The War of Twisted Words
Everyone is losing, but truth is suffering worst of all.
First-year Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib finds herself back in the spotlight thanks to recent comments she made regarding Palestine, Israel, and the Holocaust.
You can listen to or read them for yourself, but the upshot is Tlaib kinda-sorta made it sound like Palestinians had willingly sacrificed after the Holocaust and World War II to create a safe haven for Jewish refugees. That is, uh, definitely not what happened. You needn’t be a history buff to acknowledge contemporary Palestinian Arab leadership and its followers eagerly sided with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in an attempt to eradicate Judaism. Certainly not all Palestinian Arabs, probably not the majority, but that’s not really an effective counterargument when a community’s leadership and huge swaths of it sided with Hitler.
In the wake of her comments, all the usual suspects are engaging in all the usual rituals.
Tlaib’s political opponents have fast-forwarded right by “her comments were clumsy and offensive” to “she’s an anti-Semite who hates Jews and Israel.” Her political allies, meanwhile, are taking the opposite-but-equally-extreme approach of pretending there was nothing wrong whatsoever with Rashida’s brain fart and that her adversaries are simply twisting her words.
This contorting of words by both sides is not a new development. Ever since President Donald Trump took office, words have been twisted at a fevered pitch.
Trump, himself, can account for a fair amount of the twisting—both as the twister and the twistee. Trump either thinks all Mexicans are rapists or his words were taken out of context because he explicitly said some immigrants were good people. Trump either defended white supremacists at Charlottesville or his words were taken out of context because he explicitly condemned white supremacists at Charlottesville. Same goes for whether Donnie invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails or 2nd Amendment enthusiasts to assassinate her.
Of course, the 45th President of the United States gives as good as he gets and wastes no opportunity to give. His antagonists grant him and other Republican partisans no shortage of opportunity on that front. Tlaib is just the most recent.
About a month ago, fellow first-year Congresswoman Ilhan Omar landed in the crosshairs of the media cycle due to some unfortunately chosen words regarding the September 11th terrorist attacks. Her critics blasted Omar as being un-American and/or sympathizing with terrorists. Donnie helped lead the pitch-fork wielding charge. Omar’s apologists claimed ( you guessed it) her words were being taken out of context and twisted. Representative Omar is actually old hat at this by now, the verbal contortion charade having become something of an Ilhan calling card.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, yet another first-year Congresswoman, has also proven to be low-hanging fruit. Ocasio-Cortez made some suspect statements about the tax incentives that had been floated in the now-scuttled Amazon-to-NYC deal. Her critics pounced by accusing her of being too lightweight to understand the basics of taxation while her defenders—mainly her—implied her words had been distorted from a good faith disagreement into a fundamental misunderstanding.
Nor is the war of twisting words relegated to just inter-party squabbles.
Senator Bernie Sanders is no stranger to angering his fellow leftists with awkward commentary…or having his words warped by his political enemies. Anytime he opens his mouth on the subject of race, the opposing camps move to the edges of their seats. One side is ready to attack him for dismissing Black voters or not being a real progressive while the other is ready with the remark’s full context.
In the midst of all this water-muddying nonsense, there are only two sure things.
First, nobody feigning outrage actually cares whether the person in question is guilty as accused.
The ritual of feigned outrage vs. twisted words is 100-percent about political theater, about scoring points against the target and/or for yourself in the eyes of a partisan audience. Whether Tlaib or Omar is anti-Semitic; whether Ocasio-Cortez is a dim bulb just playing Congress; whether Trump is a Mexican-hating, white-supremacist-defending psychotic; or whether Sanders actually cares about Black voters are all beside the point. It doesn’t matter that these are all probably false allegations. It doesn’t matter these people are all just reckless, self-impressed egomaniacs who won’t admit minor mistakes rather than sinister forces atop our government. The optics are the point, which is why…
Second and far more importantly, truth is getting slaughtered on a daily basis.
After years of this play acting for partisan crowds, nobody can really be sure who is what. There is so much disinformation, half-truths, exaggeration, and outright lies already circulating. Did Trump condemn white supremacists after Charlottesville? Did he specify the “fine people” were there to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue? Did Omar compare Al Qaeda to the US military to make a rhetorical point? Has she drawn attention to and expressed condolences for recent synagogue shootings?
Does any of it matter?
If you’re inclined to hate Trump and love those against him (or vice versa), you have more than enough ammunition from once-credible sources to firmly entrench behind the position. Millions of people now have emotionally satisfying political positions reinforced by “objective” evidence fed to them by hyper-partisan sources. Everyone’s hearing dog whistles from the other side and defending them from their own.
That is a post-fact bell that will be hard to unring.
