(July 22) The media is helping President Trump’s reelection effort by its constant, obsessive, nearly unhinged determination to tell their audience for the 2,965th time that Trump’s tweets about four radical congresswomen were “racist.”
At least three respected polls, including one just out today, have shown the backlash those tweets — in Trump’s favor. I immediately predicted this would happen if the media persisted in its passionate, unprofessional behavior of affixing the “racist” label to the tweets as if the label were straight news rather than an opinion.
As I explained last week, words matter, and wolf cries eventually cause people to get angry at the crier. The word “racist” in particular has been so overused as a pejorative that plenty of nonracist people at least tune it out and sometimes revolt against it.
In this case, if the observer sees Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar primarily as “women of color,” then the nasty Trump tweet appears aimed at their “color,” which in these “woke” days often is misused as a stand-in for “race.” Yet if the observer doesn’t look at everything first and foremost through a racial or colorized lens, what the women have in common isn’t their supposed pigmentation similarities but their radicalism.
Telling a radical to leave the country if they hate America seems, to many eyes, to be childish and even nativist, but not a racist way to make an otherwise valid point. Witness, for example, the eight Republican women who insisted to CNN’s clueless Randi Kaye that Trump’s tweets weren’t racist, no matter how much she expressed incredulity and even hectored them to affix that label.
While telling a black American to “go back to Africa” is clearly a racial reference, telling a radical to go back to her family’s country of origin is, well, just anti-radical. …
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