By Barry Rabin
Chicago Tribune |
Jan 31, 2022 at 5:00 AM
Do words really matter?
I started asking myself this after taking a deep dive into some of the right-wing, pro-Trump broadcast media recently.
The conclusion I’ve come to is that words may matter as a rule, but the words uttered in those media bear little resemblance to their dictionary definitions.
Here are a few of my favorites:
If you spend some time watching upstart pro-Donald Trump TV networks like OAN or Fox News, or listening to caustic right-wing talk radio personalities like Mark Levin, one of the first things you’ll notice is that anyone who disagrees with them — about Trump’s election lies, about the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the vote count, etc. — is automatically “The Left.”
It’s: “The Left wants to take away your freedom!” Or: “The Left wants to steal this election from your president!”
After a while, I started wondering if I was “The Left.”
But I’m not. And you’re probably not either.
Recognizing obvious lies about the last presidential election (“We won, and by a LANDSLIDE!”) does not make me a leftist. Wanting the winner of a presidential election to be recognized as the winner without violence does not make me a leftist.
And believing that the side that can assemble the angriest mob — people perfectly willing to assault police officers and smash their way into government buildings — should not be able to decide who wins our elections certainly does not make me a leftist.
The media want drama, which equals ratings, which in turn bring in lots of money. They want to portray Americans as belonging to two big, extremist teams, each one constantly battling the other.
But don’t believe it. If you’re one of the millions of Americans somewhere in the middle, like me — believing in capitalism but with reasonable rules and actual enforcement of them by an honest government — you’re not “The Left” either.
After “The Left,” the word you probably hear the most on far-right media is “patriot.”
Many of the people who violently attacked our seat of government on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop the counting of electoral votes had been radicalized by far-right media that repeatedly appealed to them as “patriots.” Even now, you’ll hear some of these “personalities” referring to the people who were arrested and jailed for assaulting Capitol police as “patriots” (or “political prisoners”).
Yet those people engaged in one of the least patriotic things an American could do: trying to overturn a democratic election by force so they could install their chosen leader in place of the actual winner.
This one really puzzles me. These same media have also convinced their followers that they are somehow “standing up for the Constitution” But the U.S. Constitution, in Article 2, Section 1, Clause 3, reads in part:
“The President of the Senate (the Vice President) shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed.”
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the losing side should invite a mob of their followers to Washington, hold a big pep rally, lie to them brazenly about the election being “stolen,” and then send them off to the Capitol after telling them that they need to “fight like hell” at the very moment the electoral votes are being counted.
It irks me when some of these media refer to themselves as the “Conservative Media.” Or when they accuse social media of trying to “silence conservative voices.”
There’s nothing “conservative” about a president who promises to fix the national debt, then lets it rise by more than $7 trillion dollars during his four-year term. Nor is it “conservative” to push for laws that disempower the honest, decent, independent officials who count and certify the votes in the states and replace them with partisans who can simply reverse the result of an election if they don’t like it.
There are plenty of “conservative” voices on social media, as was Trump, right up until he had used them to incite violence and try to take over our country.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opin...0220131-kidf5m44xvg3jbd4repph6qcgm-story.html
Chicago Tribune |
Jan 31, 2022 at 5:00 AM
Do words really matter?
I started asking myself this after taking a deep dive into some of the right-wing, pro-Trump broadcast media recently.
The conclusion I’ve come to is that words may matter as a rule, but the words uttered in those media bear little resemblance to their dictionary definitions.
Here are a few of my favorites:
‘The Left’
If you spend some time watching upstart pro-Donald Trump TV networks like OAN or Fox News, or listening to caustic right-wing talk radio personalities like Mark Levin, one of the first things you’ll notice is that anyone who disagrees with them — about Trump’s election lies, about the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the vote count, etc. — is automatically “The Left.”
It’s: “The Left wants to take away your freedom!” Or: “The Left wants to steal this election from your president!”
After a while, I started wondering if I was “The Left.”
But I’m not. And you’re probably not either.
Recognizing obvious lies about the last presidential election (“We won, and by a LANDSLIDE!”) does not make me a leftist. Wanting the winner of a presidential election to be recognized as the winner without violence does not make me a leftist.
And believing that the side that can assemble the angriest mob — people perfectly willing to assault police officers and smash their way into government buildings — should not be able to decide who wins our elections certainly does not make me a leftist.
The media want drama, which equals ratings, which in turn bring in lots of money. They want to portray Americans as belonging to two big, extremist teams, each one constantly battling the other.
But don’t believe it. If you’re one of the millions of Americans somewhere in the middle, like me — believing in capitalism but with reasonable rules and actual enforcement of them by an honest government — you’re not “The Left” either.
‘Patriot’
After “The Left,” the word you probably hear the most on far-right media is “patriot.”
Many of the people who violently attacked our seat of government on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop the counting of electoral votes had been radicalized by far-right media that repeatedly appealed to them as “patriots.” Even now, you’ll hear some of these “personalities” referring to the people who were arrested and jailed for assaulting Capitol police as “patriots” (or “political prisoners”).
Yet those people engaged in one of the least patriotic things an American could do: trying to overturn a democratic election by force so they could install their chosen leader in place of the actual winner.
‘Constitution’
This one really puzzles me. These same media have also convinced their followers that they are somehow “standing up for the Constitution” But the U.S. Constitution, in Article 2, Section 1, Clause 3, reads in part:
“The President of the Senate (the Vice President) shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed.”
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the losing side should invite a mob of their followers to Washington, hold a big pep rally, lie to them brazenly about the election being “stolen,” and then send them off to the Capitol after telling them that they need to “fight like hell” at the very moment the electoral votes are being counted.
‘Conservative’
It irks me when some of these media refer to themselves as the “Conservative Media.” Or when they accuse social media of trying to “silence conservative voices.”
There’s nothing “conservative” about a president who promises to fix the national debt, then lets it rise by more than $7 trillion dollars during his four-year term. Nor is it “conservative” to push for laws that disempower the honest, decent, independent officials who count and certify the votes in the states and replace them with partisans who can simply reverse the result of an election if they don’t like it.
There are plenty of “conservative” voices on social media, as was Trump, right up until he had used them to incite violence and try to take over our country.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opin...0220131-kidf5m44xvg3jbd4repph6qcgm-story.html
