(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Using Dehumanizing Language #FPOTUS Has Pledged To Root Us All Out While Calling Us The Enemy Within [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-11-12 Defendant Trump spoon fed his loyal insurgents yesterday… The New York Times Former President Donald J. Trump, on a day set aside to celebrate those who have defended the United States in uniform, promised to honor veterans in part by assailing what he portrayed as America’s greatest foe: the political left. Using incendiary and dehumanizing language to refer to his opponents, Mr. Trump vowed to “root out” what he called “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within,” Mr. Trump said Saturday in a nearly two-hour Veterans Day address in Claremont, N.H. Anything to the left of them is an existential threat… Washington Post “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said toward the end of his speech, repeating his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. “They’ll do anything whether legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.” Trump went on further to state: “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within. Because if you have a capable, competent, smart tough leader: Russia, China, North Korea, they’re not going to want to play with us.” (snip) “The language is the language that dictators use to instill fear,” said Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “When you dehumanize an opponent, you strip them of their constitutional rights to participate securely in a democracy because you’re saying they’re not human. That’s what dictators do.” Y’all know how I feel about otherizing... New Republic His use—twice; once on social media, and then repeated in a speech—of the word “vermin” to describe his political enemies cannot be an accident. That’s an unusual word choice. It’s not a smear that one just grabs out of the air. And it appears in history chiefly in one context, and one context only. (snip) This is straight-up Nazi talk, in a way he’s never done quite before. To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101. Especially that particular word. (snip) Trump, let us clarify, does not mean Jews. He means some Jews—the ones who aren’t for him, which come to think of it is most Jews. And by the way, to drop that rhetorical bomb at this time, when antisemitism is raging across the country because of what’s happening in the Middle East, is especially outrageous. But Trump’s vermin are not a racial category. No, Trump’s rats are a much broader category, and in that sense an even more dangerous one—he means whoever manages to offend him while exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to register dissent and to criticize him. Trump means anyone that won’t kiss his ass… Salon “If we don't call out the rhetoric as extreme, we risk making it normal and acceptable,” Libby Hemphill, a professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information and the Institute for Social Research, told Salon. “Those are the downstream risks of desensitizing. Again, focusing on the impacts these statements have, like increasing antisemitic behavior generally or raising the temperature in the Middle East conflicts, helps people understand why they're dangerous, who they impact, and why speech matters.” (snip) “The coverage is normalizing extreme positions on issues and failing to challenge the dehumanization of migrants and ‘bad’ Jews that Trump paints as enemies,” Donald Haider-Markel, a University of Kansas political science professor who studies domestic extremism, told Salon. “When his dehumanizing comments are not challenged by the news media, viewers go along. If the dehumanization sticks, it makes support of political violence against ‘enemies’ more likely.” (snip) One-third of Republicans today believe that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats, according to a poll by PRRI that was published last month. Those percentages have increased since 2021, when 28% of Republicans and 7% of Democrats held this belief. It’s not like we didn’t see this coming... Forbes Trump’s populist appeal and incendiary rhetoric are often compared to Hilter’s cult of personality and authoritarian rule. Trump sparked widespread outrage last month when he accused undocumented immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” in an interview with the right-wing website, The National Pulse. “Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists,” Trump said, adding “It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt warned the statement “echoes nativist talking points and has the potential to cause real danger and violence,” he told multiple outlets, while the New York Times pointed out that several passages in Hilter’s “Mein Kampf” describe the “influx of foreign blood” as “poison.” Trump has reportedly studied Hilter and expressed admiration toward the Nazi dictator to people close to him. “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” he allegedly told former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly in 2018, according to New York Times reporter Michael C. Bender’s 2021 book, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” Trump has denied making the statement. His first wife, Ivana Trump, also told her lawyer that Trump kept a book of Hilter’s speeches by his bedside, according to a 1990 Vanity Fair piece published amid their split. Fucking fascists... [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/12/2205410/-Calling-Us-The-Enemy-Within-FPOTUS-Has-Pledged-To-Root-Us-All-Out-Using-Dehumanizing-Language?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/