YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: The Left’s Broad, Bigoted Politics of Vilification.
I appeared on CNN Monday night to discuss the firestorm over the president’s caustic tweets last weekend criticizing the four most progressive members of the House of Representatives. I deemed the tweets illogical and shrill, and said so on Twitter and on Anderson Cooper’s show. I also pointed out that the overreaction from Democratic politicians and their media allies revealed a hysterical attempt to castigate the president as prejudiced. I cited the incredibly incendiary accusation of my CNN colleague Wajahat Ali who retweeted an article and its headline: “Trump is a racist. If you still support him, so are you.”
Such an immense and broad condemnation of tens of millions of Americans represents, itself, an intensely bigoted tactic. After all, utterly dismissing wide swaths of our society just because they do not share prescribed political preferences represents a wholesale effort to delegitimize and dehumanize; it’s a classic tactic to “otherize,” to borrow a term from the left. Paradoxically, liberals like Ali unveil their own inherent and systemic bigotry by belittling their fellow citizens, merely on the grounds of policy differences. Rather than engage and debate and persuade, the intolerant left chooses the politics of vilification. Their rash judgment deems the “unwashed rabble” of our America First movement as deplorables and racists, simpletons unworthy of real consideration.
When I pointed out this clear chasm between their professed tolerance and real-world bigotry, Mr. Ali admonished me, stating that white Trump supporters “will never love you … no matter how hard you try to be the Latin face of Trump, they will never love you.” This CNN commentator and New York Times writer shamelessly employed an old racist trope, essentially calling me an “Uncle Tom” for daring to be brown and pro-America First. His demeaning comment attempted to remove me of my agency and castigate me as some supplicant intent on pleasing my white betters.
In actuality, I do not view all politics, as Ali does, through the narrow prism of race, and I regard myself as an American citizen and a grown man with his own thoughts. Despite Ali’s disparagement, I am not a caricature seeking the ratification of whites. In fact, I care very little about anyone’s skin color and instead aggressively argue for a new American nationalism that rejects tribalism and instead focuses on citizenship and rejects globalism.
The mainstream identity politics-driven left really are the mirror image of the fringe alt-right.