Why Hate Speech by Presidential Candidates is Despicable

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Why Hate Speech by Presidential Candidates is Despicable
by Robert Reich
November 30, 2015

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In suggesting that the staff of Planned Parenthood, Muslims, Black Lives Matter protesters, and Mexican immigrants are guilty of venal acts, these candidates are fanning the flames of hate.

On Friday, a gunman killed three at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. Later, in explaining his motive to the police, he said “no more baby parts.”

Last Monday, gunmen opened fire on Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis who were demanding action against two white Minneapolis police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Jamar Clark, 24, an unarmed black man, on Nov. 15.

Evidence shows the accused shooters were linked to white supremacist organizations operating online.

Meanwhile, the FBI reports an upturn in threats on mosques and Muslims in the United States.

In Connecticut, police are investigating reports of multiple gunshots fired at a local mosque. Two Tampa Bay-area mosques in Florida received threatening phone messages. One of the calls threatened a firebombing.

In an Austin suburb, leaders of the Islamic Center of Pflugerville discovered feces and torn pages of the Qur’an.

Hate crimes will never be eliminated entirely. A small number of angry, deranged people inevitably will vent their rage at groups they find threatening. Some will do so violently.

But this doesn’t absolve politicians who have been fueling such hatefulness.

Perpetrators of hate crimes often take their cues from what they hear in the media. And the recent inclination of some politicians to use inflammatory rhetoric is contributing to a climate of hate and fear.

Carly Fiorina continues to allege, for example, that Planned Parenthood is selling body parts of fetuses.

Although the claim has been proven baseless, it’s been repeated not only by Fiorina but also by other candidates. Mike Huckabee calls it “sickening” that “we give these butchers money to harvest human organs.”

Even in the wake of Friday’s Colorado shootings, Donald Trump referred to videos “with some of these people from Planned Parenthood talking about it like you’re selling parts to a car.”

Some candidates are also fomenting animus toward Muslims.

Huckabee says he’d “like for Barack Obama to resign if he’s not going to protect America and instead protect the image of Islam.”

Ben Carson says allowing Syrian refugees into the United States is analogous to exposing a neighborhood to a “rabid dog.” Last September Carson said he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.”

Since the attacks that killed 130 people in Paris earlier this month, Trump has advocated registering all Muslims in the United States and putting American mosques under surveillance.

He’s also claimed that Muslim-Americans in New Jersey celebrated by the “thousands” when the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, although there’s no evidence to back that claim.

Indeed, much of Trump’s campaign is built on hatefulness. And Trump not only fails to condemn violence he provokes but finds excuses for it.

After a handful of white supporters recently punched and attempted to choke a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his campaign rallies, Trump said “maybe he should have been roughed up.”

Trump began his campaign last June by falsely alleging Mexican immigrants are “bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Weeks later in Boston, two brothers beat with a metal poll and urinated on a 58-year-old homeless Mexican national. They subsequently told the police “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.“

But instead of condemning that brutality, Trump excused it by saying “people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again.”

I’m not suggesting Trump, Carson, Fiorina, or any other presidential candidate is directly to blame for hate crimes erupting across America.

But by virtue of their standing as presidential candidates, their words carry particular weight. They have a responsibility to calm people with the truth rather than stir them up with lies.

In suggesting that the staff of Planned Parenthood, Muslims, Black Lives Matter protesters, and Mexican immigrants are guilty of venal acts, these candidates are fanning the flames of hate.

This itself is despicable.

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The Media and the Right on the Planned Parenthood Attack: White Terrorism Falsehoods?
by Veena Trehan
December 2, 2015

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YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

The Planned Parenthood shooter is sadly a caricature of white terrorism, with beliefs and actions consistent with many others who pose the greatest terrorist threat to U.S. citizens.

It’s bleak out there for the right. The Paris climate conference is yielding scathing testimonies on our future of a scorched Earth. What may be the largest coverup over the police shooting of a black man (teen) has recently come to light. Students are questioning the names of college buildings, and five demonstrators were shot at the #blacklivesmatter protest, possibly with police complicity.

Then comes a gruesome attack at a Planned Parenthood clinic, the sixth in four months. Three individuals, including a policeman, were shot and killed at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood on Friday and nine others injured. The prime suspect, 57-year-old white man Robert Dear, represents a new white poster boy for violent and scary behavior. This is particularly awkward for the right as: 1) the Republicans have been whipping up anti-refugee hysteria by stoking fears of terrorism, and 2) Dear’s motivation appears consistent with lies peddled by the right about Planned Parenthood.

