The weaponization of words and the threats to our democracy
22nd August 2022 · 0 Comments
Republicans weaponize words to stoke racial hatred and fear and drive voters to the polls. From Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens,” George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton,” to Donald Trump Sr.’s “Birtherism” lie about former President Barack Obama and verbal attacks on immigrants, white male Republicans continue to play the race card to get elected.
Their “southern strategy” – race baiting – works; along with partisan gerrymandering and the weaponization of words protect the political longevity of America’s white population, soon to be the minority in the coming decades.
Donald Trump Sr. won 74.2 million popular votes in the 2020 election. This tells us all we need to know about how many voters share the former president’s weaponized, racist code words.
“Black Lives Matter,” “Antifa” (Anti-Fascist), “Critical Race Theory,” and “Woke” have been weaponized into code words relative to Black voters and pro-Democracy agendas.
Turning positive words like “liberal,” and “progressive,” even “democrat” into negatives, wrapping them in lies, have proven fruitful for Trump-backed loyalists aiming to take over the secretary of state offices to potentially steal the 2024 presidential election.
Right-wing extremist Steve Bannon, who the former, twice-impeached, disgraced former President Trump pardoned, turns negative words into positives. He encourages people to “wear ‘racism’ as a badge of honor,” as he threatens on his podcast to “deconstruct” the American government and replace it with a white nationalist government.
And while followers of Trumpism embrace “nationalism,” they’re smart enough to drop the modifier: “white.” Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene described herself as a “Christian Nationalist.” However, Greene’s bill to give Kyle H. Rittenhouse a Gold Medal of Honor exemplifies her white nationalism bona fides. Rittenhouse killed two Jewish men at a Black Lives Matter protest.
U.S. Congressman Paul Gosar, a dentist from Arizona, called the FBI “Brown Shirts” (invoking images of Nazis). Gosar says he supports a “complete dismantling and elimination of the “Democrat brown shirts known as the FBI.”
Clearly, most Trump acolytes want to forget FBI Director Christopher Wray’s 2019 warning that the greatest threat to the nation is domestic terrorism carried out by white nationalists.
Tucker Carlson called white supremacy a “hoax.” “There’s no evidence that white supremacists were responsible for what happened on January 6,” Carlson said in March 2021. “That’s a lie.”
Carlson was responding to the testimony of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who put some of those arrested for their actions at the Capitol in the category of “racially motivated violent extremism, white (nationalists) as well.”
We won’t forget Wray’s warning. White nationalists won’t let us.
The shouts coming from the so-called right for violence and “Civil War” and their support of “1776” speaks to a desire to return to the days of slavery when it was legal to own (the libs?) human beings and consider the enslaved as inferior.
Those were the days when white nationalism and white supremacy were realities, when white males ran the federal government and every industry in the U.S., enslaved people had no rights, were forbidden to learn how to read, and freedom was a dream.
White nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhites. Groups listed in various categories – Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead, and Christian Identity – could also be fairly described as white nationalist, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
White nationalists were the insurrectionists who tore up the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. One white supremacist marched through Congress carrying a vast Confederate flag, reminding us that the desire to recoup The Lost Cause (the defeat of the Confederacy during the Civil War) is alive and well.
Black and Brown Americans now know that the one-third of the electorate that is racist wants to take our rights away, especially our voting rights.
We must vote to stop them. We must vote against racists. We must vote for democracy. We must for our constitutional rights.
This article originally published in the August 22, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
