A License To Hate
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Recently
on CNN, former Republican politico and now Never Trump cable new
analyst Rick Wilson characterized Donald Trump’s supporters as his
“credulous rube ten-toothed base.”
Wilson was not original in his smear of the 63 million Americans who
voted for Trump. He was likely resonating an earlier slander of Politico
reporter Marco Caputo. The latter had tweeted of the crowd he saw at a
Trump rally: “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d
get a full set of teeth.”
Was the point of these stereotypes that poor white working-class
people who supposedly voted for the controversial Trump understandably
ate improperly, did not practice proper dental hygiene, or did not visit
dentists—or all three combined?
When challenged, Caputo doubled down on his invective. He snarled,
“Oh no! I made fun of garbage people jeering at another person as they
falsely accused him of lying and flipped him off. Someone fetch a
fainting couch.”
Caputo’s “Garbage people” was also a synonym for the smears that two
career FBI agents on separate occasions had called the archetypical
Trump voters.
In the released trove of the Department of Justice text
communications involving the Clinton email probe, an unidentified FBI
employee had texted to another FBI attorney his abject contempt for the
proverbial Trump voter and indeed middle America itself: “Trump’s
supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS [“pieces
of sh*t”].” In fact, Trump in 2016 received about 90 percent of
all Republican votes, about the same ratio as won by both recent presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney.
In the now notorious text communications between Lisa Page and Peter
Strzok, fired FBI operatives on Robert Mueller’s special counsel team,
Strzok right before the 2016 election had texted his paramour Page:
“Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump
support.”
Recently actor Jim Carey tweeted a picture of Trump supporters as
apes, as if evolution is now operating in reverse as Trumpians descend
into primate status.
Rep. Hank Johnson (who on prior occasions had referred to Jewish
residents on the West Bank as “termites,” and believed that too many
American troops based on the shoreline of Guam might “tip” the island
over and capsize it) recently compared Trump to Hitler, and
characterized Trump’s supporters—which included 90 percent of the
Republican Party—as “older, less educated, less prosperous, and they are
dying early. Their lifespans are decreasing, and many are dying from
alcoholism, drug overdoses, liver disease, or simply a broken heart
caused by economic despair." For former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump
supporters are “virulent people” and “the dregs of society”.
Note the force of such dehumanizing invective that transcends
political differences. Trump voters were not just mistaken in their
political allegiances. Instead they looked like toothless zombies and
stunk up stores, and are not quite human, and are destined to die off.
And all this from supposedly progressive humanists, quick to demonize
others who would mimic their venom.
At about the same time as Wilson’s recent smear, multimillionaire TV
personality Donny Duetsch weighed in on television about the Trump
supporters who favor building a barrier on the southern border to
discourage illegal immigration:
“This is all [Trump] has left. That one metaphor, that one thing that
talks to that 39, 40, 41% base that says: either the black man, or the
brown man, or the Jewish man, or the media man, or the banker man is
coming to take your wife?” According to Duetsch’s analysis, were the
legions of Democrats—including Sens. Biden and Chuck Schumer—who
supported the Secure Fence Act of 2006 that authorized hundreds of miles
of border fencing, also worried over their virility or is just the
working middle class?
Both Wilson and Deutsch in the past had also characterized Trump
supporters as Nazi-like. Both, in lieu of any analyses of why or how
Trump got elected or has found success in restoring the economy to
robust growth, resorted to crude stereotypes of a constituency in a
fashion they knew would be exempt from criticisms of bias and crude
stereotyping. Similarly, for historian Jon Meacham and Rep. Stephen
Cohen (R-TN), Trump’s audience and appeal are similar to those of the Ku
Klux Klan’s of the 1920s.
The
New York Times takes loud pride in its adamant
opposition to hatred and racial, class, and gender bias—at least in
theory. That is why it both hired and understandably fired in the same
day tech writer Quinn Norton, once it discovered that she had remained
friends with notorious Alt-right racist Andrew Auernheimer, despite
claims of frequently disassociating herself from his repugnant views.
Yet the
Times hired and kept another tech writer on its
editorial board, the racist Harvard Law School grad Sarah Jeong. She had
not just befriended a racist, but was an abject hater herself—at least
if her twitter trove can be believed. But the difference was twofold,
Jeong was Asian-American, and the objects of her hatred were purportedly
old and white. And she apparently knew well that such a formula
provided her exemption from any criticism for expressing toxicity.
