Just yesterday, I was commenting on Republicans’ eagerness to brand liberals like Clinton and Feinstein as violent. But it turns out it’s not just Clinton finally calling for Democrats to grow a spine. In the last 24 hours, the country suddenly noticed Eric Holder’s comments at a Georgia rally on Sunday. From CNN:
“It is time for us as Democrats to be as tough as they are, to be as dedicated as they are, to be as committed as they are,” Holder said. “Michelle always says, Michelle Obama, I love her. She and my wife are really tight. Which always scares me and Barack. Michelle always says, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ No. No. When they go low, we kick them.”
It’s about damn time the Democrats start fighting back. But the right is eager to distort Holder’s message, and to invoke “angry black man” racial stereotypes in the process.
Context matters
Let’s be clear: Calling for Democrats to be “as tough as” Republicans or “as dedicated as” Republicans is a far cry from calling for violence. Holder even said he wasn’t calling for violence, in the same speech to the same crowd:
“When I say we kick them, I don’t mean we do anything inappropriate, we don’t do anything illegal, but we have to be tough and we have to fight.”
However, Fox News was quick to commission the most manipulative possible response to Holder’s statements. Rep. Steve Scalise (who was shot last year in a politically motivated attack) authored a painfully one-sided op-ed giving “a growing list of violent or threatening actions taken against conservatives by Democrats.”
I have two problems with Scalise’s list. First, he conflates incivility and violence (a propaganda tactic used to condemn and suppress protests):
• Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and his wife, as well as White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, were chased out of restaurants.
• Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was confronted by protesters and harassed out of a DC restaurant.
These were nonviolent protests. Ted Cruz didn’t face threats of physical violence, he faced a protest. (At worst this might be trespassing, which isn’t a violent crime.) The same is true for Kristjen Nielsen, who wanted to dine in peace at a Mexican restaurant while her organization was putting Latino children in cages. Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t even face a protest, she was just politely asked by a restaurant owner to leave his restaurant, Lexington, Virginia’s Red Hen.
That brings me to my second point: Scalise wants to “end this violence and return to civility” but peddles a myth that Democrats are the only ones responsible for it.
If Scalise really wanted to address a breakdown in civility as a catalyst for violence:
- Why doesn’t Scalise address the death threats against restaurant owners following the Sanders incident? Not just against the owner of the Red Hen in Lexington, but the owners of similarly named but independent restaurants in Washington, DC, New Jersey, and Connecticut?
- Why does Scalise mention Brett Kavanaugh, but not Christine Blasey Ford, who has faced such a constant stream of death threats since the Kavanaugh hearings that she can’t live in her own home?
- Why doesn’t he address 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, which included a fatal motor vehicle attack on a crowd of counter-protesters and police standing idly by as a white man shot at a black counter-protester?
- Why doesn’t he mention Michael Folk, a West Virginia Republican who called for Hillary Clinton to be “hung from the Mall in Washington, DC“?
- Why not mention the racially charged death threats against Democratic Congressman Al Green? Or death threats against Congresswoman Maxine Waters?
- Why not address the litany of actually violent threats by President Donald Trump? Like the time he suggested on the campaign trail that gun owners take care of Hillary Clinton? Or when he labeled journalists the “enemy of the American People” (rhetoric used by his supporters while threatening to massacre journalists?)
- Or the many times Trump suggested violence against protesters, including that they should be “carried out on stretchers” or “roughed up“, and that if a supporter punched a protester Trump would “pay for the legal fees” (an offer that multiple supporters tried to make good on)?
None of this is particularly new, either. Right-wing threats (and actual violence) were constant throughout the Obama administration, from the unprecedented spike in death threats against a sitting President after Obama took office, threatening phone calls and shattered windows at Democrats’ offices to protest the Affordable Care Act, to the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 that killed 6 people (including a federal judge) and left Giffords with permanent damage?
That last omission seems particularly damning of Scalise. He’s playing off his own injury and recovery in a call for “civility,” without recognizing similar victims across the aisle. It’s sad and disappointing that he’s deciding to play partisan politics (which can only inflame things further), instead of writing an honest call for peace.
Once you realize Scalise is being so partisan, it’s easy to grasp his motive: He’s adding to the building case for violence against and oppression of Democrats, allowing an attack on his own life to be used as propaganda for that cause.
