So Are Words Violence, Or Are Words *Not* Violence?
Seems like there's a little bit of a flip-flop going on here.
For the last decade, at least, we have been hearing the Right defend the grotesque things they say about women, about men who are insufficiently macho, about Black people, about pretty much every nonwhite ethnic group, about gay people, about immigrants, about non-Christians, about imaginary Satanists, about transgender people, and so on, by saying that their words don’t harm anybody. Their hysteria doesn’t harm anybody, their conspiracy theories and spurious accusations of child molestation don’t harm anybody. After all, they’re just words.
This is not exactly true. We’ve had multiple mass murders from people who were upset about “The Great Replacement.” We’ve seen a man kill 23 people in an El Paso Walmart because he was mad at immigrants. During COVID, when they just could not stop themselves from wanting to blame the Chinese for everything, hate crimes against Asians practically doubled. We had a guy shoot up the CDC recently because he was mad at vaccines. We had 10,000 maniacs (not the band) violently invading Congress because someone told them that the election was stolen from them and they had a chance to “stop the steal.” Believers in QAnon and Pizzagate and other right-wing conspiracies have killed people, kidnapped children, killed their own children, derailed trains, attempted to assassinate Joe Biden, showed up at pizza parlors armed to the teeth and demanding to see a non-existent basement, etc. etc. Hate crimes against Latino people have increased exponentially in the last few years, likely driven by the Right’s anti-immigrant hysteria. Hate crimes against trans people and LGBTQ+ people in general have also gone way up. In fact, there are far more now than there have been in the last 30 years. Like, there were actually fewer hate crimes against gay people in the days where people were freaking out over Ellen coming out.
And yet, over and over they assured us that they were not responsible, because “words are not violence, violence is violence.” Note, we did not ask the government to silence these things, we just wanted for some communal social media spaces to be reasonably moderated when it came to hateful speech against protected groups and wild conspiracy theories of the kind that involve accusing people of being Satanic child molesters. We wanted to hold off on volatile news items until they were proven to be true. But they said no. Because words are not violence, violence is violence.
On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security issued an announcement demanding that people stop their demonizing of President Trump, his supporters, and DHS law enforcement agents — claiming that this is the cause of the recent shooting of Charlie Kirk and the attack on an ICE detention center yesterday by a 29-year-old guy from Texas and sometimes Oklahoma who either had to live with his parents or was going to have to move in with them, had no history of being even remotely political, and only managed to hit detainees, not agents. Even the New York Post is like “nah.” But hey! He wrote “Anti-ICE” on a bullet he didn’t fire, so clearly, he was inspired by things people were saying about ICE, while somehow missing the fact that the correct terminology would be “FUCK ICE” or “MELT ICE” or “ABOLISH ICE.” Makes sense!
“Following the evil act of political violence in the country this week and two brutal assaults on our brave ICE law enforcement last week, we are once again calling on the media and the far Left to stop the hateful rhetoric directed at President Trump, those who support him, and our brave DHS law enforcement,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “This demonization is inspiring violence across the country. Our ICE officers are facing a more than 1000 percent increase in assaults against them. We have to turn down the temperature before someone else is killed. This violence must end.”
I’m going to be very clear here.
If people are getting violent towards ICE officers, it’s not because we are “demonizing them.” It is because everyone can see, with their own eyes, what they are doing. Kristi Noem may think she looks totes adorbs frolicking around in her ICE Barbie outfits and hair extensions, but it is a deeply, deeply disturbing visual for anyone who thinks of these immigrants as human beings. No one needs to say “They look like the Gestapo” out loud, because they look, to anyone who has ever taken a world history course or watched a World War II documentary, like the Gestapo. They’re masked men dragging people off without identifying themselves, beating people, demanding to see papers, separating families, and sending people to far off lands where they don’t know anyone. There’s not a way to make that not horrifying.
Even with the Pokemon theme song.
Similarly, if it’s true that Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk because he said transphobic things — and we still don’t know whether or not it is! — he didn’t need the media or the Left to point that out. Because he could hear the vile things that Kirk said with his very own ears, could hear the way he was drumming up hate and fear against trans people.
It’s not like you can go around insulting people and doing terrible, violent things and no one will notice unless the big bad liberals point it out.
After the shooting, Utah Governor Spencer Cox was sure to say that “Words are not violence, violence is violence.” Many on the Right excitedly agreed that Kirk’s words, his desire to denigrate and oppress trans people, were simply his opinion and not violence. Tyler Robinson’s actions were violence. And then, shortly after that, the entire Right turned around and claimed that criticism of Kirk’s words were the real violence and what drove Robinson to kill Kirk. That the Left was responsible for what happened to him.
It seems that what the DHS wants — what all of the Right wants, essentially — is for Trump, his supporters, the DHS to be free to dehumanize people, free to say horrible, insulting things about people based on immutable characteristics like their sex, their race, their religion, their national origin, their sexual preference and gender identity. They want to be free to create laws that are oppressive to many of those groups, to allow for more discrimination against them. They want to roam our streets and violently kidnap our peaceful, hardworking neighbors.
And they want us to react by saying “Well, you know, that’s just their political opinion, and therefore we can’t really be insulted. It’s the exact same thing as if they liked a different baseball team! And lets just ignore all of that oppression, because we wouldn’t want to create a bad, Marxist, oppressor vs. oppressed dichotomy! They’re all wonderful, good-hearted people — and so attractive!”
They want the rules to be “If someone kills people because of what we say and believe, they’re just a crazy person and lone wolf, and it’s really really mean to try to say that we are responsible for something like that, even when our names are included in their manifestos,” but if someone like that sort of appears, if you squint real hard, to be on the Left? Then it is all of our faults, we are responsible for all of this for having said mean things about Trump and his supporters and his ICE agents.
Ultimately, they want everyone to just go along with them and to do whatever it takes to make them happy.
The fact is, their rhetoric is far more effective than ours is when it comes to this, even on some Democrats. As much as they whine that we have created a “victim” culture, in which people are celebrated just for being victimized, or something to that effect — they are far better able to frame themselves as victims than we are (while doing a hell of a lot of victimizing). I don’t know how to change that because I do not think that what works for them works for us. I am clearly too jaded to be able to pull off the “Oh! How could you say such terrible things about us when we’re only trying to help people? I am but an innocent rose who would never hurt anyone!” shuffle, even when that’s kind of factually true (except for the “innocent rose” part).
I’d like to say that these motherfuckers are going to have to decide whether words are violence or words are not violence, but they won’t. They will gleefully stick to a double standard in which their words can never be considered to be inciting violence but ours can, and remain entirely unbothered by the obvious double standard.
I guess just how things work when you are incapable of empathy?
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Splitting: If I approve of you, you can do no wrong. If I don’t approve of you, you can do no right.
Textbook abuser behavior. Look it up. We need to fucking call them by their names already.
The name that shall not be spoken headline of the day : Via Raw Story
"GOP lawmaker pushes to make mentioning 'West Bank' illegal"
Don't worry it only applies to Florida.