October 20, 2024
MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ host Mika Brzezinski recently went on an inane rant that said Fox News has been hiding Donald Trump’s “clear fascism” and failing to hold the ex president to account. In her rant, Brzezinski claimed that Fox offers a “safe space” for Trump where he is free to mistreat and slander anyone. But while Brzezinski lamented the supposed dissemination of hatred by Trump, her own words — and those of most on the Left — are loaded with hatred and innuendo directed at Trump and his allies.
There’s a flagrant hypocrisy in the Left’s handling of hate speech on Brzezinski’s words. Democrats had always portrayed themselves as a proponent of tolerance, freedom of speech and solidarity. They have been vocally defaming hate speech, which often becomes the excuse for tighter controls on Twitter and Facebook, particularly in the wake of the ‘Twitter Files’, which exposed widespread coordination between officials and social media companies to silence conservative opinions and ideas, especially on COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election.
But on the Right people suggest that the Left doesn’t understand its own hating rhetoric. Although avowed anti-hate speech, the Leftist pundits are all too likely to employ demonizing rhetoric against those who don’t align with their views, not least Trump and his followers. And that double standard can be found in Brzezinski’s comments, in which she repeatedly accused Trump of fascism while demonizing his base — smearing them with the same sweeping sludge she purports to reject.
Though he has gone off the rails with an aggressive tone against Trump, Brzezinski’s tirade is not alone. Trump and his followers are often depicted by leading politicians on the Left in highly dehumanizing ways as a menace to democracy. This is all the more ironic since the Left claims to stand by its end of hate speech. They blame Trump for promoting hatred, but their words tend to contain sneering contempt for their opponents. We can see it from hundreds of speeches and interviews by prominent Democrats and media figures from the Left who have disparaged Trump partisans as “deplorables,” “fascists” and “dangerous extremists”.
Possibly the best-known example of the Left’s degeneracy in the fight against hate speech occurred during the 2016 Democratic National Convention when delegates booed God. This scene shocked most Americans and was part of a wider division between Democrats and right-leaning, Christian voters. Since then, the rhetoric has only heightened. Leaders such as Brzezinski now routinely invoke the dehumanizing rhetoric that they are said to oppose. But rather than creating dialogue, their speech only serves to feed divisions and resentment.
And the hypocrisy is even more pronounced when it comes to the Left’s treatment of conservative Christians and their embrace of the LGBTQ+ movement. The LGBT+ movement has long railed against Christianity, and has charged Christ-followers with bigotry because they embrace the orthodox doctrines of marriage and gender. This has created a toxic environment in which Christians are relentlessly denounced by Left-wing activists and pundits, even as the Left continues to insist that they are the ones resisting hate and discrimination.
This was at its most heated when the Left pressed for the internet deactivation of conservative activists, especially during the Trump administration. The Twitter Files showed how Democratic-run government agencies coerced Big Tech into suppressing dissent by “mongering” conservative speech into submission as “misinformation” or “hate speech” so as to justifiably deport it. Such efforts to silence counter-views exemplify the Left’s selective use of free speech laws – saying they want to foster dialogue, but behind the scenes shutting down anyone not on their side.
Brzezinski’s recent comments about Trump being a puppet of Fox News is but another manifestation of the Left’s increasingly intolerant attitudes towards critical voices. In spite of the promise of defending democracy, they are doing the opposite by stifling their political opponents and awash them in hate speech. All the more incestuous since, if anything, as they protest Trump’s so-called divisive speech, they themselves are performing precisely that behaviour.
In the end, however, the Left’s demands for civility and hate speech only feel useful if they are not open to embracing or acknowledging their part in it. And while individuals such as Brzezinski still spread hate to Trump and his base, they keep turning away millions of Americans who discern the fallacy. The Left may say it opposes hate, but in practice it says and does more about them dispersing hate than anyone else.
Sources:
- Breitbart News on Mika Brzezinski
- FBI’s Twitter Files reveals
- DNC bashing God in 2012
- Twitter Files info
