The Democrats’ campaign against Donald Trump consists mostly of branding him a bigot. Thus, they have sent out many emails like this one:
Stop bigotry! No details are necessary.
The Associated Press was once a straightforward, relatively nonpolitical news source, but those days are long gone. Now some of the most hard-core Democratic Party advocacy comes from the AP. Thus, it is no surprise that the AP is trying to advance the Democrats’ narrative that Trump is a bigot.
On July 22, the AP headlined: “Critics: Trump speech signals shift to coded race language.” This is an old trick–make a “news story” out of what critics say. The occasion was Trump’s convention acceptance speech. And, of course, talking about “coded” language allows reporters to impute to politicians things they never said, based on their enemies’ fantasies.
[S]ome observers say he’s turning to code words to gin up racial animosity and fear among America’s white voters.
Is that assertion true? The AP takes no responsibility, it is just what “some observers say.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for an article from the AP about the Democrats ginning up racial animosity and fear among African-Americans. That would actually make a good news story, but you won’t be seeing it any time soon.
Trump “didn’t get on stage and issue a bunch of racial epithets,” said Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie, who watched his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. “We didn’t hear the N-word, and we didn’t hear other words that may offend many people. But just because he didn’t use racial slurs doesn’t mean he didn’t frame issues in a way that people in racial and ethnic groups find problematic.”
What does that mean? I have absolutely no idea. The AP didn’t inquire, and doesn’t tell us.
Ian Haney Lopez, author of “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class,” went further, saying Trump’s speech surpassed even the coded racial language of Richard Nixon in 1968.
“Coded racial language” is big on the left, but note that so far, the AP hasn’t quoted a single word that Donald Trump actually said. Not one. The AP goes on in the same vein, quoting Trump’s far-left critics, but never citing any of Trump’s own words. Except for a stray phrase or two, like this:
Some have pointed out that Trump’s slogan “America First” was also the slogan of the America First Committee, an isolationist, anti-Semitic group whose primary goal was to keep the United States from joining Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany. The group opposed the acceptance of shiploads of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution.
Flawed messaging on Trump’s part? Perhaps. But these days, anti-Semitism exists almost exclusively in the Democratic Party, not the Republican. And however the phrase may have been used 80 years ago, today “America first” is a perfectly straightforward way of expressing the proposition that America’s government should put the interests of its own citizens ahead of all others–a proposition with which the Democratic Party will not argue, but neither will it agree.
There is much more along the same lines; read it for yourself if you like. The next day, July 23, the AP came out with another anti-Trump racial smear: “Energized white supremacists cheer Trump convention message.” It is more of the same: Trump doesn’t actually say anything about race, but we liberals will tell you what he really means.
They don’t like to be called white supremacists.The well-dressed men who gathered in Cleveland’s Ritz-Carlton bar after Donald Trump’s speech accepting the Republican nomination for president prefer the term “Europeanists,” “alt-right,” or even “white nationalists.” They are also die-hard Trump supporters.
Sure. And tomorrow, the AP will run a story on how Communists and Socialists are cheering for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. They won’t do that, of course, because fringe people are of interest only if they support Republicans. It’s just another day in the lives of liberal journalists who are devoted to advancing the interests of their party.
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