They "saw with dreadful clarity things that did not exist"

This is maybe just a tad overstated:

The present blooming fantasy of white victimization has roots in the peculiar violent institutions of the 19th-century American South. In the distant mirror of history, it’s easy to spot the irony and the guilt: even before the Civil War began, whites worried that their slaves would rise up and repay their masters in kind — filch the fruit of their labor, rape them, and beat them, sometimes to death. As soon as the balance of power shifted and news of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse circulated throughout the former slave states, those fears ran amok. Mark Summers, a historian of the disastrous “Reconstruction” that condemned recently freed blacks to another century of oppression, has observed that the South, unlike the North, had no truly independent newspapers or magazines. What fair and balanced organs then existed reported rumors and falsehoods, like the arrival of a “liberating” French army sent by Napoleon III the same week of Lee’s surrender, or the forced seizure of former plantations by mobs of roving blacks. In Summers’s telling phrase, “the white south saw with dreadful clarity things that did not exist.” * * *

The most enduring behaviors of nations, like the hardest-to-break habits of individuals, are those we are least aware of. The new racists — that is to say, “concerned citizens” of Caucasian descent — seem only dimly conscious of past American racism, an ignorance no doubt unconsciously maintained, but more potent for that. Journalists for supposedly liberal publications like the Times and the New Republic have sought “actual racists” in the Tea Party movement and, because no one would say the N-word on the record, duly exonerated the Tea Partiers of racist intent. In exchange, Tea Party spokespeople acknowledge that the odd unreconstructed crank might turn up at one of their rallies. It’s a free country. All the reporters could find was that self-identified Tea Partiers were more likely than most Americans to pick a poll option asserting that “too much attention has been paid to problems facing Black Americans.”

Ostensibly, then, all the Tea Partiers want are the same contradictory things that most real Americans want: Medicare benefits, disproportionate federal spending on rural districts, and no taxes. As a T-shirt puts it, “I’ll keep my guns, money, and freedom, you can keep the ‘Change.’” But the summer’s events show that the defense of unthreatened freedoms counts for less than an apparently widespread white wish to make more out of their difficulties than other people. This is no longer a culture war, a revolt of stoics against the “culture of complaint,” but something deeper and older that precedes the identity politics movements it aims to subvert. Forty-two years after the Civil Rights Act, white people who still think of themselves predominantly as “white people” want to air their grievances with the aid of a social movement. One half of what passes for American two-party discourse calls now for another rebirth of a nation: the Caucasian States of America, a postmodern ethno-nationalist republic.

But the part about whites' fears of "repayment in kind" reminded me of a notorious Goebbels quote:

Behind the oncoming Soviet divisions we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them terror, the specter of mass starvation and complete anarchy.

Of course, this is a direct projection onto the "Jewish Bolsheviks" the actual "Jewish liquidation commandos" who followed the German divisions in 1941 -- commandos who liquidated Jews. The dreadful clarity with which Goebbels saw this peril was the clarity of the mirror.

... Goebbels was also an early critic of "political correctness":

We also know our historic responsibility. Two thousand years of Western civilization are in danger. One cannot overestimate the danger. It is indicative that when one names it as it is, International Jewry throughout the world protests loudly. Things have gone so far in Europe that one cannot call a danger a danger when it is caused by the Jews.

I'm really afraid to read any more of that Sportpalast speech I linked -- it might sound more and more familiar.