There’s been an awful lot of name-calling in politics lately, with epithets such as fascist, white supremacist and racist being thrown around. Democrats and Republicans are even turning on members of their own parties.
WND reported Thursday that the GOP establishment has declared war on President Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon and his effort to run Republican candidates who will advance Trump’s “America First” agenda. The Republican Senate Leadership Fund will focus on Bannon’s “hard-line populism and attempt to link him to white nationalism [and anti-Semitism] to discredit him and the candidates he will support.”
The ADL already has posted an ad about Bannon on its website titled “Steve Bannon: Five things to know,” that tries to link Bannon to white supremacist David Duke and Rocky Suhayda of the American Nazi Party. But the ADL has no evidence, citing only articles Bannon published at Breitbart critical of Islam, feminism and Planned Parenthood.
Former GOP president candidate Herman Cain said in a recent interview that the Democrats are well advanced in their name-calling game.
“They’ve gone beyond all of the name-calling they did during the election. It has now become very toxic name-calling. They select things that aren’t even true, that can’t be proved.”
The Washington Examiner reported Brian Fallon, a former press secretary to Hillary Clinton, recently tweeted “a picture of the Tiki-torch carrying, J-Crew wearing, neo-Nazi frat boys who descended on Charlottesville earlier this year with the caption: ‘live look at Ed Gillespie campaign strategy meeting.”
Gillespie is the Republican nominee for governor in Virginia in the November election.
The Examiner’s Philip Wegmann commented that if Fallon “was a deep cover Republican operative masquerading as a Democrat, that’d be a good move.”
“Considering that Fallon is actually a liberal who wants to see liberal politicians elected and liberal policies enacted, this was very, very stupid.”
Wegmann said Gillespie “doesn’t fit the role of a racist and he certainly doesn’t harbor any sympathies for Charlottesville Nazis.”
“Back in August, the Republican immediately condemned the pimply-fascists for ‘their hate, their white supremacism, their neo-Nazism.’ In a bipartisan moment, Gillespie even joined with Democrat Gov. McAuliffe to call for the rabble ‘to go home and they need to take that vile hatred with them.'”
Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh says that for the Democrats, such rhetoric, even if untrue, is essential.
“Folks, there’s a lot of postmortems starting to be written by Democrats. Well, actually they’ve been written. They’re increasing in volume. You know, what went wrong? Why did Hillary lose?
“Because now that the Russia thing is vanishing – and it is – there are now other opinion pieces being written,” he said, citing a recent call for Democrats to drop the racial-identity rhetoric.
Some Democrats, Limbaugh noted, are saying, “We gotta stop dividing people. We need to go back to class warfare. We need to get back to class warfare if we’re ever gonna start winning elections again,” which means, according to Limbaugh, “We gotta start pitting people against each other economically instead of racially and with gender!”
Limbaugh continued: “But no matter how you do it, the Democrat Party still believes the way they can win, the only way is to pit groups of Americans against each other. The Democrat Party simply doesn’t have it in itself to promote a national unity.
“They are always gonna need demons. They’re gonna need devils,” he said.
“They’re gonna need bad guys to blame everything on as a means of convincing people to vote against Republicans and conservatives, because what the Democrats ultimately admit is that they do not have enough reasons to offer people to vote for them,” he said.
“This, to me, represents yet another great opportunity the Republican Party has, because the Democrats can’t be honest about their agenda, they can’t be honest about why they want people to vote for them, so they have to demonize. But this identity politics and pitting people against each other on sexual ID, sexual orientation, racial makeup, all this? It’s destructive. It’s tearing them and everybody apart, and it’s not promoting harmony in any way, shape, manner, or form.”