Responding to incivility
It’s worth noting that while Clinton and Holder are bringing this fighting message to the Democratic mainstream, they’re not the first Democrats to call for strong responses. Back in June, Rep. Maxine Waters encouraged her supporters to find and protest Trump officials in their daily lives. From CNN:
“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents,” Waters said at the Wilshire Federal Building, according to video of the event.
“We don’t know what damage has been done to these children. All that we know is they’re in cages. They’re in prisons. They’re in jails. I don’t care what they call it, that’s where they are and Mr. President, we will see you every day, every hour of the day, everywhere that we are to let you know you cannot get away with this,” she added.
CNN’s coverage noted that President Trump responded quickly by mischaracterizing her statements. Trump alleged on Twitter, falsely, that Waters had “called for harm to [his] supporters.” He also vaguely threatened Waters to “Be careful what you wish for” (yet another example of threats by a sitting Republican President that Scalise chose to ignore).
Sadly, at the time many Democrats still cling to hopes that civility would win out. Comments by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were typical of the Democratic response, calling Waters’ statement “unacceptable” while also saying it was “provoked” by “Trump’s daily lack of civility.”
(This was the Democrats, as recently as June 2018, criticizing a Democrat for encouraging people to choose the lives of refugee children over civility. Sigh.)
Note Pelosi’s recognition of Trump’s incivility. Back in June, Democrats were still embracing the idealist Michelle Obama vision of “when they go low, we go high” (a call for Democrats to be civil, even when Republicans are not). Holder’s “we kick them” followup was still only about what to do “when they go low.” Any discussion of civility on the Democrats’ side is, inherently, a discussion of how Democrats should respond to incivility that already exists. Even putting President Trump aside, Republicans in Congress were yelling “YOU LIE” at the President during his State of the Union address, bragging about telling the President to his face that they were refusing their constitutional duties, and questioning (and questioning) the President’s American citizenship.
Which brings me to my last point: It’s hard to have a discussion about civility without race, since Republican incivility is often focused on women or people of color, or in the case of Maxine Waters, especially both.
Racial fuel on the fire
Waters has a long history of pursuing nonviolent resistance. It was something she fought for in L.A. in 1992, calling for an end to violence while sharing the pain and frustration of the black community. Last year, she was one of the first Democrats to declare a boycott Trump’s inauguration and she participated in the D.C Women’s March on January 21. She has long encouraged and participated in nonviolent resistance, and any statements she makes should be read in that context.
Despite that, when Waters called for people to confront Trump administration officials about mistreated children in June, Trump chose to misconstrue her statement as a call to violence, while simultaneously calling her an “extraordinarily low IQ person” for some reason. It’s almost like he’s invoking a racist “angry black woman” stereotype (along with other conservatives condemning her angry response to accusations of wrongdoing, something they give white men a free pass on).
The trope of African-Americans as angry, dumb and savage won’t die. And it’s no coincidence that African-American politicians like President Obama, Maxine Waters, and Al Green seem to face death threats. Calls for nonviolent actions are distorted and warped into calls for violence from angry apes (despite the fact that President Obama spent most of his Presidency so calm he needed an anger translator).
So after Eric Holder’s comments went viral, I went to see how long the racist responses would take. Answer: Not long. Beyond Scalise mislabeling Holder’s comments as a “call for violence,” there’s the alt-right Daily Stormer labeling Holder a “Pro-Violence Negroid,” Lou Dobbs on Fox News saying he’s “some sort of street thug“, best-selling conservative author Brigitte Gabriel calling him a “disgusting thug” on Twitter, and an endless supply of alt-right drones parroting such language across social media. The conservative National Review seems to have recognized the racially charged nature of the story, proactively embedding a denial of the racist history of the word “thug” in their coverage of Holder’s comments.
And yet the National Review, like Scalise and everyone else, is ignoring that Republican President Donald Trump has said worse without clarifying he didn’t mean to incite violence. No mention of the fact that Trump recently praised a Congressman for physically assaulting a journalist. The gaslighting denials of a racial element are just the finishing touch to their blatant propaganda.
None of these right-wing pundits have or deserve any credibility on the subject of civil discourse, because they refuse to acknowledge the orange-haired elephant in the room.