcibly made to make a decision whether to roll over and die and stand up remains to be seen.”

Thankfully, the authorities arrested Hasson before he attempted to follow through on his murderous plot.

What examples like Hasson serve to expose is the underlying evil behind identity politics, whether it comes in the form of white nationalism or in more widely accepted forms like Black Lives Matter or the Women’s March. The evil of identity politics is fomenting rabid tribalism. It is the antithesis of constitutional conservatism, which espouses the God-given dignity, rights, and Liberty of each individual over that of any one identity group. An individual should be judged by actions and ideas, not identify-group classification.

The hatred of others based upon their immutable characteristics is not a conservative or politically right-wing perspective, even though the mainstream media often erroneously conflates the two — often with the help of the hate-baiting Southern Poverty Law Center. Instead, it is an expression of identity politics. (One party in America specializes in this, and it’s not Republicans.) By its very nature, identity politics highlights tribal grievances (real or imagined) and then uses these grievances to vilify and blame another targeted group as the “problem.” It seeks to pit groups against each other by preaching the flawed Marxist ethic of oppressor vs. oppressed, creating overly simplistic paradigms like bourgeois vs. proletariat or rich vs. poor. In Hasson’s case, that manifested as sociopathic white nationalism, and there’s nothing remotely “right wing” about it.