Fortunately, the right hasn’t had to deal with a Colorado Springs incident where three people were murdered with a gun since, let’s see … a month ago. Then lax gun laws contributed to the carnage, yet the mayor did not want to tighten “open carry” laws.

The Standard for White Christian vs. Brown Muslim Terrorism?

This latest Colorado Springs incident has many antecedents. Abortion clinics and providers have been targeted resulting in eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 42 bombings, and 186 arsons since 1977.

One would imagine Dear’s act would be an obvious case of terrorism: the use of violence or threat of violence to achieve a political or ideological goal. Yet the media and right wing again mostly suffer from “white terrorism falsehoods -> puzzlement and sadness response.” Sadly WTF->PASR is not yet in the DSM, because it’s well worth us paying $750 a pill to cure it.

More seriously, we must have a broader, “pro-life” discussion that uses consistent language and standards versus blatant fear-mongering. Terrorism has been the top US priority in the new millennium, with our “Global War on Terrorism” and its aftermath ringing up a $6 trillion price tag to supposedly save many American lives. Yet that wasn’t the case: millions have died globally, the world has become more dangerous, our privacy and civil rights have been eroded, and our ability to fund basic services here and abroad greatly diminished. And it has distracted us from focusing on an equal if not more important priority of terrorism is at home.

The farcical media and political response show why. They’ve twisted themselves in knots in their attempts to avoid classifying the act as terrorism, blatantly demonstrating their double standard for using the term. A public killing in the West by a Muslim man or men is immediately called terrorism. Media outlets do not, en masse, cast doubt on the motives of the shooting by multiple Muslim men. So why wouldn’t the “public violence” bar be high enough for a white man (particularly when right wingers kill twice at least twice as many Muslim extremists?) Even worse, this was the targeting of a nonprofit institution subject to increased violence as its activities have been intensely (and often inaccurately) debated. Can we imagine any case in which a Muslim man would target a highly politicized institution, killing several individuals, and it would NOT be deemed terrorism?

Finally, explicitly stating one’s motive is rarely, if ever, necessary to describe an attack by Muslim(s) as “terrorism.” Yet saying “no more baby parts” in this case is apparently not sufficient. Can one imagine a deeply Muslim guy shooting several police men and others at a prominent US synagogue saying, “No more Jews” and the media refusing to call it terrorism?

Let’s focus specifically on the target of this violence. Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides a spectrum of women’s health needs including abortion (which is not federally funded), is the most politicized institution in this country. The Republicans were willing to threaten a government shutdown over federal funding for Planned Parenthood, despite last one costing $24 billion. A number of states have tried to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood. Carly Fiorina lied about a supposedly damning Planned Parenthood video in the September Republican debate. Subsequently Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards was called to testify before Congress where she was interrupted 44 times by Republicans and berated by Rep. Jason Chaffetz over a Planned Parenthood corporate chart that … didn’t exist. Various investigations have not found ANY illegal activity, despite candidates’ repeated and defamatory suggestions to the contrary. Fortunately, Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders correctly and importantly tied the apparent motives of the attack to Republican rhetoric the next day; Petula Dvorak and others have also.

The Response of the Media and the Right

Broadly speaking, the right has trotted out the explanation they use when white men commit terrorist acts against the minorities or groups they revile daily. The shooter is “deranged” and “mentally ill” (though the threat of removing guns conversely is used to rile up their base.) From the left to the right, the media echoes that we don’t know the gunman’s motive. One almost expects the mainstream media to speculate that he said, “no more baby stroller parts,” accidentally ending up at Planned Parenthood instead of Babies “R” Us.

So too to date have most politicians and mainstream media avoided discussing the fact that 99 percent of mass shooters are men, many with issues about their masculinity. Even though journalist Amanda Marcotte tweeted: “As soon as I heard about the shooting, I said, ‘Middle-aged man, romantic failure.’ Why I was able to predict it.”

The media also used the softer words for white “gunmen.” A New York Times breaking news alert on Tuesday titled their article, “The suspect in the Colorado rampage was a recluse who longed for women, and mixed religion with rage.” Ironically, the article itself discusses him raping a woman who wasn’t interested in him, violently abusing his wife on multiple occasions, buying a gun, gambling, expressing extreme anger … and calling those who attacked abortion providers “heroes,” and saying they are “doing God’s work.”

