One would think progressive Democrats would be euphoric. Having successfully put Joe Biden in the Oval Office after keeping him hidden in his basement in the months leading up to the election, he’s now popping his head up to signal four years of radical progressivism.

Yet leftists are as angry as ever, and even frightened, because their monster has not been slain. Worse, it’s increasingly difficult to even identify the monster at a glance.

In the 1982 cult classic “The Thing,” Antarctic researchers discover an alien life form — a black, oily goo — that can absorb into living organisms and perfectly imitate them. Their transportation destroyed, trapped in a frozen tundra, the researchers turn on each other, terrified that the person next to them is an alien ready to kill and assimilate them.

Such is the fear NYU history professor Cristina Beltrán and countless other progressives now face. It has shaken them to their very core, as evidenced by her recent op-ed in The Washington Post entitled, “To understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness.”

Yes, you read that right — “multiracial whiteness.”

As Beltrán explains, “Rooted in America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.”

To be clear, referring to Trump supporters, conservatives, and traditional-values Americans in general as “bitter” clingers, racists, homophobes, xenophobes, a “basket of deplorables,” and “just not very good people” is not dehumanization; that’s just speaking truth. Because, you know, Tolerance™ and Unity™.

And we guess that makes Nigeria’s Boko Haram (killing black Christians) and the communist Chinese (killing and enslaving the Muslim Uyghur minority) a bunch of “white supremacists.”

Beltrán and her ilk are truly stunned and amazed that, after years of relentless accusations of racism by the Democrats and the media (but we repeat ourselves), President Donald Trump increased his 2016 percentage of the minority vote — up 6% among black men, 5% among black women, 4% among Hispanic men, and 7% among Asian voters. Hispanic women stayed the same.

In order to explain away this impossible contradiction of minorities voting for Trump, progressives are forced to create a mythology where anyone who is evil is “white.”

After all, it must be a desire for “whiteness,” a desire to persecute others, that leads a minority to pledge fealty to the Bad Orange Man. It couldn’t possibly be because they supported and benefited from the Trump policies that led to the lowest black and Hispanic unemployment rate in U.S. history, or the five-fold increase in per capita income over the Barack Obama years. And it couldn’t be because Trump made America safer by cracking down on illegal immigration and reducing the flow of drug mules, gang members, and sex traffickers across the southern border. Or due to his investment of billions of dollars in Opportunity Zones in poor minority neighborhoods. Or because he pushed and signed criminal justice reform.

No, leftists say, it’s because these misguided minorities want to be white at any cost, even selling their souls.

This does make for some awkward clashes with reality though. While major news outlets described the Capitol protesters as a bunch of white supremacists rallying to their cult leader Trump, it’s harder to explain away the many Trump supporters who are, shall we say, melanin-enhanced.

As the Spectator put it, “There’s a small problem. Somehow, on their way to launching a neo-fascist takeover of the United States, the white supremacists ran out of whites. Simply looking at video of the Capitol riot, or looking at the FBI’s wanted images afterwards, makes it obvious that the mob of Trump die-hards were multiracial. The two most famous members of the Proud Boys, America’s premier ‘white nationalist’ group, are an Afro-Cuban and a Samoan. ‘Stop the Steal’ organizer Ali Alexander identifies as black and Arab.”

But how is it possible for brown and black people to be white supremacists? Because some of the melanin-endowed but intellectually unenlightened fall prey to the siren song of “colorblind individualism” and turn to evil.

So, to clarify, white people are responsible for all of the evil in the world. If you are white, you are racist, period, and denying your racism only proves how racist you are.

But if you are brown or black (or Asian or Pacific Islander), you are also “white” if you embrace a capitalist, pro-America philosophy. And if you don’t subscribe to the “woke” agenda of the Left, then you are, by default, embracing “whiteness” and therefore racism. Ergo, Thomas Sowell, a respected black Stanford economics professor, now becomes a white supremacist, but Shaun King, a progressive white activist from Kentucky who “identifies” as black, is not.

Luckily, Beltrán provides a path to redemption for “whiteness”: Embrace leftist ideology and vote Democrat. Imagine that.

Of course, this is all lunatic nonsense. Race, like sex, is genetically determined. And anyone who argues otherwise is lying or delusional. And when it comes to “persecution and dehumanization of others,” leftists lead the way.