I don’t know where the term “alt-right” originated, but it masks the reality, like so many right wing buzzwords. “Pro-life”, “ethic cleansing”, “school choice”, “job creators”, and “death tax” come to mind.
When a new word is substituted for the tried and true, it hides the reality, because it is free of the associations that ride on the back of the old terms. In the case of the “alt-right” we have a virtual smorgasbord of terms that are more appropriate: racist; fascist; misogynistic, come to mind right away.
It is also emphatically the case that the media loves to adopt neutral sounding terminology for purveyors of hate; it makes their primary job: casting each side as equally bad, so much easier. Of course, that doesn’t apply to Fox, but that’s okay, since they’re in the tank for Republicans, who forced the rest of the media into the false equivalence pose in the first place.
Here’s a bit of the process at work. A Trump surrogate argues on air that Hillary is herself a bigot for branding every member of the alt-right as a racist because, after all, not everyone who reads the Huffington Post is a communist, so not every Breitbart reader is a racist. They’re not racists, they’re just “God-fearing, baby-loving, gun-toting, military-supporting, school choice-advocating Americans!”.
Can you spot the logical flaw there? If not, stop reading this blog, you just can’t cut it.
This particular racist got some pushback when he spewed this bullshit, but one must ask why someone is permitted on air to mouth this nonsense in the first place. Apparently, it is now the standard line: How dare you imply that a movement that explicitly appeals to bigotry is totally infested with bigots, when it’s entirely possible that some of those bigots are not omni-bigoted, but are more focused in their bigotry.
But this fellow inadvertently pointed to something that is a bit of a departure for the Democrats. I haven’t read Hillary’s speech, but from what I hear, this racist was right: she made the connections fairly clear. She called the “alt-right” out for exactly what it is. It is to be hoped that the Democrats will continue to do so, by linking the term every time they use it with something people already understand. While they’re doing it, they should be attacking the broadcast media (the print media has been much better) for its failure to do the same. The beltway media won’t change its behavior unless it comes under the same sort of attack from the Democrats as the Republicans have used against it for years.
Post a Comment