Indeed, Jeong was never shy about her crude dehumanizing venom: “Are
white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus
logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?”
And “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to
old white men.” And “White people marking up the internet with their
opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.” And on and on.
These outbursts were all voiced from highly educated elites (Caputo
has a journalism degree from the University of Miami, Deutsch graduated
from the Wharton School, Jeong from Harvard Law School, Strzok received a
master’s degree from Georgetown, Wilson attended George Washington
University). And all engaged in vicious and cowardly stereotyping of a
demographic in a manner that they assumed involved no downside. Rather,
the smears were delivered on the expectation of winning approbation from
their peers. And they did in twitter-fueled competitions to find the
crudest pejoratives.
For decades race and gender studies academics had argued that overtly
expressed racism against whites was not real racism, but could be
contextualized by prior white oppression. In the age of furor against
Trump, their theories now went off campus and were being adjudicated by a
wider constituency—and yet they did not seem to win agreement from the
general public. The irony, of course, is that these professionals
displayed far less humanity in their crude putdowns about smells,
toothlessness and apes than did the targets of their smears.
But the hatred was not confined to the media and politicos, but
rather also came from the very top of the Democratic Party. After the
election, a defeated Hillary Clinton openly doubled-down on her earlier
smear of Trump’s base as deplorables and irredeemables, in recalibrating
Barack Obama’s old saw of the white working class as “clingers” who had
failed to appreciate his transformative candidacy. Clinton told an
audience in Mumbai, India:
“I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving
forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking
backwards. You don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like
women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American
succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to
solve it.”
New York Times reporter Amy Chozick, who had followed the Hillary
Clinton 2016 campaign, wrote of the embittered inner Clinton circle:
“The Deplorables always got a laugh, over living-room chats in the
Hamptons, at dinner parties under the stars on Martha’s Vineyard, over
passed hors d’oeuvres in Beverly Hills, and during sunset cocktails in
Silicon Valley.”
What is again odd about these examples of open progressive racist,
cultural, and class contempt for the American interior, is not just how
ubiquitously politicians and journalists voiced them, but also how
candidly and indeed confidently they repeated notions of smelly,
toothless, ape-like, lazy “garbage people.” In that sense, who hated
Trump and what he represented also explains precisely why so many went
to the polls to elect him, and perhaps also why Trump’s own uncouthness
was in its own manner contextualized by his supporters as a long overdue
pushback to the elite disdain and indeed hatred shown them.
What does all this hate speech signify?
One, there is terrible frustration among both the progressive Left
(and the Never Trump Right whose luminaries have mused about replacing a
supposed spent white working class with purportedly more energetic
immigrants). So far Trump has not been stopped. His foreign and domestic
agendas often find success and resonate with about 40-45 percent of the
American people. Much of the uncouthness, then, reflects their own
frustrations and sense of alienation that millions of Americans have
tuned them out.
Second, most of the slurs are voiced by elites, especially politicos,
journalists, and celebrities. Perhaps their angst is driven by class—as
in how can their own superior logic and reasoning fail to resonate with
63 million voters? Answer: Trump voters are hopelessly obtuse to the
point that they cannot even take care of their own personal hygiene or
are now descending into simian status.
Third, cowardice plays a role. Those who slander the deplorables and
irredeemables assume that they can say almost anything and expect no
pushback, given the white working classes lack the romance of the poor
and the supposed panache of the elite. A race to the bottom develops in
which the more the hatred, the more the clicks and the media exposure.
Minority critics expect their own identity politics affiliations to
shield them from criticism. Wealthy white elites virtue-signal their
disgust for those without privilege as a way of ensuring that those like
themselves, who most certainly enjoy privilege, are rewarded with
ideological exemptions for it.
Finally, we are learning that the entire idea of political
correctness was never much about universal ideas of tolerance of the
other, or insistence that language and protocols must not stigmatize
individuals by lumping them into stereotyped and dehumanized collective
groups. What we are witnessing, instead, is that it is fine to demonize
millions, from their appearance to their purported hygiene and smell to
affinities with feces and apes—if it serves political or cultural
agendas.
In sum, cultural progressivism is about raw power, not principle.