The Presidential Candidates’ Responses

Surprisingly, the security-promoting Republican presidential candidates now have little to say on the relevance of terrorism or guns. This is despite one study that showed Americans are seven times more likely to be killed by a right-wing terrorist than a Muslim extremist, and another that found similar countries have 5 percent as many homicides using guns as the U.S.

Instead, they’ve gone from excoriating Planned Parenthood to more of the same or WTF->PASR.

In the September debate, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina talked about having seen the harvesting of fetal tissue while “a fully formed fetus [lies]on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking.” While this was shown to be a total lie, the killer’s motive is entirely consistent with such a myth. Now Fiorina calls the Planned Parenthood attack “a tragedy, especially on a holiday weekend” (?!) by someone who was “deranged” and talked about how the “left-wing” should not be “demonizing the messenger.” As a messenger delivering lies to 23 million Americans about a clinic that has been the victim of numerous terrorist attacks, Fiorina deserves to be demonized.

She is among most Republicans candidates who choose to ignore an important reality: fetal tissue, used for stem cell research, is valuable to doctors and survivors alike for its promise of curing Alzheimer’s, diabetes and other diseases. In fact, Former First Lady Nancy Reagan championed President Obama’s lifting of restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Republican front-runner Donald Trump said “all of the videos they’ve seen with some of these people from Planned Parenthood, talking about [harvesting fetal tissue] like you’re selling parts to a car.” While he said some tapes aren’t pertinent, he repeats that there are “many [such] tapes” without providing any references (for the Trump campaign to “Make America Hate Again” truth is no barrier, as it wasn’t in his reversed white-on-white crime statistics or Muslim 9-11 celebrations he lied about.)

Ted Cruz called Planned Parenthood a “criminal enterprise” responsible for “multiple felonies” during a September Republican debate (a lie that might yet prove an accurate descriptor for his wife’s former employer Goldman Sachs who has settled for hundreds of millions, or corrupt US private contractors in Iraq.) He appeared to back plans to shut down the government over funding of Planned Parenthood, amping up the rhetoric against it. Yet he now calls the shooting “unacceptable, horrific, and wrong” with a toll including the “one officer who lost his life [as] particularly tragic”(?!), apparently discounting the Hawaiian mother or African-American Iraq War veteran who also were killed.

Dr. Ben Carson called it a “hate crime” and for a “rational discussion” instead of wanting to “destroy those with whom we disagree,” a softer stance for the new neurosurgeon who now likes Syrian refugees who stay in the Middle East.

The Democrats have done better. Bernie came out first on Saturday, in a statement about the “the vicious and unsubstantiated statements” which included, “I strongly support Planned Parenthood and the work it is doing and hope people realize that bitter rhetoric can have unintended consequences.” Hillary Clinton slammed Republicans from blocking a vote on barring those on the no-fly list to buy guns, and called for background checks. She also voiced support for Planned Parenthood, two days after Sanders’ statement. Her contribution was positive albeit late, yet given more positive and higher placement by CNN. We don’t know what our fellow citizens make of the article as CNN has cut off comments since commenters cited parent Time Warner’s connection to Sen. Clinton as potentially linked to the debate coverage biased in her favor. Martin O’Malley called the act “domestic terrorism” and highlighted other American gun massacres and the need for action.

Yet still not enough political and media leaders are calling it what it was, terrorism by a coward who didn’t have the confidence or integrity to use speech. An act of barbarity by a person who appears to believe extreme rhetoric and widely propagated lies of the right. A man who had issues with his masculinity and committed domestic abuse and other violent crimes. Someone who is sadly a caricature of white terrorism, with beliefs and actions consistent with many others who pose the greatest terrorist threat to U.S. citizens.

This act should also open a larger discussion: on what we spend fighting terrorism at home vs. abroad and why; on whether we spend on health, jobs, and education vs. weapons; on access to guns in a culture that glorifies them and how to regulate and end these copycat sprees. A conversation on white men who are committing rampant violence in crimes of terrorism and hate, their twisted psychology and radical ideologies, and how to stop them.

In the meantime, undoubtedly to the chagrin of the backward right, Oregon and California are making birth control available over the counter.