As LU’s J.E. Dyer observed last month, “The charge of ‘racism!’ has been a convenient shorthand for silencing opposition, deployed almost exclusively by the political left for the last 30 years. But it has become such a reflexive allegation that it has lost all meaning for good-faith political discourse.”
Perhaps mindful of that charge’s excessive use and in light of the Left’s growing insistence that Donald Trump is a white nationalist, liberals seem to be playing the “white supremacy” card with increasing frequency.
That card was played on Monday by the Daily Kos’s David Nir in reference to North Carolina State Sen. Dan Bishop, who on Saturday referred to Democrats as “clowns” on Twitter. And “clown,” Nir explains, is a “slur pushed by white supremacists.”
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Who knew?
Nir writes:
This whole “clown” business has been circulating among Republicans for some time — the ne’er-do-wells at the National Republican Congressional Committee, for instance, have been tweeting out creepy, crappy clown Photoshops for months.
But it’s not just a particularly lame joke. It turns out there’s a disturbing genesis. Jared Holt, one of the tireless folks at Right Wing Watch, reported in April that white supremacists have begun adopting a version of the infamous far-right “Pepe the Frog” meme decked out in clown garb that they call “Honkler,” to symbolize “their exasperation over an imagined state of collapse in the Western hemisphere that they largely blame on immigrants and minority groups.”
The Forward’s Aiden Pink explained further, “While some users depict themselves as clowns who are ‘in’ on the ‘joke’ of the alleged downfall of white society in a multiracial country, others have targeted their supposed enemies by depicting them as clowns.” The Twitter account for a white supremacist podcast called “Goy Talk” took Honkler in precisely this direction. …
The fact that this dog whistle has anti-Semitic underpinnings should take some of the starch out of the sails of liberals, who are not that bullish on Jews to begin with.
Digging deep to find a sinister hidden meaning also led former FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence and current NBC News contributor Frank Figliuzzi this week to assert that Trump’s speech on mass shootings contained a numerology allusion to Nazism. The Left is nothing if it’s not imaginative.
Meanwhile, as Alex Griswold of the Washington Free Beacon notes:
“Clown” is a fairly standard insult in U.S. politics for attacking unserious opponents and typically doesn’t carry Nazi connotations. Just in the past week, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough attacked President Donald Trump’s DNI pick John Ratcliffe as a “clown,” and liberal songstress Barbra Streisand attacked Trump in a “Send in the Clowns” parody.
