It started with the deplorables.
The term originated late in the 2016 presidential election when Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton used it as a descriptor for supporters of Donald Trump. They quickly embraced it; to this day, you see people identify themselves as “deplorable” as a way of saying “an unapologetic supporter of Donald Trump.”
But from the outset, it was misconstrued. Clinton never said that Trump supporters were universally deplorable. She said that some of Trump’s supporters — half, in her original formulation — were deplorable in that they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” Later, she tweaked the assertion, describing the statement as “grossly generalistic” and admitting that “half” was too large a percentage. But the damage was done.
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Trump was among those who treated Clinton’s statement as a broad disparagement of his base, tweeting that it was “SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people.” In other words, Trump was encouraging his supporters to align themselves with or see themselves as the targets of Clinton’s disparagement — that is, as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic.
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There’s an obvious reason for this. Trump ran as the anti-elite candidate and Clinton’s remarks were easy to repurpose as elitist disparagement of his real-America base. It was President Barack Obama’s “clinging to guns and religion” line — fodder for an enormous amount of conservative teeth-gnashing — but more pejorative and much more expansive. It was those coastal liberals once again looking down their noses at regular people, and Trump encouraged the regular people to own the disparagement.
Since then, this has come up repeatedly. It came up this week, in fact, in a very specific and very bizarre way.
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Here, for example, is venture capitalist and author J.D. Vance, candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio, demanding that Attorney General Merrick Garland resign his position for treating “moms” as a threat.
Reading that statement without knowing what Garland actually said should hopefully prompt you to be a bit skeptical. The attorney general thinks mothers are a threat because they’re mad about “critical race theory”? If you’re a little bit tuned into the political conversation, you should be hearing more alarm bells; “critical race theory” has broadly become a right-wing euphemism for “classroom lessons about race” and has been elevated repeatedly on Fox News as a mortal threat to the nation.
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If you actually read the memo from Garland that triggered this, though, you see that he was not expressing concern about parents speaking at school board meetings, as Vance might have you believe.
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“In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools,” the memo reads. He acknowledges the important role of the First Amendment in the political process but assures local law enforcement officials (to whom the memo is addressed) that the Justice Department “takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate.”
In other words, the department is focused on threats of violence aimed at pressuring school officials, not simply criticism. Nor is his memo about critical race theory. It’s more likely a reaction to threats and intimidation about mask rules and vaccine recommendations stemming from the coronavirus pandemic. Over the past few months, the fury over race that had been amplified by Fox News transitioned into angry demonstrations and hyperbolic assertions about the virus and its treatments.
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But, again, the point is that this narrow focus on people threatening school board members and teachers is being expanded into an attack on all mothers. It’s a line of argument that, again, has been common in Fox News’s prime-time discourse.
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On Wednesday night, Tucker Carlson made a similar argument as Vance. Garland, he said, was taking over investigation of threats against educators.
“The question is: who is threatening these teachers and school board members? Is it al-Qaeda? Is it the Russian government? Is it ISIS-K [the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan]?” he asked rhetorically. “No. It’s parents. Parents are angry about what’s happening in schools.”
Here, too, we see a bit of how this works. A parent making a threat against a teacher is still someone making a threat! That they are not a member of al-Qaeda is probably not much assurance to the teacher. Carlson is tipping his hand: These furious parents (often White, of course) are inherently innocent, and it’s ridiculous to hold them to account. It’s the Karen Code.
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Carlson insisted that such threats don’t exist (they do) and then engaged in a little speculation.
“Imagine if Donald Trump’s DOJ designated, say, CNN anchors as domestic terrorists, put it in writing, and then told men with guns to enforce the law,” Carlson added. “How would that go over?”
Well, if Brian Stelter were threatening to assault a member of a school board, I would hope that the police might roll up and talk to him.
For Carlson and Vance, it’s again useful to reframe the Garland memo as political target of a huge group of Americans. It allows Carlson to continue his narrative of the heavy hand of government overreacting to what he presents as perfectly innocuous behavior, and it allows Vance to play the Trump game, aligning himself with parents who are simply echoing Fox News’s concerns about school curriculums.
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Notice, though, that it’s Carlson and Vance who are equating upset parents with people issuing criminal threats, not Garland. Garland is saying “we will not stand by while people try to frighten school board members and teachers” and Carlson and Vance are saying, “hey, he’s talking about us!”
Carlson is an old hand at this. Since President Biden took office, he’s been claiming that the government is trying to accuse Trump supporters of being domestic terrorists. The evidentiary chain for the claim goes like this: Trump-supporting rioters attacked police on Jan. 6, Biden said he would focus on the extremism that played a role in that attack ergo Biden wants to target Trump supporters. It’s a part of the broad effort to treat the Jan. 6 rioters as nothing more than average Joes out to enjoy a tour of the U.S. Capitol — and, more recently, to treat those arrested for their roles in the attack as political prisoners of a vindictive president.
Again the same pattern. There was a group of obviously bad actors — but holding those bad actors to account is presented as a targeting of those who shared their political views on Trump. And, again, the conflation occurs so the same people can reap the same benefits. (Trump on the Jan. 6 arrestees: “Our hearts and minds are with the people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election.”)
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The irony of this is that people such as Vance, Carlson and Trump are insisting that the left and the government are viewing everyone on the right as dangerous and hostile when, in fact, it’s Vance, Carlson and Trump who are lumping the good in with the bad. They do so knowingly and intentionally, and their audiences often embrace this idea that they are viewed as dangerous to the government.
But if you say that Clinton was describing all Trump supporters or that those who committed violence at the Capitol are the same as any other person who voted for the president or that parents who threaten school officials over right-wing rhetoric are comparable to al-Qaeda, you are not paying your allies a compliment.